No business would knowingly implement a process to produce mediocre
results. Instead, everyone focuses on best practices and continuous improvement of the processes in place. The challenge with continuous process improvement is to make the best better.
Smart Business asked Chris Wagner,
vice president of marketing at InfoCision
Management Corporation, about the
process of continually improving a company’s marketing efforts and building a quality assurance (QA) program. “Good is not
good enough today,” Wagner says. He
advocates a regular review of all processes
and raising the bar each time an existing
metric is met.
Isn’t it a challenge to recognize that yesterday’s ‘best’ is today’s so-so process?
It sounds a bit harsh, but the demands of
today’s business world call for out-performing the competition and yourself. The
only way to run a quality, nimble operation
is to keep raising the bar. Our company
does this quarterly by providing an employee incentive for each component.
Remember that quality matters in terms of
results.
How does process improvement work?
Any process can be described as a triangle with these three sides: QA, training and
execution.
The bottom line on the triangle is execution, or operations. This represents your
output. That’s the place to start. As a company, we spent many years and millions of
dollars building this side of our triangle.
The goal is to directly correlate performance and execution. In a lot of companies,
quality is measured after the fact. In a call
center, you may have agents with very high
QA scores and slightly lower performance,
or vice versa. You have to balance their
skills out with performance evaluation and
coaching.
Second, you have to build a statistically
legitimate QA program. This is for trend
analysis. The closer your P-score is to zero,
the more your costs increase. We try for
plus/minus 5 percent reliability. Our QA
program has three tiers: the production
floor, where employees and managers work together; a QA manager who works
with employees; and a corporate, internal
QA group that monitors and calibrates
quality daily.
Lastly, be sure you have a clear path out
of the QA department to the training side of
the triangle. You should continuously
improve programs. Use tools like video,
web-enabled training and local universities
that offer employees degrees either for
general or job-related improvement.
Where do you look first to increase productivity?
In order to improve, you need better
employees, so look at performance and
education in two areas: new-hires and production. We have a 30-day training period,
after which people are expected to meet
certain goals.
It is important to monitor the ability of
your workforce to accomplish goals.
Examine the potential of the top 30 percent. In our company, we average the top
and second third of performance levels
every quarter, and that measurement
becomes our new standard of excellence.
Reset goals as soon as you are able to
consistently hit the previous benchmark.
For us, that is about quarterly. As soon as
you can hit a benchmark consistently, it is
time to raise it.
Should the call center take the lead in maximizing ROI for its customers or the business
using the call center?
If a call center understands its customer’s
key metrics, it can take the lead based on
those benchmarks. The customer has to
give its outsourcing partner incentives.
However, be certain that the incentives
boost productivity and sales and tie into
true ROI, or they will become goals in and
of themselves.
When does process improvement fall into the
danger of tweaking for the sake of tweaking?
I don’t think it ever does. Any business
constantly hires new people, adds new
products, sets new goals and finds new
customers. Even if you maximize the
potential in one sector, you need to keep
your eyes open for improvement in others
Any sports coach will tell you that the
hardest time to improve is when the team
is winning. But it is also the most important
time. It is easy to get attention when you
are the underdog, but there is a real danger
of getting complacent when you are on top.
Is a big announcement required for changes?
Does a process change lose some impact if it
is simply inserted into the routine?
It is really larger than that. No real change
can be seen as ‘just another idea from management.’ A change has to tie into the company culture to be effective. The best way
is to link the change to compensation.
Reward the top performers of the company for achievement. The key is buy-in from
upper management. Change needs to be
passed through the organization and not be
seen as ‘the flavor of the month.’
CHRIS WAGNER is vice president of marketing at InfoCision
Management Corp. Reach Wagner at (330) 668-1400. In business for 25 years, InfoCision Management Corporation is the
second largest privately held teleservices company and a leading
provider of customer care services, commercial sales and marketing for a variety of Fortune 500 companies and smaller businesses. InfoCision is also a leader of inbound and outbound marketing for nonprofit, religious and political organizations.
InfoCision operates 28 call centers at 12 locations throughout
Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. For more information, visit
www.infocision.com.