How To Right-Size Your Technicians

What is right-sizing?

• Technician right-sizing is the process of geographically aligning a workforce with the workload they’re responsible for in any given area. 

Why doesn't right-sizing happen naturally?

• There are two forces at play while trying to provide service appointments to customers – quota (workload) and routing (workforce).
• During quota management, service appointment windows are generated to specific geographical regions.
• Routing occurs when technicians are dispatched to complete the work within their areas.
• Many different factors lead to a poor alignment of technicians to service appointments.  Some of which are as follows:
  • Size of both the quota and routing areas
  • Incorrect configuration of automatic routing software
  • Lack of communication between quota team and field operations
  • Business processes resulting in arbitrary technician borders

How to identify the need for right-sizing?

• Symptoms of poor right-sizing can be seen through various key performance indicators (KPIs) when granularly viewed.
  • ‘Average Time to Repair/Install’ (ATTR/ATTI) is the time it takes between when a customer requests an appointment and when that customer has a technician at his/her residence.
  • ‘Met Rate’ is the % of appointments where the technician arrived at the customer’s residence within the promised timeframe.
  • ‘Productivity’ is a reflection of how much work is being accomplished by each technician.

• Right-sizing is likely (yet not necessarily) the culprit when a particular area is over-performing and a geographically adjacent area is under-performing in the KPIs listed above.

Why is right-sizing important? What are the impacts of a lack of right-sizing?

• If an area isn't right-sized, it typically results in more sporadic and inefficient technician routing.
  • Some technicians will be assigned very tight routes while others will spend a majority of their day driving to appointments.
  • The technicians with the tighter routes will reflect higher productivity for the day than the technicians that had long drive times and were unable to complete as many jobs.

• It also creates more work for the Dispatch team.
  • Dispatchers will need to have more manual interventions to ensure all the service appointments are met.
  • Instead of the automatic router being able to fill technicians with productive routes, dispatchers are left to do it.
  • Finding jobs to fill technician routes is a reactive task which leaves less time for their proactive duties such as looking ahead and managing jobs that are in jeopardy of being late or altogether missed.

• Negative customer experiences are created.
  • Quota availability is perceived as unfair.
    • “I called my cable provider and they said it’d be a week before they could come out and one of my friends called around the same time and was told it’d only be four days.”
  • Routing complexities and lack of available technicians for an area lead to late or missed appointments.
    • “I took off work and waited for two hours, only to be informed that they couldn't make it and would have to come out another time.”

Welcome the New Year 2015!

To our Customers, Partners, Neighbors and Friends,

It’s been an eventful year for all of us here at Cliintel, as we continue to invest in the solutions we provide and in the communities where we live and work, 2014 has been a busy and rewarding year with many achievements and milestones along the way. In the coming year, we’ll continue to partner with businesses and magnificent non-profits that make Cliintel vibrant, dynamic, and impactful to everyone.

Here are some of the highlights from 2014:

Solution Delivery

• Delivered 14 projects on time and under budget since June
• Created and Implemented a front-end debugging library
• Adhered to software development lifecycle with success

Partnering for Success

• Cliintel worked with Midcontinent Communications and reduced scheduling windows to an industry best, re-designed dispatch operations with heightened focus on customer-impacting metrics in a real-time environment, and demonstrated to the customer community an unrelenting commitment to delivering product and service excellence. “Although never satisfied, this partnership maintained consistent on-time arrival rates of 97.75% with over 93.8% of all jobs scheduled in 15 minute windows, providing more customer choice,” commented Midcontinent Communications Vice President of Operations, Brad Schoenfelder.
• Cliintel and Spectralliance partner to serve the small Multi-System Operator (MSO) community with actionable analytics and data visualization that enhance the support systems offered.
• Cliintel integrates with GLDS for expanded broadband reporting and metrics to allow businesses to drive strategic, operational, and tactical initiatives while precisely measuring impact and demonstrating return-on-investment (ROI).

Presence in the Cable Industry

• Cliintel was an active participant and sponsor of many programs within the cable industry in 2014.

