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Article : Will a Toyota Emerge from the Pack of Me-Too BPOs?

Here’s a challenge: try to be unimpressed about what Toyota has accomplished.

From one small California dealership in the late 50’s, they just passed GM as the #1 car manufacturer globally. Not only stunning progress on the market share front, but their operating margins are 3x the industry average. Until the recent market carnage, Toyota’s stock was up over 200% since the early 90’s, while Ford and GM’s stocks were down 50% and 75% respectively. GM’s stock is now trading at the level it was in the 1950’s.

These results are even more stupefying when you realize that every car company in the world has had Toyota’s playbook for two decades. The Toyota Production System is known in every detail. Toyota even runs joint ventures with GM, showing them exactly what they do and how they do it. Despite this, no car company in the world can keep up with them.

What’s the secret? I can tell you that the secret is not the plays they run or the players who run them. Think about it, if an opponent hands you their playbook and they run you over anyway, can the secret be in the plays? If their coaches worked shoulder-to-shoulder with your coaches and players showing you exactly what they do and still, they crush you year after year with different players, can their secret be the players?

Yes, Toyota makes good cars. But anyone who has worked in other manufacturing environments and then worked at Toyota quickly realizes that Toyota is doing something way beyond making good cars. They have developed an organizational capability that is continuously learning how to make cars better and continuously teaching every employee how to make cars better.

Cut to the global BPO/Call Center services world. There are dozens of global BPOs providing call center services. They are all global. They all have the latest call center technology stacks. They all have hiring processes designed by industrial psychologists. And they are all one-trick performance improvement ponies: they monitor and coach agents. In other words, they are all the same.

A friend of mine, Alan Madison, who runs H&R Block’s Customer Service Operations is unequivocal, “I can safely say it’s a level playing field out there amongst the top 10 BPO companies. Most are executing the same basic blocking and tackling game plan---some better than others---but there isn’t anyone bringing a new game to the field. The objective is to pick a BPO who has a solid blocking and tackling game because you are definitely not picking a BPO due to their unique capability.”

This isn’t really an essay about Toyota. This essay is intended to highlight how a company can separate from the pack and totally dominate. So the real question here is if a BPO wanted to emerge from the me-too pack, how would they do it? In my view, the success at Toyota suggests an answer.

If a BPO wants to pull away and dominate, the answer is not in adding more geographical locations, fine tuning their technology stacks, adding a hiring screen or scheduling more coaching. They have to build a unique organizational capability to not only handle calls better, but to learn how to continuously improve call handling and teach everyone who walks through their doors how to continuously improve call handling.

There is technology available to support this. You can now clearly define a call handling process and get the agents to follow it using pre-programmed system actions and pre-recorded audio files. Once you have a single process that all the agents are using, the focus is on continuously improving the process, not trying to improve each agent, one at a time.

That step is sine qua non, but a technology solution alone is never enough. To do what Toyota has done, a BPO will have to teach the leadership in all their centers how to continuously improve call handling across every call type on every account. This, in part, means restructuring to create, for lack of a better title, a process engineering function that:

1) studies phone calls,

2) continuously develops and tests hypotheses for improving those calls and

3) rapidly cascades their knowledge across the entire organization.

What’s at stake were a BPO to develop an organizational capability like this? To the victor go the spoils. Just ask GM’s and Ford’s shareholders.


About KomBea:
Company LogoKomBea, Inc is a call center technology company. Their ProtoCallSM solution is designed to reduce variation in call process and output, deliver a better customer experience, and lowers costs. Their ReCallSM solution can allow low-cost, open-format call recording with no PBX-integration requirements and can make call recording and screen capture more affordable to any size center with any technical configuration.
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Published: Wednesday, November 19, 2008

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