Creating a Customer Service Culture
Consumer home improvement products
What was the problem?
Our client was a manufacturer and supplier of home improvement products which was experiencing difficulty dealing with the impact of unpredictable customer call volumes on their order fulfilment process. Their central call centre handled customer service activities from their distributor, retail and wholesale customers. Due to changes in volume and the impact of non-standardised call centre processes, the ability to handle calls effectively had diminished. The outcome being that issues of productivity, overtime and warehouse product accuracy existed.
What did you do?
We designed a project which would focus on improving the effectiveness of the call centre and warehouse operations over a period of seven months. This would include analysing how the call centre and warehouse handled customer orders, followed by the development and tracking of critical performance metrics for call centre productivity and responsiveness.
What happened?
We were able to design a forecasting tool to predict customer call volume and call types and used the insight gathered to standardise call centre operational activities utilising benchmarking and best practices. Call centre and warehouse improvement teams were developed and trained and the supporting documentation was created to ensure longevity of the improvements.
What was the outcome?
Savings through increased productivity, reduced overtime and inventory carrying costs resulted in $2M annualised savings. By the end of the project we had been able to support the client through installation of metrics to track customer satisfaction and service performance and had trained improvement teams to implement standardised processes. Cross-functional call centre work cells had been formed to handle the dynamic and random changes in call volumes and warehouse operations were effectively integrated with call centre to improve on-hand accuracies and reduce obsolescence.