Business Process Mapping Part 2

Business Process Mapping Part 2
May 13, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

This is a second post of series. To see the first post in this series go to Business Process Mapping Part 1 on May 10, 2012.

In the absence of a clear and deliberate effort to map out the business processes in a contact center you are left with a legacy process that my not fit your organization's needs or your customer's needs at the present time.The may be processes that you are undertaking that are redundant, obsolete, or that there is now a software that can accomplish the same task at a fraction of the cost. Therefore, it is imperative that a clear process map is in place, and posted for everyone to see, and that is revisited each 12 calendar months to determine if this is still the best approach possible.

Source: http://www.fpm.iastate.edu/worldclass/process_flowchart.gif

Examples of what may not be editable in your process mapping in your contact center are those related to federal, state or local regulation. For example, my student loans are serviced by the company Nelnet. Each month I receive a paper statement and a bill. Each month I go online and make my payment. I pay more each month than the minimum payment and therefore when I do, my online balance due for the next month is always a bit lower because they subtract out what I have paid extra from the next month's minimum payment. However, when I receive my paper statement in the mail, the minimum payment is always the same, no matter how much I pay in advance. To understand why the online and the paper system did not mirror each other I phoned the Nelnet call center. The agent who answered the phone could not answer why these two items were not identical, so the call was escalated until I reached someone with the answer. And the answer is, that the federal rules around federal student loans requires the servicing company to send out a bill, by paper, each month that is equivalent to the minimum amount due over the payment period. So Nelnet has read this as a policy that cannot change and so I receive a bill for the federally define rule of minimum amount each month invoiced over the life of the loan while the online, and more flexible system, allows for the minimum payment to decrease over time reflecting the extra payment amount. Clearly the federal, state and local rules must be followed, but in the absence of such regulations, ALL business processes within the contact center should be mapped out in a high level of detail and then reviewed each year to determine if there is a better and more efficient way to run the operations. More on Business Process Mapping in Part 3.

Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler