DailyKaizen

I spent a good part of the day today in our customer service center working with a couple of bright consultants that are working on their first improvement project.  I always enjoy the opportunity to coach new consultants, because I think it is the best opportunity for me to also develop my skills.  Coaching other consultants always keeps me on my toes because they ask great questions and having limited experience myself I am often not as confident as I would like in helping. 

In preparation for the coaching session I had the consultants pull together a current state map for the process, which we reviewed.  They had done a lot of process observations and had drawn out the process and had begun to fill in the situational data points in terms of volume, quality, delivery etc.  I had also asked the consultants to begin to identify opportunities in the process for waste reduction based on their process walks.   For the area of customer service that we are working with a lot of calls come into the center that need to be escalated (handed-off) to other groups (specialists) for resolution.   As a result the consultants had come to the logical conclusion that the best way to reduce waste was to eliminate the hand-off through the creation of standard work.

As they walked me through these conclusions I had a flash back to two years ago during one of my first improvement workshops where we had come to the same conclusion, but in a different call center.  In this event we had developed standard work and made some fairly impressive improvements in productivity by reducing hand-offs.  Months later as I was working with yet another area I had a realization that in-fact reducing hand-offs was not addressing the root cause.  To address the root cause you have understand why people are calling the service center in the first place and reduce the need.  If a customer calls the center it means there is a defect in a process and we need to learn where the defect took place and fix it.  It does not mean you don’t reduce handoffs in the process, but your first priority should be to solve the problem for the customer before it ever happens.

So back to my coaching session.  I was able to ask a couple of questions that led them to the same conclusion that I had come to.  I had helped them avoid the miss that I had made when I was in their shoes.  I felt like my experience had gotten me to a place where I actually had earned the right to coach.  Fun…

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