Lean Six Sigma in Telesales
The first part of the article talked about ways to address the NVA (non-value added) processes to optimize outbound telesales. Agent-assisted automation is a technology that can help to keep them under check.
This system basically automates the work of an agent thus eliminating the chances of dialing wrong numbers, and leaves automated but polite messages when they reach the customer’s answering machines.
Next comes the process defects and waiting. The whole process from greeting till ending the call, and making a note, can be done with an automated recorded system. Then again, with an agent-assisted automation, process streamlining can be achieved, and also the defects caused due to between and within-agent variation are totally eliminated.
Lean Six Sigma in Telesales uses this tool to make the process 10-15% more productive. It also understands the need of segregating the resources into two different tiers. One that takes the help of the automated technology and gets interested customers. The other group picks up from here, and converts the interested customers into genuine buyers. This leads to a huge productivity gain and lessened NVA activities.
Since Tier I agents basically work with a pre-recorded system, it can be offshored thus saving a mammoth labor cost. Training cost is reduced by a chunk because now, there is no need for all the agents to interact with the customers.
Process streamlining is achieved by focusing on the training of the handful of Tier II agents. Also, now Tier I agents can handle more than one call at a given point in time. Lean Six Sigma in Telesales address not just the ‘muda’ but also the ‘muri’ in this way.
Although Tier I agents deal with more calls at a time, but now when the customers blatantly say a no it is to a software and not to them, and, there is no way that they can now demotivate them for their accents. Therefore not only does the performance increase but there is a much lesser turnover in terms of human resources costs.
To improve the conversion rates, Tier I agents are ordered to run two pitches on their machines and a p-chart helps bring out better conversion rates for Tier II. With a Lean Six Sigma approach in Telesales, the NVA activities can be optimized. Also the process streamlining can be achieved by training and cross-pollinating the best practices.
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