Six Sigma is a methodology that has brought significant improvements to many companies in a variety of sectors. And it looks like we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible when Six Sigma is applied correctly. Customer service is an area that’s notoriously difficult for companies to get right.

Even when you’re prepared to invest a lot of resources into your customer service, that’s still not a guarantee that you’re going to see good results. You also have to apply a controlled approach to optimizing your performance and service quality. That’s where Six Sigma comes in – let’s have a look at what it can do for you in this regard, and how to put it to proper use.

Assessing Your Current Situation and Goals

In order to utilize Six Sigma in your customer service setup, you must start by analyzing your current situation. Six Sigma works with measurable metrics, and the more of those you can gather, the better results you can expect. Try to gather as much information as you can about your operations.

How many customers you’re servicing in a given period, hours with heavy load, satisfaction rates, call duration, and anything else that might be relevant. All of those details will help you build a picture with which you can objectively measure the current performance of your customer service. This will help you figure out which areas need to be addressed with a higher priority.

Implementing Improvements

With the help of Six Sigma, you can then start addressing issues that require urgent attention. Customer service problems tend to be concentrated in a few specific areas – like response time and service quality – and you will probably want to start with those. Any improvements you make should be quantifiable. That is, you should be able to measure their impact in an objective manner. This will help you ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. It will be a particularly important point when it comes to addressing waste. Six Sigma puts a strong emphasis on that, and it’s something that requires a lot of concrete data in order to work.

Measuring Results and Iterating

After you’re done implementing your changes, you should measure how they impact your operations. Some of the modifications you’ve made may not play out exactly as you intended, and they might actually reduce your productivity in some cases. This makes it important to pay attention to metrics, and make adjustments as needed. Don’t expect everything to be perfect from the first iteration. You’ll likely need to revise your implementation a few times before it works correctly.

If you play your cards right, Six Sigma can result in noticeable improvements to your customer service. It will take some time for the changes to start registering, especially if you’re dealing with a larger operation that generates more data. But once those improvements have materialized, their impact will be permanent. And you’ll have a lot of valuable data to work with that can help you improve things even further by iterating on your current situation.

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Six Sigma provides benefits no matter which industry it is being used, even if it is the foodservice industry. This is particularly true for restaurants. But how exactly can a restaurant use Six Sigma to its benefit? Here are four use cases that can help paint the picture.

1. Improving Efficiency

Focussing on efficiency is different depending on what restaurant it is. For instance, If it is a fast-food joint, the food needs to be prepared at a quicker pace in order to serve customers and make deliveries faster while making sure to reduce costs. Efficiency for owners of a dining establishment will pay attention to providing customers with a high-quality dining experience in the most efficient manner possible, from the service to the food.

2. Increasing Profits

A big part of managing a restaurant is making sure there is minimal inventory waste. Because of the tools and techniques provided by Six Sigma, there is greater control of inventory, allowing for the reduction of waste and minimization of costs. For instance, Six Sigma’s tools and techniques can allow restaurant managers to anticipate how busy the restaurant will be on a particular day. They can do this by analyzing the data collected over a specific period of time. This can allow restaurant managers to order the exact amount of inventory needed for that day to reduce waste and realize more profits.

When it comes to service delivery, staff are a critical component. The level of customer service is directly proportional to sales. Six Sigma can help restaurants improve customer service in order to improve sales through the DMAIC methodology. For instance, proven methods of enhancing customer services can be embedded in the Control phase while the restaurant staff is being trained in DMAIC

Customer service is not the only thing that has a direct effect on sales. Marketing does too. Using Six Sigma’s data-driven approach, restaurants can measure and analyze data to target their ideal customer with the right marketing strategy. This way, resources are not wasted on targeting the wrong people and there is a good return on investment (ROI). As more data from the marketing campaign comes through, the strategy can be continuously improved based on further analysis to achieve an even greater ROI.

3. Testing New Products

Most times, if restaurants want to see if customers will like a new menu item, they just put it on the menu then see what happens. However, Six Sigma uses a different approach. Restaurant managers can look at the data (e.g. accounting data) to see if the product they just introduced is increasing sales enough to warrant a permanent spot on the menu.

4. Reduced Costs

Established methodologies like Six Sigma do a great job of strengthening relationships in key business areas to cut costs. For instance, if the restaurant’s accountant has an efficient and standardized approach to record-keeping that is highly-accurate, they can minimize costs and save the restaurant a significant amount of money.

Conclusion

Six Sigma can help restaurants and other businesses in the foodservice industry in many ways. As you can see, it works well to help restaurants improve efficiency, increase profits, test new products and reduce costs. All of these use cases help the business become more profitable and gain a competitive edge.

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The Growing Importance of Customer Service

Customer service has always been at the center of many companies’ work, but it was not until recently that we started to truly comprehend its important in the grand scheme of things. As a result, many companies have started to completely change their approach to servicing their clients, and various new trends have cropped up on this market as a result. It’s not only interesting to follow those developments but important too if you want to see your company growing properly in the long run.

Markets Are Changing Fast

A lot has happened on the general market in the last few years, and we’re probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg too. Various developments are coming up on the horizon that could have major implications on the way the market will work in the future.

Customers now demand faster, more precise and personalized services, and this demand will likely only continue to grow in the coming years. It’s especially problematic when you consider certain sectors that did not have practices of immediate response rooted into their work, but have had to rearrange that in the last years.

The Internet Has Improved a Lot on Both Sides

Still, the advance of the internet into our lives has changed a lot, and it’s enabled companies to be even better and more precise in the services that they deliver. There have been various improvements for both users as well as the companies themselves.

While people are now able to find information that’s relevant to them more easily and filter it for the things that they truly need, companies can also use these technologies to provide a more direct, personal approach to their customer support. And the fact that it’s now completely reasonable to expect the average person to be constantly connected to the internet and aware of the important trends online has been very helpful as well. As a whole, the situation is moving in the right direction for both companies and their clients.

Immediate Service

The rise of the on-demand market is also hard to ignore. People are now used to getting their hands on their newly purchased products and services much faster and without any intermediate hassle. Streamlining these processes has become the main activity of a large number of companies, and many of them have already started to see remarkable results in this regard. But it will likely take some time before immediate services start to become truly commonplace on the market.

Until then, it’s still important to work hard on evolving your services in this direction, and ensuring that you’re able to provide your customers with an immediate response to their queries. It will not only save time in your support it will play a huge role in improving the impressions people have of your business.

Outsourcing or Expanding?

Outsourcing customer support services is becoming increasingly commonplace for many companies. It’s easy to see why too it can significantly optimize the way a company utilizes its resources and can open up various new possibilities for them in their regular work. At the same time, outsourcing customer support comes with an inherent cost you’re sacrificing some of the control over the process. Consider carefully if that’s worth it in your specific circumstances.

But the benefits of outsourcing are hard to ignore as well. You will get access to much faster, more competent service providers who know exactly what your customers expect to get from their support inquiries and know-how to deliver the right answers. This is something that you can develop internally as well, sure but it will take a lot of time and effort to get there, and outsourcing is a great shortcut through all that.

Make sure that you measure your progress as much as possible as well. It can be difficult to know that you’re moving in the right direction sometimes. Unless you’re actually measuring your data and confirming that you’re hitting the right milestones, you might have some serious misconceptions about how well you’re doing at the moment. There’s a reason why some companies put so much focus on their data collection practices, and it’s not a bad idea for you to consider that as well.

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