I met with a company that rents mobile phones and virtual calling cards. Their deal makes it very affordable for people to use a local phone to call abroad at calling card prices.
The areas we focused on were to reduce operational labor needed to process forms, contracts and customer queries as well as reducing the risk from signing people up over the web where the credit card itself is not seen by the company and only its number is given which makes it hard to enforce payments when customers resist.
We spent a couple of hours walking through all current processes, noting how often each one takes place.
After understanding the processes and constraints we started a long brainstorming session where I throw one idea after the other and they decide if it is worth further examination or not. We went through about 25-30 ideas and it was a fun experience for all involved allowing them too to come up with the craziest and weirdest ideas.
After about three hours we had the following:
- A high level design of the improvements their IT system needs to save them hours of work every day by modifying work processes and pushing some of the work to the customers themselves with web forms and self-service portals. The innovation was to find a cost effective way to achieve this without spending big bucks on a complex system but using simple components that are easy to install and maintain.
- An idea for lowering risk of credit card transaction refusal that can be implemented immediately and add at least 10% to their revenues by significantly reducing uncollectable bills.
