In an article in Quality Progress, Barbara A. Cleary reports on improvements made in a software supplier’s responses to customer calls. In this article, the author states:
In an effort to improve its response time for these important customer- support calls, an inbound telephone inquiry team was formed at PQ Systems, Inc., a software and training organization in Dayton, Ohio. The team found that 88 percent of the customers’ calls were already being answered immediately by the technical support group, but those who had to be called back had to wait an average of 56.6 minutes. No customer complaints had been registered, but the team believed that this response rate could be improved.
As part of its improvement process, the company studied the disposition of complete and incomplete calls to its technical support analysts. A call is considered complete if the customer’s problem has been resolved; otherwise the call is incomplete. Figure 2.6 shows a. Pareto chart analysis for the incomplete customer calls. a What percentage of incomplete calls required “ more investigation” by the analyst or “ administrative help”?
b. What percentage of incomplete calls actually presented a “ new problem”?
c. In light of your answers to a and b, can you make a suggestion?