Nt1310 Unit 3 Data Collection

Data collection would be accomplished by the assigned individual who would screen the emails in the support distribution email box, then move all the misdirected emails to a separate email folder labeled “Misdirected” each day, then and there forwarding a copy to the correct department. The moving of the emails allows a total to be collected each day, so at the end of the week they would be totaled and recorded to measure the effectiveness of the new process. There was a study conducted using research from comparable organizations, using a similar process that concluded that we should have a benchmark of 1 misdirected email a week. Furthermore, we would need someone to monitor the total number of non-technical support request that come in to
the contact center then compare them with the number directed to each department. Depending on the actual count we can calculate against the costs from above in section 3.d to analyze the net benefit for the organization. This would help us to develop a ratio of total requests process to correctly directed requests.
The data would be collected in a excel workbook and the numbers would be compared every week to the benchmark and the variances would be reported to the director. We would additionally compare current numbers of customers cancelling our service, compare that with the average cancellations for the last two years to get a benchmark number for comparison. Then with these benchmarks we can than compare the number of variances after we implement the changes to gauge our progress and effectiveness.
Section 5: Consistency with a TQ approach to improving processes.
This process improvement, to increase efficiency in the handling of customers’ requests, in following the total quality philosophy of customer focus, teamwork, and continuous improvement will decrease the time to process and handle customers’ requests. Like many services in our company we continuously are looking for ways to improve a process or make processes with non-value steps more efficient as we continue to expand. The process of continuous quality improvement aligns the company to be more agile and ready for changes in customer requirements, as they occur. During the implementation of these new steps there must be
set aside time to explain the reasoning for these changes or incorporate this into the training. According to Evans and Lindsay from the text book Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence “The success of the process depends on everyone-workers involved in the internal as well as the external activities-understanding that they add value to the customer” (Evans & Lindsay, 2008, pp. 216-217). The shorter cycle time to process and resolve a customer request adds value for the customer which will add to their loyalty to our brand, whereas adding to our bottom line. While these new process steps simplify the contact center representative’s need to make a judgement decision, by mistake proofing the directing the customer request step, through having a document outlining the guidelines where each type of request should be directed, there still leaves some small margin of error. Human beings sometimes make poor judgement decisions for several reasons, one as stated in our text book “misunderstanding or incorrect identification because of the lack of familiarity with a process or procedures” (Evans & Lindsay, 2008, p. 219), which can be reduced through proper training. This process improvement will reduce cycle time for handling customer requests by eliminating the additional handling, by different employees, the request when they are misdirected, thus increasing productivity. During the course of this process improvement I used several quality tools and processes some including process benchmarking, best practices, reengineering, DMAIC analyst, flow charts all while following the Lean Six Sigma service capabilities. The top key measures of performance were accuracy, cycle time, cost, and customer satisfaction were all incorporated into the improvement process used on this project. This is a great example of the opportunities, no matter how small, that can increase efficiency and customer satisfaction as quoted from our textbook “it is generally agreed that 50 percent or more of the total savings opportunity in an organization lies outside of manufacturing” (Evans & Lindsay, 2008, p. 499.). I would like to mention that the teamwork aspect of this process improvement comes from the point that no one during the value chain of the process will be able to “just pass” along a request and everyone will be held accountable for their own actions.