Identifying system-wide contact center cost reduction opportunities through lean, customer-focused IT metrics

Dell's long-term success depends on its customers' future buying patterns. These patterns are largely determined by customers' satisfaction with the after-sales service they receive. Previously, Dell has been able to deliver high customer satisfaction but has done so at a high expense, further reducing the low margins on their consumer product line. Dell's Global Consumer Services and Support organization (GCSS) is constantly innovating to lower its operating costs while maintaining customer satisfaction. Their task is difficult to achieve in part because of the broad scope of problems that Dell's customer service agents (CSAs) tackle and the grey areas of support boundaries. In order to identify and correct the root-causes of these contact-center costs, Dell needs the ability to measure the specific cost of supporting individual customers. Yet, no such customer-centric data framework exists at Dell, or indeed in the contact center industry. However, it is possible to create just such a customer focused data framework by applying an automated value stream mapping (VSM) analysis to a large sample of contact-center activity data from Dell's data warehouse. The resulting data set is a collection of digital value stream maps representing the end-to-end customer service experience of each contact-center customer. After performing the proposed data transformations, these customer-focused metrics (CustFM) are shown to yield significant insights into previously unidentifiable cost reduction opportunities available across Dell's global contact-center network.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Sen, Avijit

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deborah Nightingale and John Sterman.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Civil and Environmental Engineering.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49791

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49791