This post is part of the Process Optimization Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities. These posts will be broken into two sections – how to do the analysis and how to configure the Process Optimization project.
Most workflows provide the opportunity for an employee, customer, citizen, business partner to reopen a piece of work after it has been closed if they are not satisfied with the response or if there is further action required.
Regardless of the reason why the piece of work is reopened this is probably not the optimal experience for the given stakeholder which will impact our satisfaction metrics, and the fact that we didn’t get it right the first time will also have a productivity impact.
All of this reopened work is valuable feedback and should be used to identify coaching opportunities, process improvements, or content quality updates – whether that be to our standard operating procedures, run books, or knowledge articles.
Process Optimization can be used to help us analyze reopened work to isolate these opportunities.
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow(Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc) and does not require any additional/special configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow
Open your project to the Analyst Workbench view
One of the core capabilities of Process Optimization is bottleneck analysis, which allows us to analyze and isolate different steps within a given workflow. To access the bottleneck analysis feature within the Analyst Workbench you click on the Model Options button on the right hand side of the screen to expose the Model Options panel.
Within the Model Options panel you’ll see the Bottleneck Analysis button. When we click on that button we’ll get our Bottleneck Analysis pop up that gives us detailed information about all of the different transition or hops in our process. We can see how many unique occurrences or records made this transition, on average how long it is taking work to move through the transition, and one of my favorite metrics – Total duration – which is an indication of how much productivity we may be able to reclaim if we can optimize this step or in some cases reduce the need for a piece of work to go through it. Reopened work is a good example of where we should be able to reduce our volumes and reclaim some productivity through the use of self service.
We can then use the search capability to isolate our Resolved to In Progress step. You’ll see that we have 482 unique incidents that made this transition, on average it took a day for it to happen, but most importantly there was 1 year worth of productivity lost due to incidents making this trip. Even if we could just reclaim a percentage of that time moving forward that would be a win.
If we click on the Resolved – In Progress row in the Bottleneck Analysis pop up window visualized process map will be filtered down to just show us those 482 incidents that took that trip or were “reopened”. We can then click on that path on the map and use our histogram to see if there are any outliers that might be skewing the duration metrics.
Once we’ve isolated our reopened incidents. We can than start to use our Breakdowns to further analyze them. Maybe we want to look for coaching opportunities. So, let’s look at our Assignment Group breakdown.
We can see that 200 of the 482 reopened incidents are in the Solana Customer Service Support group. We can use the breakdown to isolate those 200 hundred by selecting the check box and clicking Apply.
Those 200 incidents for the Solana Customer Service Support group accounted for 6 months or 50 % of that total duration metric we were looking at earier.
At this point we can use Cluster Analysis to look for patterns in the unstructured data like short descriptions and descriptions of the incidents.
From here we can see there is groups of hardware issues as well as account access issues.
Or we could dive directly into the 200 incidents themselves using the Show Records option.
One useful technique whenever we get to a list view of records in the platform is to apply the “Interactive Analysis” capability available from the list menu to get an instant dashboard view of those records.
Since we are looking for coaching opportunities we could adjust the dashboard to see who the incidents were Assigned to.
In this example, 10(the majority) of the 200 were worked on by demo user 181. If we drilldown into those we’d see a large percentage had to do with Account Access Issues.
In addition to these actions which could help reduce our reopen rate and help us reclaim some productivity, Account Access Issue are a good target for a Virtual Agent conversation that we could use to deflect the incident in the first place.
How to configure the Process Optimization Project
This analysis does not require any special configuration. The out of the box project that comes with the content pack for each of the workflows will enable you to do this type of analysis. If you are looking for a recording that will help you get your instance configured with the appropriate plugins you can find that here.
If are looking for a quick video on how to create your first Process Optimization project in minutes you can find that here.
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Optimization Academy library of content
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Optimization Essentials - Now Learning Course
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