Introduction
XYZ is one of the leading deposits taking financial institutions in Asia. The bank offers clients a wide range of services including taking customers deposits, withdrawals, bank custody services, business installment loans (BILs)Treasury Bonds, amongst other services. Customer service is a key area where the bank has put in so much emphasis; the bank has pledged to provide world class customer services putting customer satisfaction at spotlight. They excite customers by creating magic moments at whatever service offered to the customers.
The entire staff of the bank has this in mind all the time, whether just answering customer questions to know how to fill in deposit slips, or giving directions on the next convenient branch in any part of the country.
The bank has a feedback process where customers are allowed to give the bank a chance to understand genuine complaints. Set up to handle customers queries at all times, Customer Service Centre (CSC) gives customers information over the telephone and these services range from account balance, loan balance, loan disbursement period, check clearing period, standing order instruction to salaries queries etc. The CSAs are dedicated to providing customers with professional assistance and necessary information on proper identification, and they pass the information via the telephone, email, fax etc.
The bank has a due process of handling customer complaints and these complaints are handled by various members of the customer service team which ranges from the weight of complaints and queries. Very urgent queries are fast tracked, whereas general complaints are reverted by branch managers or customer advisors who sit at branch. The first day of operation saw a massive response where 250 customers contacted the centre. Today, since 2 years, the centre has handled 2.1 million customers’ calls.
Customers are not always happy with the quality and value of the services they receive from shops, banks, hypermarkets, etc.; they complain when deliveries are late, when served by a rude staff, inconvenient service hour, and poor performance. It is against this backdrop that we take stock of how XYZ have used the CSC to be able to handle customer queries in a professional way accurately and also maintaining integrity and confidentiality of customer information.
Control Charts
The measure of a statistic process control x and R charts are used and can be used to measure all characteristics of a product, which can be divided into two categories: variables and attributes. (Juran and Gryna, 1980). Variables have measure while attributes is a product characteristic that has discrete value.
Quality Customer Service
Customer service is the core of the banks day to day operation, and the bank has pledged to give excellent customer services to all clients. In this study, XYZ has employed a strategy of the bank calls 75/25 Customer Service Level Strategy.
The bank has this strategy to answer at least 75 % of the call within 25 seconds of calls or just about 6th ring. The faster the CSA respond to the call the higher the service level tends to be (Grant, 1998).
For the last two years, the bank has worked towards achieving service level higher than the 75/25 set mark which is their standard for tracking the service level. Most of the CSA have been given trainings on this and they continue to do refresher courses. Again when the service level is too high say 90/10 it means just about the 3rd ring, it means the bank needs more staff and this can be very costly to the bank. Service level attainability depends also on the clientele and also on the kind of service offered.
Methodology
The data used here was obtained from the Customer Service Centre manager XYZ Bank Limited. A total number of 6 samples which represents quarter one and quarter two of 2010. Each of the 25 customers who called to find out whether their Business Installment Loans (BILs) had been approved and credited into their respective accounts.
The variation range is defined by the use of these control charts. A process to be tested is considered to be out of control when data reveals one of the common sides falls outside the control limits. We use X-Bar and R Bars to be able to monitor these variations. X-Bar charts are used, for example, to monitor the mean of a process, we contrast the centre line of the chart, where we consider samples and compute their means.
Unlike X-Bar charts which measure shifts of tendency of the centre process, range or R-charts monitor the variability of the process; the centre of the line is drawn and it determines the average range where both the lower and upper limits are computed.
Data Collection
Waiting time for answering the phone calls were measured and recorded during the four months. Ten random waiting times were recorded in the table shown below; time is in seconds.
Confidence Intervals here will allows us to estimate a population parameter, collected data to be used to estimate the range of values for the population mean or proportion. Confidence level is always presented as C and a smaller population is a good measure because it gives more information.
The average range and average time for every 4 months were determined.
The centre line of the control sampled data is the average of the samples presented in equation as;
R=159.47/10 = 15.947
In statistics mean is always computed using the following equation;
Mean m =
= (X1+X2+X3+…+Xn )/ n
Where n is the total number of data say 10 for our case and m is the mean.
Where n is the number of customers who made calls in a sample (equals 10 in this case)
We also have standard deviation which is the deviation from the centre line and in SD we always have upper and lower bound to cater for calculation and plotting errors in graphs. Range is also presented as the difference between the extreme observations.
Confidence Interval
Confidence intervals are usually used to estimate range of values for the population mean. The Confidence Interval for the obtained data was investigated to state the range where most of data might exist.
Hypothesis testing
It is one of the tools used in statistics and most often decisions are required to be made concerning populations on sampled information. We used the obtained data to apply the hypothesis test where the null hypothesis was set to less than or equal to 20, and the alternative hypothesis was set to more than 20.
Control Charts
Basically, control is a graph used to study how a process changes over time. The collected data are plotted in a time order, and it has a central line for the average upper line to represent the upper control limit, and a lower line for the lower control limit (Montgomery, 2009).
Here we have chosen X-bar chart, and the R chart will be used as a tool to examine the obtained data. The X-bar chart is used to check for the mean of the data and how it is related to the ideal mean. The R chart is used to check the variability of the data.
R chart is to be examined before the X-bar chart in the sense that the X-bar chart depends on R chart.
This is the general line graph that represents 10 different customers who made calls in a period of four months.
From this graph, we will extract the X and R charts respectively, and draw a conclusion whether the bank has been able to meet the target for the four months sampled.
R Chart
The R chart examines the ranges of different related samples to the average range of all the samples in order to test the variability of the measurements. The R chart shows the measured samples’ ranges (Y-axis) to the sampling time (X-axis).
Equation c: R Chart center line
Equation d: R chart LCL
Interpretation of R Chart
X-bar Chart
This chart examines the averages of the obtained measurements related to the average of all the samples. The X chart shows the averages of the measured samples (Y-axis) to the sampling numbertime ( X-axis).
Equation 1: X-bar chart center line
The x axis represents sampled months while the Y axis represent time is seconds.
The average time of call response is 15.90 seconds; here the centre line is the mean.
Interpretation of X-Bar Chart
Once the graph has been plotted and the central line drawn, the vertical axis of the X chart here represents the means for the characteristic of interest and the vertical axis of the R chart here represents the ranges. So if we want to control the minimum time CSA needs to pick up a customer’s call, then we use the centre line In the R chart that would represent the acceptable range of time in seconds within the sample, while in the x chart, the central line would represent the desired standards.
Capability Analysis
This is the ability of a process to meet the expectation as set by an organization management and process structure. The set regulations governing this should always ensure that the process control limits fall within the specification limits. Here we have to specify control limits; the lower control limit is set to zero and the upper control limit is set to 10.
Recommendation
From this we realized that the bank needs more Customer Service Assistants at the call centre to be able to respond to customers’ needs within the shortest time possible.
Reference List
Grant, EL 1998, Quality Control of Statistics. 6th Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Juran, JM & Gryna FM 1980, Analysis Quality Planning 2nd Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Montgomery, CD 2009, Modern Introduction: Statistical Quality Controlling. 6th Ed. New York: Wiley & Sons Publishers.