MHA 505 Week 5
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MHA505Week4GembaWalk2.docx
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BlueShield Company is an insurance company which offers such services as life, personal and health insurances to its customers. The mission of the company is to offer unparalleled insurance services to customers, for the least possible fees and in the most efficient and satisfactory manner. The vision of the company is to become a leading company in the provision of insurance services and to become a pacesetter in customer satisfaction and organizational culture.
To find out whether or not the mission and vision of the company are being adhered to, I undertook a Gemba Walk within our organizational head offices. True to the definition of a Gemba Walk, I aimed at being at the place where the real work was being done, to see areas of strengths as well as those that need to be improved (Womack, 2013). It also gave me an opportunity to ask why things were running the way they were.
As such, the main focus was placed on the customer service department. It should be noted that most of the communication between customers and the company is mainly not done face to face but rather through phone calls as well as emails. The company has therefore built a customer service center where these calls are answered or made and emails replied to customers when need be. The company places a lot of importance on this department given that it is the one that can make or break the relationship between it and customers. I set out into the office to see and hear what happens there. Specifically, I laid special importance on the times that it took our employees in the customer care department to respond to phone calls and to emails from our clients.
When taking the Gemba Walk, I was able to record a number of observations. The assistants whose responsibility is basically to reply phone calls were almost always on their phones caught between the calls from our clients mostly in the afternoons when they were sometimes forced to hasten their services in order to serve as many clients as possible. This means that the amount of time that it took to respond to clients was shorter than they would have liked. In fact, some customers were forced to leave messages, something that the company strives to make sure that it does not happen. In the morning hours though, the company employees often found themselves with less pressure, with the work being making calls themselves and replying to email messages from our clients. Those with the sole responsibility of writing and replying emails sent to the company from our clients often found themselves without much work to do most of the time since most clients preferred calling the company to have one thing or another sorted out rather than send emails. Therefore, those in the emailing department had very little work to do until at the end of the month where customers are emailed reports of the services that they have received from the company. As such, a lot of valuable time was found to be wasted by the employees working in this department.
From the observation, the average waiting time for calls was found to be 6 minutes which is way above the 1-minute threshold that the company aims to maintain. A lot of customers are forced to wait for their needs to be attended to by our assistants and this is a problem for the company because it is one potential cause of customer dissatisfaction. At the same time, the phone call assistants find themselves pressured at times which definitely affects the kind of services that they give to customers (Gesinger, 2016). In times when the pressure is raging high, call times are forced to be largely reduced which may adversely affect the quality of service offered to customers. The emailing assistants, however, find themselves with ample time that is unproductive (Hafey, 2014). With about four assistants, there is hardly enough work to make sure that all of them are work in a manner that resources are used efficiently. Simply put, it is a call times are forced to be largely reduced which may adversely affect the quality of service offered to customers. The emailing assistants however find themselves with ample time that is unproductive (Hafey, 2014). With about four assistants, there is hardly enough work to make sure that all of them are work in a manner that resources are used efficiently. Simply put, it is a case of a lot of pressure that has to be handled by assistants handling phone calls while there is just enough work to effectively waste resources for the assistants handling emails. To solve this problem, the company can train assistants to handle both phone calls and emails to make sure that resources are not wasted.
In a nutshell, the following were the key takeaways from the Gemba Walk:
i. There are a lot of resources wasted for employing four emailing assistants while there is hardly enough work for them
ii. Waiting times for calls are very long meaning that client service is far from satisfactory.
iii. There is more work for the phone call assistants can efficiently handle.
iv. All assistants ought to be trained to handle both phone calls and emails if the issues of undue pressure and client dissatisfaction are to be resolved.
To streamline customer services and reduce wastage of resources, new phone call assistants can be hired, all assistants can be trained in both phone call and email handling and the groups can be molded into a single department in the short run. In the long run, the company can make use of new technology especially chatbots to offer customer services (Bremer, 2015). Once these opportunities are explored, the company will surely be able to live up to its mission and achieve its mission in the long run.
References
Bremer, M. (2015). Walk the Line. Quality Progress, 48(3), 18.
Gesinger, S. (2016). Experiential learning: using gemba walks to connect with employees. Professional Safety, 61(02), 33-36.
Hafey, R. (2014). Lean safety Gemba Walks: A methodology for workforce engagement and culture change. Productivity Press.
Womack, J. (2013). Gemba Walks: Expanded 2nd Edition. Lean Enterprise Institute.
