Senior management in a financial services company determined that in order to meet the planned levels of business from its call centres 10,000 outbound sales calls need to be made each week. However the supply of leads from marketing to telephone sales was less than half the demand and was erratic.
Furthermore, leads were supplied in inconsistent formats, without any relevant narrative about the likely sales opportunities.
A six sigma project was set up, sponsored by the head of operations, led by a marketing blackbelt with representation from marketing, finance, telesales and IT departments. Waste and lost opportunities exceeded €840k p.a.
The team mapped the various processes at various levels of detail, correlated the telesales departments’ requirements with the inputs from the processes mapped and constructed failure modes and effects analyses of what was going wrong where. Hypothesis tests were conducted to confirm the discoveries. The main findings were that different databases held different details, some databases were incomplete or in formats which were difficult to access or interpret. This often resulted in telesales leads which had no telephone number.
Solution
The team setup regular marketing/telesales reviews, generated reports to show performance, updated the databases with the correct information and developed synchronised databases. They introduced a leads grading system, used finance and collections staff to generate an effective customer change of details advice process and agreed standard operating procedures for staff to use in future.
Results
The process was changed from an erratic supply of leads. A pull system was introduced where leads were supplied to telesales at a rate at which telesales staff could deal effectively with them. A significantly improved proportion of leads were targeted at decision makers.
