Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) can be the catalyst for huge gains in your call center efficiency and capacity metrics. This world-class methodology enables the efficient capture, reuse and publication of knowledge.

KCS and Lean Six Sigma thinking can be combined to create a powerful force for increasing ROI and call center capacity. Lean Six Sigma initially maps out the entire call center process looking for redundant and/or inefficient steps. Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) provides the methodology for improving many of the typical problematic areas found during the mapping process.

Chances are bottlenecks exist in your approval process. It is not uncommon for a single tech reviewer/approver to have hundreds of documents to review in a queue. This can result in weeks of delay before publication. 80% of these solutions will never be used again, so reviewing all of them is an inefficient process. A better solution is to sort the documents for review by the number of times they have been used internally. This will float the critical 20% to the top of the review queue. This dramatically decreases the review and publication cycle time for content that is critically needed by your customers. Content that takes longer than 30 days to publish loses a tremendous amount of its value.

Licensing qualified agents to publish and bypass steps in the review process can create times of less than one day to publication. The idea is to optimize all of the business practices that affect rapid publication. Typically there is a delay between each step of the workflow. A Lean Six Sigma Transactional Efficiency formula can be applied to benchmark the process efficiency.

Transactional Efficiency = Execution Time / Execution Time + Delay Time

Let's look at two examples.

Example One: The call center agent spends half an hour creating the solution document and a reviewer then spends fifteen minutes verifying the solution. The document is then routed to Marketing and Legal where a total of another half hour of time is used to ready the document for publication. The total execution time is 1.25 hours. Due to delays between each step, the entire workflow process takes 14 business days from creation to publication. To calculate the Transaction Efficiency divide 1.25 hours by 112 hours (14 business days) = 1% process efficiency rate.

Example Two: The well trained call center agent is "licensed" to publish the solution document. The agent spends half an hour creating the solution document. The document then sits in a holding queue for four hours where Marketing and Legal have the option to review it. At the end of four hours it is auto-published. To calculate the process efficiency rate divide .5 hours by 4.5 hours = 11% process efficiency.

The process efficiency rate does not tell the complete story. Imagine that last week your company shipped 30,000 MP3 players with the wrong device driver. Calls will begin peaking within a few days. Rapid publication can deflect many of these calls saving $15 per support call.

KCS is a registered service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation

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Randy Ross is a Senior Implementation Manager and Process Analyst at Stone Cobra located in Rocklin, California. For further information on KCS, please visit http://kcs.stonecobra.com where you may download whitepapers, training materials and join KCS community discussions.