Reducing processes to increase internal work

At Aviva Healthcare, it could be argues that the agents ended up with more work. When I was coaching an agent as part of the judging process for the Contact Centre Innovation Awards, I observed her make calls to get information which a competitor had made me, the customer do. I asked the agent about this and she said - "Why wouldnt I do it - the customer gets an answer quicker and I know it's accurate because I asked the right question." However by eliminating other red tape the difference was cost neutral or even an overall time saving as preventing the customer from calling back several times meant less ID&V and repeating the same information, so a time saving overall.

In some cases the Claims Assessors took on finding out information for the customer - this did result in more work for them but added to their job satisfaction, when we looked at some of our processes we were able to strip out things which were unnecessary so saving time - overall wrap times reduced during the pilot.