RMCA (Rocky Mountain Cable Association)

• Sponsor of the Turkey Hunt
• Golf Tournament participants

WICT (Women in Cable Telecommunications)

• Sponsor of the Rocky Mountain Tech It Out
• Sponsor of the Rocky Mountain Walk of Fame
• Sponsor of the Carolinas Annual Conference

SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers)

• Sponsor of The International Cable-Tec Games
• Tradeshow Exhibitor

NCTA (National Cable & Telecommunications Association)

• Attended The Cable Show in Los Angeles, CA

NCTC (National Cable Television Cooperative)

• Attended The Independent Show in Kansas City, KS

Adaptive Spirit (SkiTam)

• Active board participation
• Attended and volunteered
• Brad Parobek sponsored his time as an active Board member, as well as led the silent auction and assisted with the kids race. Crystal Allen volunteered her time greeting and guiding attendees to the events, check-in for the Brain Trust panel, and assisted at the silent auction.

Impact in the Community

• First Cliintel Cares Day

• Cliintel participated in Hunger Action Month at Food Bank of the Rockies by contributing to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, filling 600 boxes – over 2.5 tons – with food supplied by USDA for seniors in need throughout the Rocky Mountain service area. In addition, the Cliintel resources fulfilled 16 Mobile Pantry distribution orders to be delivered to program participants.

Connecting for Cancer

• Cliintel cares about making an impact in our community and touching the lives of many individuals, but taking part in Connecting for Cancer is near to our hearts. MyLifeline.org has provided an outlet for Kris (a retired employee) that allows her to connect with all of us, but also other family and friends that want to stay current with how she is feeling, doctors’ visits, and the many sail direction changes the wind of cancer can carry. The ability to connect and provide to as many affected individuals in unfortunate circumstances is embedded in our values and employees and we are honored to be a sponsor for Connecting for Cancer and the life of Kris. Cliintel was able to sponsor Dream Dinners for Kris and her family while she was undergoing treatment, and provided a family portrait session to capture the bright moments of the Pogue family.

Platinum Sponsor: Children’s Hospital Colorado Burn Camps Program- Creating Ties Dinner

• The 2014 Creating Ties dinner raised a total of $80,000 in donations and support ensures that young burn survivors will continue to have opportunities to be defined by their dreams, goals, and their future.

What to do with Conflicting KPI's

Business is tough. It’s even tougher when your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are contradictory. You end up fighting against yourself.

What business would do that? It’s just crazy, right?

We see it all the time and the simplest example is, any company that rolls out a big initiative to increase quantity of work. Sounds good so far, every company wants to get more productivity out of its workforce after all.

Productivity is key, so everyone hear this: Get more work done!

What a lot of companies forget to stress is that more productivity is great, if quality doesn’t suffer.

You might be amazed how many companies put the push on for getting more done and are shocked when they see their defect rates go up. Or just the opposite, there’s a well-publicized effort to improve quality, only to see quantity drop.

Any single KPI has the potential to be misused when considered on its own merit.

Use multiple KPIs together to form a well-balanced view of your organization, and make sure that your initiatives communicate a balanced approach clearly and effectively!

Goal Alignment: Does Your Company Have it?

Can you imagine what would happen if the boosters on a rocket were not aligned?  You can easily visualize that rocket careening left, right, then up and down in a completely unpredictable course.

Now apply this same principal to your business.  Your people, processes and tools are analogous to those boosters on the rocket.  If they are not aligned, and properly pointed at your target, your flight is not going to be successful.

Using our INSIGHT methodology, and our IGNITE suite of Business Intelligence (BI) tools, Cliintel helps its clients carefully tune the alignment of people, process, and tools.  Our Six Sigma trained experts will assess your operational efficiency with a combined approach of advanced statistical analysis and deep domain knowledge. We’ll look at the initiatives that are driven from the C-Suite and recommend ways to optimize your operations so that everyone within the company is in alignment, and pointed toward the target.

