The Philippines is a beautiful place, with beautiful, friendly people.  It has clear waters that are just made for sailing, peppered with idyllic islands to visit.  Perfect for a holiday?  You bet.

For better or worse, it is also a place with comparatively cheap labour and an English speaking population, which has resulted in many companies off-shoring their call centres or service departments there.  I say for better or for worse, because of the following story:

Dodo mobile and Internet, in Australia, was one of these very companies.  They used the Philippines for their call centre staff, and instead of making things simpler, they received a fine in 2008 from the ACMA for breaching the Privacy act.  So I was not looking forward to calling them, even when I found out I was paying too much for my internet service.  I thought that perhaps it would just be easier to keep paying the $10 extra a month and be done with it.

But then something wonderful happened.  It started with a visit to their website.

On their “Contact Us” page, there was something I’d never seen before.  It was the current call wait time – displayed plainly for all to see – right next to the number to call.  It also showed the historical average.  Both times were lower than the average call centre, at around 1 minute.

I thought – “Oh my God.  This is Visual Management!”  In a call centre, on a website!  And it’s actually information that is extremely useful to me!  Based on the wait time displayed, I called the number.  They picked up in less than a minute.  This alone would have been worth the price of admission, but the Lean experience didn’t stop there.

The staff member was friendly, polite, and did exactly what I needed.  But it was what they did next that nearly made me the happiest man on the planet.  The staff member asked if she had met my requirements for the call – I said “yes”, and she then reminded me to stay on the line so I could rate her service.  When she hung up, I was automatically put through – this is perfect one piece flow – no additional steps required.  The message that played asked me to rate a “Five” if she had completed my requirement for the call, and a “Four or below” if she had not.

And I thought “Oh my God” again.  This is Jidoka.  It’s the principle of “Stop and Notify” if something is wrong.  If I selected a four or below, they said, it would put me through immediately to a senior staff member to get more information about why the call was bad.  In other words – they would stop immediately, swarm around the problem using their senior staff and try and get an immediate fix.  While I didn’t get to see it as I rated her a hearty “five”, I imagine that they log the reasons for their “Four or belows”, so they can fix those for the future as well.  They would have to – their service certainly reflects it.

It was absolutely brilliant.  And it was obviously paying dividends – the staff were very good at their job, and were keenly aware that their process was good, fast and effective, but also that they would be rated every single time.  In Lean, we fix our Process, and we build up our people.

But here is the kicker – the payoff isn’t just happy customers.  The payoff is financial, pure and simple.  Happy customers mean sales, and more sales create a booming business.

M2 Group, who owns Dodo, has a share price that has almost doubled in the last year.  Not many companies can say that.  And yes, at the time of writing, I happen to own some 🙂

Yours in change,

David McLachlan

Disclaimer:  At the time of writing, David McLachlan owns shares in M2 Group.

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