Private health insurance administrator Discovery Health has reduced its call centre defects fivefold following the implementation of the Lean Sigma Six (LSS) and Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO) methods introduced by global strategic management consultancy BMGI.

LSS is a managerial concept combining lean manufacturing, or lean enterprise, and the Sigma Six process capability, which results in eliminating the eight types of waste and variation through a better understanding of where to streamline processes and improve quality – with the customer being the ultimate beneficiary.

The waste types include defects, overproduction, waiting, nonused talent, transportation, inventory, motion and extra processing.

DPMO is a metric to measure how processes perform to customer-required quality levels. It is calculated by taking the number of steps that have to be followed in any process and calculating the percentage of these that are completed incorrectly. These are then multiplied by a million to see how many steps out of a million would, therefore, be incorrect.

Discovery Health quality management deputy GM Larry Borowitz says DPMO enables the company to understand how many interactions are being completed incorrectly and the impact on customers, and the various business units across Discovery to establish what particular steps in each process need to be corrected.

This ensures that focused, corrective action can continually occur and that customers can continually receive improved products and service.

“Further, one of the major benefits of DPMO is that it allows for the comparison of processes – for example, a call centre dealing with hospital admissions and another dealing with chronic illness queries. It also enables excellent insight into individual staff, team and company performance.

“DPMO and its related Sigma levels – which are an internationally recognised standard – also enable Discovery to compare its quality of service with other organisations locally and internationally,” says Borowitz.

Discovery Health deputy CEO Ryan Noach says the company call centre receives about 650 000 calls a month. A finite list of the most common customer queries was compiled, with the messaging and content, as well as the process for handling each call type, then being defined.

Borowitz notes that the process was not a quick fix, but a systematic approach that resulted in identifying and categorising the type and detail of every process, including calls received, as well as standardising the content of the responses by call centre staff to eliminate inefficiencies and improve customer satisfaction levels.

“Measurement had to be applied consistently. Every regional call centre had to own the process and adhere to the standard. This was easier said than done, but buy-in was achieved when the regional operations saw the benefit of the approach,” says Borowitz.

Discovery Health has an ongoing pipeline of improvement initiatives, with a focus on improving customers’ lives. With quality a consideration in all these initiatives, the group primarily focuses on product, service and process improvement.

These initiatives include voice biometrics, speech analytics, intelligent routing, omnichannel communication and self-service enhancements.