Quality Management: Completing Client Requests Quickly

Nearly 24,000 requests are handled by the Wheels client services and operations teams each month. From pulling license plate renewal statuses to creating vehicle selector templates, the teams work diligently to ensure you have the information needed to run a productive fleet.

Behind the scenes, much is involved with ensuring we deliver a fast and accurate answer to your inquiry. Oftentimes, account executives find the answer themselves by looking up information within the systems they can access. However, in other instances, they must seek out information from other departments to complete the request.

We triage requests to get them to the right department in less than four business hours. Once we have the request in our system, Wheels associates actively work on completing it prior to the estimated completion date (ECD). If it becomes apparent that the ECD won’t be met, we actively revise the date. This revised ECD is accompanied with a reason and shared with the requestor to ensure they’re kept in the loop on its progress.

Team Huddles: Customer-Focused Metrics

In addition to actively managing work queues, each team discusses request metrics during daily team huddles; focusing on three key metrics:

1. Cases awaiting assignment more than four business hours after being received. The goal is to have zero in this range.
2. Cases past their original ECD. The goal is less than 10%.
3. Cases past their revised ECD. The goal is less than 5%.

Whenever a target isn’t met, the team creates countermeasures to get back on track. At the management level, we’re regularly reviewing the ECD to gauge when adjustments can streamline the process. One day a month, a cross-functional group gathers to focus on making improvements to response time for a certain request category. This team analyzes the data, reviews the process and implements changes to reduce completion times.

Our first step is to ensure we’re meeting ECDs. If we aren’t, the team focuses on improving the process. Once we’re consistently hitting our target, we reduce the ECD and then we start the improvement process again to meet the new target.

Estimated Completion Date Target Charts

In the charts below, you’ll see how we measure average completion time against the ECD on the X-axis and the number of cases on the Y-axis. In this example, we identified that Commercial Motor Vehicle Compliance (CMVC), Compliance Renewals, Executive Services, and Title Maintenance were all above target. We pulled together a team to focus on improvements for each of these areas and within a few months, as visible in the second chart, you can see the results.

• Compliance Renewals: 8-day improvement
• Executive Services: 15-day improvement
• Title Maintenance: 8-day improvement
• CMVC: 4-day improvement

Click each chart to enlarge.

Before improvement:

After improvement:

In the above charts, a circle on the green line represents the average completion time being at our target ECD. The days on the X-axis shows how many days before (after) the ECD we are completing our requests on average. Therefore, our goal is for each case category to be to the left of the green line.