Lean Six Sigma for Contact Centers

Once your improvements have implemented, the next step is to ensure sustainability of your results through tools like the Control plan & FMEA.To ensure a smooth transitionto your Contact Center Process Owner, the black/green belt should takea more hands-on approach than one may be used to in the transactional space.

(if you just read that opening sentence and asked yourself ‘what if my process owner isn’t in the contact center but the project affects the call center agents or support staff…?’)

I challenge you to ask your champion the following question:

1)Why isn’t your process owner within the center?

• A call center is typically seen as a vendor by most organizations, or someone who provides a service that shows up on the P & L as a line item within the Cost of Goods Sold. As a result, most operations leadership sits in ‘HQ or headquarters’, somewhere remote from the call center, thus rendering them one of the most removed from the process –
• Instead, utilize the in-center supervisors or managers that work for the vendor with a HQ-hired account manager to oversee and sustain excellence within the operations center. You will not only build allegiance with those who will be helping you to execute your new process to customer specifications, but you will also be getting the true ’Voice of the Customer’.
• Lastly, don’t forget… you will be onsite and able to ‘Walk the Process’ yourself while conducting ‘Time and Motion’ studies on the agents, both of which are extremely useful tools for green and black belts to use if they have a call center related lean six sigma project requiring a lower time to resolve / handle time per contact.

(See the follow-on to this post for a helpful checklist of tasks that need to be included or prepared for the process owner handoff of your project).