Pitney Bowes
- 56%Customer-service acceleration
- 20% → 0%Errors in servicing customers
Back-office customer management. Results achieved in under 90 days. Winner, 2014 Process Excellence Award for Best Process Improvement Project under 90 days.
Service quality & customer experience
Explain why the customer is still waiting.
Service-level problems are usually blamed on effort or headcount. The measurement almost always shows something else: the work itself takes minutes, and the customer waits days. Stereologic separates active work from elapsed time, finds where the errors and the delay are created, and attributes both to specific steps.
The problem
Five minutes of work, a week of waiting.
A service level is a promise about elapsed time. Most operational measurement reports active time, which is a different number and usually a much smaller one. When the two are not separated, the improvement programme optimizes the five minutes and the customer still waits the week.
Errors behave the same way. A rework loop rarely shows up as a failure in a system record — it shows up as a case that was touched again, by someone else, later. Unless the case is reconstructed end to end, the cost of getting it wrong the first time stays invisible and the service-level conversation stays anecdotal.
What the measurement shows
Where service time is actually created.
Each of these is measured from observed work and attributed to a specific activity, not to a department.
- Active work against elapsed timeHow long the work takes to do, set against how long the case takes to finish — so the gap between them can be explained rather than assumed.
- Waiting, handoffs and queuesWhere a case sits between teams, systems or approvals, how often, and for how long.
- Rework and correction loopsCases re-opened, re-keyed or corrected after the fact, with the step that created the error identified.
- Variation between teams and sitesWhy the same request is served faster in one team, and whether the difference is capability, sequence, tooling or exception volume.
Why it matters to the business. A service level you can attribute is a service level you can fix. Once delay and error are traced to specific activities, the improvement can be targeted and the result measured afterwards against the same baseline.
Evidence
Service outcomes that were measured, not asserted.
Major Canadian Bank
- 22.5%Acceleration of customer services
- 95%Reduction in errors and delays
Loan-origination platform stabilization across the branch network. Diagnosed and resolved in under six months. Bank not named at its own request.
Common questions
Service quality and customer experience
How is this different from the service metrics we already report?
Most service reporting states what the elapsed time was. It rarely explains what created it, because the waiting, the handoffs and the rework happen between system records rather than inside them. Stereologic reconstructs the case end to end, so elapsed time is attributed to specific activities and specific waits.
Do you measure individual employees?
The unit of analysis is the process and the case, not the person. Findings are reported at the level of activities, steps, teams and variants.
Can you separate the time we control from the time we do not?
Yes. Waiting on a third party, a customer or an upstream team is measured separately from work inside your own operation, so the service-level conversation distinguishes what is addressable from what is not.
Take the next step
Bring one service level you are being asked to defend.
Tell us the promise you make to customers and where it is being missed. We will show how that work can be observed, reconstructed and measured — and what it would take to explain the gap.