I work for a leading mobile phone operator in Bangladesh, and I applied lean in its call center. The call center received about 100,000 to 110,000 calls every day, and its average handling time was about 150 seconds per call. The organization had a customer base of 40 million that was growing at an annual rate of 20%. The customer base and incoming calls to a call center are positively correlated, meaning increasing a customer base leads to an increase in calls to the call center.
Although self-service channels (e-care, website and interactive voice response) were available, the organization's customers preferred calling into the hotline and were more comfortable talking to human agents. About 1,500 employees worked around the clock to manage this huge call volume. Of those, 600 were fulltime employees who worked eight hours per day.
To manage the increasing number of calls to the call center, there was no other option but to enhance callhandling efficiency because increasing manpower to keep pace with increasing call pressure was not con- sidered a cost-effective option. So, our challenge was to find ways to receive more calls with our existing manpower without affecting customer experience or service quality.