Excellent thoughts!! I am feeling reassured about my initial understanding of our customer requirement.
If we are able to deliver quickly without compromising on quality, I would imagine that customers would want to do business with us than a near competitor
Again, I must insist that I reiterate how we have gone about driving efficiency in our system. I am sure this will help any other service provider on this forum to help organize resources to better meet customer requirements. I sincerely hope you wont find this boring.
We are now driving speed from simply prioritizing the articles. Our earlier work assignment process (which was mostly manual) involved emailing our writers their daily assignments. Often these assignments carried many articles from various orders to increase variety.
This also meant that our 'Turn around times' were at risk depending on the ability of our writers to return these assignments on time. We even hired an "army" of callers just to follow up on those assignments.
With all those costs, heart aches and worries, we still had a good number of writers who would fail to return the articles on time. This cost us time, poor service levels and largely unpredictable results. Obviously not something our customers were happy about.
We have lost many customers in the past on the account of not delivering on time as we promised. This had to stop and hence we invested money and planning into our new system. We even thought of a fancy name for it
COMS. It stands for '
ContentYogi Order Management System'
Today, our new system COMS assigns articles only to writers who log in to the system and ask for assignments. If they dont ask for work, they don't get assigned any work! Each time a writer asks for work, by the form of clicking on a 'Assign work' button, he/she gets just one article assigned to his/her account at a time. Now this writer gets upto 3 hours to write-return a 400 worded article. Failing which, the system re-assigns the very same article to another writer. While most of our articles go through the current work assignment process, there are some exceptional requirements which are best assigned manually.
For instance, when a complicated article requirement needs an experienced writer, the auto assigning system is by passed and our staff is assigned with the task of manual assignment. We are working on automating these exceptions too. Shortly, with writer profiling, our system should be able to identify the nature of the article requirement and match the most qualified writer for the assignment. The writer profiling will be driven by dynamic feedback provided by our proofreaders. As a writer matures in the system, COMS should be able to recognize the new performance level of the writer and assign appropriate level of complicated tasks or assignments. This was almost impossible to achieve in a manual assignment process where the skill set of a writer is not measured on a dynamic or a real time basis.
With all these changes to our system, we are now able to assign articles only to writers who are most "ready" to do the job. We simply prioritize the articles and the system does rest of the trick
We no longer spend time following up on assignments since the writer now feels a sense of urgency to finish the article within 3 hours from the time of request.
This has changed the way we are doing business at ContentYogi. I really hope other providers are able to use similar or better processes to help speed things without affecting quality.
All through, you must have noticed that we have not changed the way we deal with quality. We are still doing exactly the same things we used to. But we just prioritize better
I hope this makes sense and please don't hesitate to ask questions if you need any clarification.
