The call center is a necessary evil for any company, and is a hub for most of the interactions between that company and its customers. Now that more and more commerce is done virtually, call centers have become ubiquitous for almost all successful companies, evolving to multiple channels of communication including online chat portals, social media, and email.
The Six Sigma methodology is a perfect match for Call Center Customer Service improvement. In order to be improved, critical to quality metrics need to be identified. Call center metrics include quick resolutions, decreased hold time, and customer satisfaction etc.. Six Sigma certified call center professionals hold the skills to collect this rough data. The data is then analyzed with a goal of pinpointing quality improvement solutions for issues that occur earlier in the production chain. For example, if a significant percentage of customers are reporting the same problem, a Six Sigma professional working in the call center can report that hard data back to a designated department head in order to assemble another Six Sigma Team to eliminate the problem. Six Sigma in the call center eliminates costly ‘work arounds’ to problems that arise, and instead, allows teams to identify and limit defects by providing data-driven resolutions. Root cause analysis is a Six Sigma tool that is used often in a call center setting; it allows the team to go back and find the ‘root cause’ of a frequently occurring defect or problem in order to resolve it from the start.
While Six Sigma certified call center professionals are improving upon their own internal processes and collecting necessary data for other company-wide departments to use in perfecting their processes, they are also simultaneously putting in place safeguards to ensure that continuous workflow is continuously improved. In other words, once a process is perfected, everyone needs to work together as a Six Sigma team to ensure that the improvements continue indefinitely. The final stages of the Six Sigma DMAIC/DMADV processes are Control/Verify; both of which ensure that improvements made are both positive and continuous through the life of the process, or in some cases, the company itself.