If your current BI tool isn’t capable of providing the proper telemetry and guidance for your flight, we have IGNITE to offer.  IGNITE will access any number of different data silos to show how each adjustment of your processes impacts your direction, and you’ll know virtually instantaneously.  Let’s face it, some really good  ideas don’t always work out as planned, and you’ll need to reverse those adjustments quickly, and you can’t do that effectively without fresh and actionable intelligence.  And for the ideas that do provide the right impact, you’ll want to know those impacts as well.  In either case, you’ll have the confidence to alter your flight knowing that your risks are controlled with our trusted INSIGHT methodology coupled with our BI knowledge.

Does Your Call Center Compete?

Our leadership team recently had the opportunity to visit the Zappos office in Las Vegas and take part in their 3 day “Zappos Insights Boot Camp”.  This was a very interesting and unique experience as Zappos is well known for their company culture and how they have become one of the best places to work in America. 

Zappos started out as an on-line site to buy shoes, and now sell a wide variety of products through their web site although shoes certainly remain a staple for them.  One reason that the Zappos story is so interesting is because of how they organize and run their call center. Call centers are notorious for being unhappy, unfriendly, toxic environments where anyone can get hired but no one with any talent or skill tends to stay for very long.  However, that is not the case at Zappos, where every employee in the call center is upbeat, smiling, and anxious to serve their customers. How did Zappos do that?

By clearly creating and reinforcing a culture that is unique from any other call center I’ve ever experienced.

On our first day at Zappos, before we even had a chance to learn anything about the company, before we had a chance to hear about the Zappos Culture, and before we had even met our first Zappos employee, we were given a tour of their call center. 

I was shocked. 

Call centers tend to be uniform in their layout and design with hundreds of identical cubes lined up, with employees slowly milling about glassy-eyed and almost comatose as they avoided customer calls.  Call center personnel are typically graded on how quickly they get resolution on each call, which is a nice way to say that they are paid to get off the phone in a hurry; whether the problem has been solved or not.  The rooms are generally quiet, still, and bland except for the muffled tones of employees droning on to unknown customers on the phone lines.

Not so at Zappos.  There, employees were grouped into teams of 8 – 10 where each group came up with their own identity and then decorated their area based on that.  We saw Star Trek teams, teams dedicated to long defunct rock bands, some to more recent music stars, and of course the required “Simpsons” team.  The decorations were in some cases crude, but in all cases both colorful and plentiful.  The huge call center resembled the birthday party of an over-sugared 10 year old.  

While the team lines were clearly delineated, there was no concern over cliques forming.  You see, teams only stay together for a few months and were then disbanded so that new teams could be formed with new ideas and new decorations.   Over time you get the chance to be team members with many, if not all of your fellow employees. 

Employees are not rated on how quickly they get off the call, but by how quickly they answer the next call in their queue and their ability to meet a number of points on their call check list. That list specifically calls out making a connection with the customer. Since call length is not important, the employees feel no need to rush their customers.  In fact, they are encouraged to spend the time getting to know them.   They are encouraged to build relationships with customers that they will likely never meet in person.  Why?  Because customers who know you care will likely call back and buy more products.   Customers are not someone that you must “deal with” instead they are treated like an old friend that you are anxious to help.

And this attitude extends beyond the call center to every aspect and job within Zappos.   Zappos has done what no other company to my knowledge has been able to do: they make working in a call center fun.  And that is no easy task.

Here are the key things we learned that I believe can be transferred to the development of almost any culture:

1. Know your culture before you can imprint it. Clearly, values play an important part in defining that culture, and   Zappos started with a list of simple words that defined their values.  They started with 10, and further-clarified them by changing them from simple words to short statements, each one starting with a verb.  So “customer service” turned into “Deliver WOW through Service”.  “Fun” turned into “Create fun and a little weirdness”.
2. While skills are important to any position, skills are teachable.  When hiring they make sure that each new employee embodies the spirit that is the Zappos culture.  Culture interviewing is critical in their hiring process, and if there is any question about a potential employees ability to fit the culture, that person is not offered a position.
3. Zappos employees must show that they fit the culture continually.  Someone is more likely to be fired for failure to meet the culture than they are by failing to perform.
4. Cultural assessments are performed annually across the organization and are as important as objective based Performance Reviews.
5. Everyone proudly displays the Zappos name.  From T-shirts to mugs, pens and key chains, the Zappos name is ever-present, and employees display their wares proudly. 
6. Employees are encouraged to nominate their peers for special awards when they display the Zappos spirit and culture. 

