Comcast Week 3: Process Improvement

My department (Call Center Sales) is, or at least should be, a very cross-functional one. There are six teams under our one Senior Vice President, and each team plays their own unique role in working toward our department’s and even our company’s innovative vision. In addition to my Voice Analytics team, we have teams focused on research and planning, inbound call sales, outbound call sales, call center development, and long-term strategy. We all sit on the same floor, but the team rarely comes together as one unit to discuss progress and direction. As a result, my team has noticed that many of the requests we receive to investigate certain call trends observed by other teams are disorganized and almost random. Therefore, the results we release are only really helpful to the specific teams who ask for them. When it comes down to it, our team essentially makes the same 4-5 recommendations for each completed request, although personalized to the orientation of the requestor.

What our department needs is coordination, and if I learned anything from Theories and Models, it’s that leaders are needed to solve coordination problems. Every team is moving in their own direction with their own motives, and that needs to change. To remedy this problem, my team is taking a step in the right direction by creating a Voice Analytics dissertation. In this project, we will explain to the other teams that our team’s purpose is to serve the department. We make the same recommendations each time, so we need to align the requests that come in with the long-term strategy of the group as a whole. As a next step, I would recommend that the entire department, all six teams, meet once a month to get everyone on the same page and moving in the right direction. These meetings would be driven by our long-term strategists, and include each team’s function and monthly updates to meet our future goals. If we can do this, I’d bet that the requests we see come in will be more department-driven.