The two performance consultants attending the meeting quietly gathered information for further investigation. Not surprisingly, several issues arose from the work that the customer care managers were responsible for, such as certain lower-level tasks usually performed by an entry-level employee. Since so many field offices were short-staffed, many customer care managers were simply doing this work themselves because they found it faster than showing an employee how to do it.

Typically, customer care managers were responsible for customer service research such as locating a missing policy payment or comparing coverages available among several policies. In recent years, operational processes like these had been removed from the field offices and centralized into regional processing centers to provide faster results and gain economies of scale. The processing centers had service level agreements (SLAs) with the field for the tasks they performed, but they were missing their deadlines regularly. Many customer care managers had faced irate customers because some research took longer in the processing centers than it had in their offices, and in frustration, these customer care managers conducted duplicate research simply to serve their customers better.

The customer care managers were working extensive hours, doing simple tasks best handled by junior staff, duplicating complicated research work in the name of customer service, and struggling to keep up with their own work while trying to fill staff vacancies. No wonder they were burning out and taking stress leave for extended periods.

The two performance consultants reached agreement with the stakeholders to conduct a full-scale analysis of the situation with a focus on work, process, and practices issues. They named the project Service Fitness and went off to plan their analysis.

They began by compiling a list of the issues they had heard about in the meeting:

The consultants further assumed that the customer care managers experienced considerable task interference because they were doing so many tasks in addition to their regular responsibilities. They identified the processing centers’ inability to meet many of their SLAs as a “Critical Process Issue,” flagging this as a potential driver of other difficulties the customer care managers were experiencing.

Mapping the field and processing center organizations was the next step the consultants chose. They wanted to see where the work of these two groups intersected and to understand how they were staffed and managed. Finally, the consultants planned a data review and visits to field offices and processing centers to gather information and observe work processes and practices first-hand. They thought that the combination of all these activities would give them a complete understanding of the issues facing the customer care managers.