DMAIC Project: Reducing the Time it Takes to Process Complaints about E-commerce Orders
Baseline (Define)
The company felt that the handling of complaints related to e-commerce orders was inefficient and took up too much time and resources. In particular, it was hoped that customer complaints received by telephone would be dealt with as quickly as possible.
Although the company already had a separate Lean project to reduce the number of complaints, the company also wanted to improve the speed of handling complaints, as the number of contacts and service advisors was expected to increase significantly in the future as volumes increased. The focus of the project was therefore on the internal handling and redress process of cases in a selected customer service team (= time when the case is on the service advisor's desk). Due to the tight timeframe of the project, the objective was to implement at least one solution and a plan for continuous improvement.
Process performance at the beginning (Measure)
Log data (including transaction timestamps) for complaints related to e-commerce orders was available from the CRM system used by the customer service, from which a month's worth of process data on complaint handling time was selected for analysis. Based on the original data, the average processing time was relatively short (7min), but the process variation was remarkably high. However, during the process description phase, it became clear that the measurement of processing time was incorrect, as the majority of service advisors were already recording the case in the system before the clearing and settlement work was completed - meaning that the current situation was actually more problematic.
Improvement measures (Analyze & Improve)
The main root causes of the problems were found to be the different practices of service advisers (including waiting times for pending cases, case clearance and reimbursement only after a phone call/phone calls, and recording information in several different places). Unfortunately, these could not be validated with data due to a previous measurement error, and the project ended up continuing to brainstorm and implement solutions using mainly Lean methods. The main challenge proved to be the availability of reliable data and the large number of different approaches, which made it particularly difficult to identify the real root causes of the problem. In the end, reorganisation and simplification of the process steps through the use of standard work instructions were selected as improvement measures. This solution was piloted and received a lot of positive feedback.
Results (Control)
Data on the new policy and situation was collected over a period of a few weeks and the analysis showed a significant improvement in the mean and variance of the process. The project also created a new day-to-day management model with metrics to maintain the new practices and detect problems early. However, at the end of the project, the target values of the project were not yet achieved due to the ongoing implementation of the solutions (insufficient reliable data on the state of the process due to initial difficulties). However, it was decided to end the project at this stage, as the Process Owner had sufficient capacity to continue continuous improvement with his team and as Black Belt moved on to other tasks. The sustainability of the new approach in the future will be influenced in particular by the number of service advisors/queue situation and management communication and day-to-day management.
In addition to the improvements gained from the project, the company felt that the lessons learned about the importance of data reliability and the importance of involving employees well in advance were a great added value.
This project was a Black Belt training project, which the participant did as part of the training and received a Black Belt certificate at the end of the project.
If you are interested in learning how to improve your processes using Lean and Six Sigma, and obtaining a Green or Belt Belt certification at the same time, check out the different options at : Lean Six Sigma trainings.