Step engaged with a market-leading low-cost airline to improve the overall operating efficiency of their contact centre, with specific focus on improving processes, revising their resource deployments and implementing relevant metric monitoring and reporting, all supported by appropriate technology.
Given the nature of a low-fare airline, there was a specific need to achieve this with staying true to the ethos of the business of keeping costs low while enabling customer self-service. Owing to the airline being a market-leader, the challenge was to find opportunities to improve, which exist at the margins.
After a year of fast and positive growth, our client was needing to identify points of inefficiency within the contact centre and supporting divisions of the business segment, to deliver a seamless customer experience though physical and self-service channels. Given the nature of the industry and customer demand, the business was struggling to find the time in their day-to-day to identify these inefficiencies, hence the need for assistance from Step.
CLIENT
PROJECT TYPE
Optimisation of Target Operating Model
Duration
16 weeks
INDUSTRY
Low-Cost Airline
To fully understand the airline industry, we conducted detailed desktop research and spent intentional time with the team by conducting interviews with heads of specific divisions. These interviews informed us of the recent business growth and various issues experienced within the division. To understand the day-to-day operations of a contact-centre, we spent a week with the contact centre agents, understanding and analysing the types of customer queries, the time taken to resolve customer queries, the approach taken by agents to resolve these queries, and the software tools used to enable the agents in their day-to-day job.
Once we had a clear understanding of the business and had identified the various issues being experienced, we hosted workshops with the team and prioritised and unpacked each issue. This included breaking down the current process followed, the tools used to support the process and the existing bottlenecks at each point. This was valuable time as we were able to paint the “as-is” state and begin to discuss what a “to-be” state could be. As we discussed the “to-be” state, we ensured that suggested changes were aligned to business requirements of increasing revenue, decreasing or maintaining low costs and/or improving customer experience. Another interactive session that we hosted with the team was an agent training and development session where we mapped out a 24-month programme that a contact centre agent should typically go through to move from a beginner to an expert contact centre agent. To ensure that each suggestion could be measured and tracked overtime, we spent time analysing the available data which informed a benchmark to inform future metric monitoring.
To ensure that we provided informed recommendations to our client, we incorporated a benchmarking activity by visiting a non-direct competitor contact centre, to understand how they operate at scale and determine both the health and performance metrics that are typically leveraged in operating efficient contact centres. Furthermore, we bought in an external consultant within out network to understand the omni-channel systems that exist in the market and the pros and cons of an omni-channel vs. piece-meal system architecture design.
Once all the understanding, benchmarking and analysis work was complete with the team, we performed a process re-design for each of the identified issues and their respective blockers. For each blocker we broke down how it could be re-designed from a people, process and system perspective. For each issue, the required metric reports were designed to enable effective decision making. With the recommended re-design, we assisted the team in articulating five key objectives to implement and realise change. Each objective had a set of strategic initiatives which were prioritised and allocated to a team member to create focus and accountability within the team.
The final outcome of the project provided a view of the as-is state of the contact centre with clear people, process and system recommendations per identified issue. To ensure that progress could be tracked and metrics monitored, we recommended a data dashboard which included data points that we believe the team should begin to track to help make informed business decisions. To ensure that the team had a clear view of immediate next steps, we set out five key objectives and initiatives to help the team execute accordingly.
