A Good Change

Winds of Change

Kaizen, or Japanese for "a good change" is the Lean concept of continual improvement at all levels.  This week, I wanted to share with you a story of one small change the Service Desk made that had a big impact on our customers.

Earlier this week, I took a call from one of our customers who was unhappy about our response time on an urgent issue.  As it turns out, he called us and utilized the option in our phone system to leave a message.  We didn't return his phone call in the same day.  Had he stayed on the line until an agent was available we could have solved his issue right away, but he didn't have the time to wait.

The reason why we didn't call him back that same day has to do with how voicemails are handled in our workflow.  Voicemails are automatically transcribed to text and create a ticket in ZenDesk.  Once a voicemail becomes a ticket, it is handled by a different role (with a different workflow) than a phone call.  That workflow has a slower response to issues than our phone workflow.

This feedback from a customer exposed a flaw in our workflows.  From a customer's standpoint, phone calls and email have different priorities.  When you send an email, you don't expect an immediate response, but when you call someone, you expect someone to pick up the other end (and if not, an opportunity to leave a message and have someone call you back shortly).  

Our workflow wasn't purposely designed to handle voicemail this way.  It just emerged from the existing system.   Fortunately making a slight change to improve the response time to voicemails was very easy.  We expanded the role definition for the Service Desk Defender role and changed its workflow to handle voicemails before emailed-in tickets.  Two days later we tested it out and now all voicemails are returned within a few hours. 

Because we deliberately developed the roles and workflows in use by the Service Desk, this was an easy change.  Updating the documentation, communicating the change, and a small configuration adjustment in ZenDesk was all it took.  Had we not done the work of defining workflows, I'm not sure how we could have made this change.  Would we encourage people to look out for voicemails and handle them as a priority?  Yell at staff when they fail to return voicemails in a timely manner?  Neither of these are fail-proof, and as a manager, not the best way to motivate your staff.

Remember, the foundation of the Lean House is Standard Work, Heijunka, and Kaizen.  Can you see how we leveraged Standard Work to make a good change?