Transportation Services - 77% Reduction in Missed Stops! Exponential gains in customer satisfaction
Missed Stops Process Improvement
Background
Our client is a provider of transportation services with locations across the US. The client operates transportation depots across the US. Our client schedules over 25,000 stops per day. 75% of the customers are on a regular pick-up schedule, 25% are scheduled on an on-call basis within one day’s notice.
The Challenge
Our client believed they had an opportunity to reduce their missed stops however they could not pinpoint the exact magnitude of the process.
- The client had recently centralized its customer service call center. The corporate customer service team raised the issue to management as missed stops were the second most frequent customer inquiry they received.
- Missed stops data was self-reported by the local operations team. This self-reported data was aggregated manually by the regional management teams and reported up to the VPs of Operations.
- Our client lacked the data necessary to determine the ROI associated with any operational improvements or investments to reduce missed stops.
Our Approach
We engaged with our client to map the relevant processes and detailed data for the prior 6 months. Based upon our analysis, we determined the following common causes of delays and errors:
- Delays were driven by duplicate inspection and redundant processes
- Re-work caused by flaws in the process
- Un-even volumes drove spikes at the end of the month and the quarter (20% increase at the end of the month and 40% at the end of quarter). These spikes overwhelmed the staff and lead to mistakes and delays.
Our Solution
We worked with the client team to map the current state processes and to review the available data.
- Define a “missed stop” from the customers’ perspective.
- Developed a set to analytical reports to identify missed stops automatically. These reports are pushed to the front line supervisors and managers daily for review and corrective action.
- Created a case-management process to align customer complaints / calls to operational data. This helped facilitate the corrective action process.
- Designed a corrective action process to:
- Determine the root cause of the missed stop
- Eliminate erroneously reported missed stops
- Address common causes of missed stops on a local and national level
- Developed process metrics to track performance on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
The Results
We worked with the client to implement the new procedures and studied the results over the 30-60-90 day implementation cycle. Within the first 90 days, our client enjoyed a 52% reduction in missed stops. After 1 year, our client realized a 77% reduction in missed stops.
