PORTFOLIO SAMPLE

Customer-Service Performance Improvement

 
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Challenge

The backlog of technical support issues was rising in the Customer Service department at Gateway Ticketing Systems, a small company that develops ecommerce and access-control software. Each agent was evaluated on the number of issues he or she closed, leading to a competition to grab the easiest issues, and most agents were individually assigned to specific customer accounts, which took away the incentive for teamwork. When there were emergencies and questions with the software, individuals contacted people they happened to know in the Software Product department, which disrupted software development work. In addition, there was only a loosely structured on-boarding program for new hires, leading to customer complaints that new agents were put on the phones without knowing anything.

Solution

To answer this challenge, I was promoted to the role of Senior Manager of Customer Service. I led four major initiatives:

  1. Process definition. I worked with Customer Service and Software Product leadership to define a comprehensive support request process, with defined hand-offs between departments and internal service-level agreements. For emergencies, this process included more precise definitions and remediation steps, limiting the number of emergency disruptions and ensuring that actual emergencies received proper attention.

  2. Team restructuring. I grouped the department into small teams with a mixture of senior and junior agents, each supporting a group of customer accounts. This approach encouraged mentoring and provided a back-up system when one member of the team was out of the office.

  3. Goal recalibration. I replaced the department’s focus on raw issue count with quarterly goals to reduce the number of issues that were past the target resolution time. This strategy incentivized the teams to tackle the older, more difficult issues instead of picking up the newer, easier ones. On a weekly basis, the teams forecasted how much time they had available and used that number to estimate how many issues they would be able to close in the next five days. I created dashboards in the support desk platform so that the department could track both their quarterly and weekly goals.

  4. New-hire training overhaul. I developed a comprehensive, blended approach to new-hire training. It included the previously developed Software Certification Program and sessions on each phase of the support request process. In addition, it had a shadowing schedule that progressed through the stages of watching someone else, doing the job with direct supervision, doing the job with someone on stand-by for help, and doing the job independently.

Result

These efforts led to an increased issue-closure rate of 29% per agent compared to the previous year. The new-hire training program also allowed the department to rapidly hire 33% more staff without a decrease in its overall customer satisfaction score.