I could go on and on, but they key takeaway for me was that when you want to build something special and deliver a better customer experience that leads to happy, repeat customers, as well as engaged employees, it all begins with your culture.

Got a Problem? We Can Solve it.

The Silver Bullet Solution

Many companies want that silver bullet that solve all of their big data problems quickly, easily, and completely. This is true for many of our clients. It’s a very seductive concept, and one that oftentimes is not realistic.

While silver bullet solutions may be few and far between, what does work is implementing proven approaches for iterative and incremental problem solving. CliIntel’s approach is just that. With the big picture in mind, we focus on iterative solutions that are self-funding. In other words, we tackle one problem at a time to maximize ROI.

The Cube of Opportunity

It’s been said that a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.  CliIntel takes that single step by analyzing a small component of a business, documenting the opportunities, and presenting a conservative ROI calculation for capitalizing on one or two of the most feasible opportunities.  We calculate the feasibility based on the best ROI for the least effort with the least disruption (we call this the ‘cube of opportunity’).

Solutions are implemented one step at a time in order to maximize ROI for each iterative step completed.  Then the changes in performance levels are measured, presented and verified. The cube of opportunity represents small, incremental changes that yield results in days, not months. Results like these allow companies to make decisions swiftly and determine the next critical change to be implemented.

This incremental approach allows companies to protect their investment. Incremental investments are met with incremental returns, oftentimes far exceeding predictions. Funny thing with big data – once you can wrap your arms around the little things, the big things get easier.

Self-Funding

We call this a self-funding model because the first project pays for itself quickly, and continued ROI pays for the next project.  You get to play with ‘house money’.  The second project pays for itself (even though the first project also paid for the second project) and the next project as well.  The third pays for the fourth, and so on.

Business Intelligence (BI)

This model is predicated on the fact that companies have the ability to quickly monitor their performance data.  Many companies already have ‘system of truth’ type BI system which provides time appropriate access to actionable data.  For companies that either don’t have this kind of system, or can’t ingest new data quickly enough to meet the measurement needs, we plug in IGNITE Lite, our low-investment easy-to-implement BI tool.  This tool allows for creation of baseline performance levels, and  timely access to the actionable data companies need to verify that optimization projects meet their goals.

Summary

Your business problems (or shall I say opportunities) probably don’t all look the same, and certainly can’t be solved with a silver bullet.  With a repeatable process that can be applied to a wide variety of challenges, incremental  insights add up to impressive results.

Three Rules for Making our Company Truly Great

As companies are always striving for better, we at Cliintel are striving for great. Often times, it can be tempting to try and make the company’s results look better by declining assets and investments to reduce costs. Since this is not the way to make a company truly great, there are three rules that can serve as corrective measures to the leadership all-too-fallible intuition.

1. Better before cheaper
   1. Look to competing on other options and desires than price
2. Revenue before cost
   1. Prioritize and follow a process to increase revenue, prior to reducing costs amongst the company
3. There are no other rules 
   1. We are a change company. In order to fall in line with what we do for our clients, we must first follow rules 1 and 2

Truly great companies accept higher costs as a price of excellence, which creates a non-price value and generates higher revenue; leading back to our mission of: “Happy Employees, Happy Clients.”  Outstanding performance is created and executed by grander value, not by lower price. Companies that seek sustained profitability should pursue strategies consistent with these three rules and avoid those that aren't. Cliintel values our employees; our people are our product. Our cultural approach and attitude holds success in balance for Cliintel, especially when our leadership team upholds following the three rules to making our company truly great. At the end of the day, everyone is responsible for making Cliintel great. An individual department does not drive success without interlinking other departments and brilliant individuals. We cannot create a truly great company by only following these three rules, but also through: teamwork, innovation, communication, and selflessness. 

Onward,

Richard Batenburg Jr., CEO