Complaints Blitz

At Kura we have wide experience in handling customer complaints across various sectors, particularly in utilities where our staff have been supporting complaints handling for over a decade.  Continuous Improvement is at the centre of our operations, and we are always looking for ways to improve our client’s service levels.  An example of this from this case study is our complaints blitz support in utilities which was a project ran to make a quick and incisive reduction in complaints volumes outstanding to support our client’s overall volume and industry position.

Our client had approached us with a challenge set to reduce their overall complaints volume by approximately 15% which was the equivalent of over three thousand.  The reason for this was due to customer impact from carrying such a large volume of ongoing complaints, time and effort taken to resolve which impacted handling of new issues and had a direct impact on their industry scorecard.  Kura being the highest KPI performing BPO partner had to have a significant impact and shoulder a large proportion of this target

To resolve we adopted a Kaizen blitz style approach as only had a short period of time to affect the backlog and change of around 2 weeks.  To begin, we utilised the expertise and experience in the operation to understand barriers to completion as well as assess the opportunity within our workload.  We then planned out across a 10 day period what cases would be our focus and ensured any which required further work, escalation or a technical fix were identified and moved into the appropriate channels

Our solution was to set up 4 project teams solely focused on this project and also set goals and targets for the BAU teams to help control the incoming volumes.  We also shared our plan with the client as well as any support requirements from a technical standpoint where system access limitations could pose a challenge to achieving our goals.

We set ourselves a 10 day blitz plan with daily targets and milestones defined.  A few teams were assigned to focus solely on the project with experts.  Cadance of touchpoints were defined at twice daily for 30 minutes for the project team and leads to ensure traction and agile reaction to any challenges as they arose.

Kura’s contribution to the overall reduction target exceeded 50% vs. proportionately having approx. 30% of the staffing across several partners so had more than made an impact.  The reduction Kura contributed towards helped maintain the client’s leading position in industry as set out by the industry scorecard

The project was successful and a good example showing what impact we can make in reducing customer complaints.  In terms of lessons learned this type of activity we should look to implement naturally vs. at request

 The approach could be utilised as a quarterly initiative ran solely from Kura as a value-added activity and to support BAU performance in this space

The main takeaways from this project were:

• 50% complaint reduction achieved in just 10 days.
• We were able to showcase our ability to flex in resource to meet client demand in a short space of time.
• Utilising the knowledge, ideas and experience of our staff with more than a decade of experience