Quality Management Analysis and Recommendations for Rubicon

Quality Management Analysis and Recommendations for Rubicon Group -- a Travelcom Company

It is common for quality management symptoms and problems to appear when two or more organizations are integrated together, as is the case of the business units within the Rubicon Group. It is imperative however in assessing support services using quality management frameworks and techniques to not focus too closely on the symptoms and not see the greater strategic challenges and roadblocks standing in the way of greater levels of customer service quality (Sepic, McNabb, 1994). The intent of this analysis is to explain how Rubicon Group can use the frameworks of Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, lean principles and balanced scorecards (BSC) to attain a higher level of performance and customer satisfaction. Treating the symptoms will only get the customer service team so far. A key underlying assumption of this analysis is that the fundamental nature of what is expected of customer service and the value they deliver has changed. Using these techniques, Rubicon can get re-centred on customers and begin to build a more lean, efficient framework for serving customers and holding onto them over the long-term.

Analysis of Rubicon Quality Management Problems

The increased call volumes, exponentially increasing workloads on customer service representatives and the resulting increased complaints and customer requests for special assistance all point to the quality management platforms or frameworks that Rubicon customer service is based on are broken. What first needs to be done is that a Total Quality Management (TQM) analysis completed on the Rubicon customer service group, comparing customer requirements to design requirements of the role of service in the new organization. These tow elements, customer requirements and design requirements in turn are pivotal to having the TQM House of Quality constructed (Ooi, Lin, Tan, Chong, 2011).

The scoring of factors in the TQM House of Quality can also assure that further efforts to increase quality of service levels are on the right track, focusing on the best possible metrics. As a foundational structure for guiding future Six Sigma, TQM, lean and BSC initiatives the TQM House of Quality anchors all other initiatives back to a quantified customer-centric set of priorities (Dervitsiotis, 2011). Of particular interest is the roof of the House of Quality as the prioritization fo factors in this effort will determine which problem areas need to be addressed first with Six Sigma-based improvement strategies (Li, Wu, Yen, Lee, 2011).

At Rubicon, the main problems will surface with a TQM House of Quality Audit. From there, additional Six Sigma projects can be undertaken by key functional area. Immediately apparent in applying the TQM House of Quality to the Rubicon case is the lack of synchronization and no single system of record for all systems and strategies to serve customers. This is an ideal project to be undertaken using the DMAIC methodology of Six Sigma, placing the customer and their needs at the center of the problem statement and steps to resolve it

(Li, Wu, Yen, Lee, 2011). Clearly there is a lack of system integration and more systemic than that, a complete lack of process integration as well. While more research would be needed to validate this, the symptoms point to a significant disconnect across produces and data areas, which is contributing to the increased customer wait times, their levels of dissatisfaction and the increase in the number of clients given to each customer service representative. All of these symptoms point to faulty or incomplete systems of record and an approach to problem solving that is manually-based and therefore very slow and error filled with response. It would be premature at this point to create a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as the systems and processes in place are not ready for that level of quantification and measurement (Apgar, 2011).

After completing a TQM Audit and constructing the House of Quality, Rubicon needs to next prioritize which specific areas of their customer service function need to be made more customer-centric. Instead of just ranking these problem areas by complaints or the volume and severity of screaming from customers, it's important to pull back and measure which factors most and least contribute to long-term revenue and Customer Lifetime Value (Amado, Santos, Marques, 2012). Only by doing this can Rubicon profitably serve their customers and get back in control of their business.

Using Six Sigma to resolve the system of record challenges is going to be critical, as is the need for better managing the internal metrics of performance as well. This latter point deals with creating a series of metrics and KPIs that measure only the most critical factors, not every single one available (Maklan, Klaus, 2011). Too often quality management initiatives in customer service take the approach of attempting to "boil the ocean" with regard to analytics and KPIs instead of first determining which factors need to be resolved through the use of Six Sigma (Li, Wu, Yen, Lee, 2011). For Rubicon to continually improve their processes however they will need to combine lean process management techniques, Six Sigma and the prioritization from TQM to create an effective strategy for turning around the deteriorating situation. Only by first focusing on measuring the right things (Maklan, Klaus, 2011) and creating an effective series of processes for managing these metrics (Apgar, 2011) using Six Sigma (Li, Wu, Yen, Lee, 2011) will the company ever be able to get back in control of the customer service function.