How We Cut a Support Backlog by 94% in 3 Months

Context: E-Government Services Support Challenge

A government agency is transforming the way it serves its citizens. They’ve launched several online services – what we call “e-services” – that revolutionize how people interact with the government. Citizens can, for example, now request criminal records, obtain national certificates, and register their businesses, all through their screens.

Behind the scenes, a small but dedicated technical support team of six people keeps everything running smoothly. Citizens reach out to them through WhatsApp, phone, or email whenever they need help. The team’s mission is simple: solve problems and keep citizens happy, all within a 24-hour window. But their role goes beyond just helping users – they’re also the vital link between citizens and the development team, flagging bugs and suggesting improvements to improve the services.

Current State: Measuring Support Response Time

“We need to improve our service,” the management tells me. I nod. Together, we agree to focus on the lead time – how long citizens wait for their requests to be resolved. It is the key metric we’ll tackle first.

So I dive into a five-day investigation, calling the last ten citizens whose requests were closed by the tech support team. I want honest, concrete feedback about completed support requests.

The citizens’ message comes through loud and clear. Whether they contact us via WhatsApp or email, their main complaint is response time. “Too slow,” they say. Most wait over two days. Some even wait a whole week. Worse yet, half of them have yet to receive a response.

Next, I shadow the technicians during their daily work. The numbers tell a stark story. With the team leader, we uncover 320 pending email requests. The WhatsApp account? Another 95 requests are waiting for attention. Remember – these teams should respond within a day. Any request older than that becomes what we call a ‘backlog’ – overdue work missed its deadline and is still pending.”

Understanding Lead Time in Tech Support

Let me explain what lead time means in our tech support context. It’s the total time a citizen waits – from the moment they send their request until they receive a working solution. Simple, right?

But here’s where it gets interesting. Every new request joins a queue behind older, unfinished ones when we have a backlog. Think of it like a busy coffee shop – if there are fifteen orders ahead of yours, you’ll wait longer for your coffee. Each request spends time “waiting in line” before a technician can even look at it. This waiting time is a massive part of our lead time. And our citizens feel every minute of this wait.

Here’s the critical relationship: more backlog means longer wait times, which leads to increased lead time. But there’s good news, too. If we clear the backlog, we can immediately start processing new requests. When that happens, lead time drops and citizens notice the improvement immediately.

Objectives: Setting Realistic Improvement Targets

With the tech support team, we set our first milestone. The backlog problem is clear, but tackling it needs a measured approach. Instead of aiming for an immediate complete elimination, we opt for continuous improvement. Our first target: reduce the backlog by 20%. Once we hit this mark, we’ll set the next goal.

This measured approach directly aims to improve how citizens perceive our response time. When citizens reach out to us, they should feel confident they’ll get a timely response. No more week-long waits. No more silence.

Root Cause Analysis: Finding the Source of Delays

While investigating the emails with the team leader, we uncover several root causes of our backlog problem:

Technical Setup Issues: The email system is a maze of folders, each with complex routing rules. Many of these rules are broken. As a result, incoming emails randomly land in different folders. When new technicians join the team, no one can explain this folder structure to them.

Inconsistent Process: There’s no standard way to handle incoming requests. Each technician picks requests from whichever folder they know about whenever they think it’s right. It creates considerable variations in response times.

Missing SLA Knowledge: The team has no clear visibility of their response time targets. We can’t find these service-level agreements in any document or visual reminder. Without this knowledge, no one feels the urgency to speed up request processing.

Team Coordination Gaps: The team works in isolation. No one knows who’s handling what or when. We find year-old email requests that nobody ever opened. Some requests sit forgotten in both WhatsApp and email queues.

Action Plan: Five Key Improvement Levers

1 – Ensure to see the entire incoming flow
The backlog made our incoming request flow invisible. We need visual management to spot bottlenecks quickly. These bottlenecks could be a technician overwhelmed with too many requests or incoming requests piling up due to unclear priorities. Considering our volume – about 450 requests daily – we opt for a simple table showing the number of tickets at different stages: incoming, waiting, and processed.

2 – Implement a better flow management
We tackle this with two approaches. First, the team leader becomes a dispatcher. As a senior member, she assigns requests to her colleagues based on their expertise levels. She also handles simple cases directly, helping her understand the types of requests they receive. Second, we set up a basic pull flow. We know our daily incoming volume and the backlog reduction target. It gives us precise numbers: requests to process daily and even per hour.

3 – Create knowledge about the SLA
The team leader goes beyond one-time SLA communication. During daily meetings, she consistently reinforces the 24-hour completion target. It has become part of her daily language. She also creates a visual reminder on the wall displaying these service levels.

4 – Learn and implement Problem-Solving
When the team misses their daily targets, they don’t just move on. Each morning, they reflect on the previous day’s performance. What happened? Why? What should we try today? This habit builds systematic problem-solving through PDCA. For instance, when they notice an unusual spike in complex requests, one team member leads a PDCA cycle with the development team to understand and address the root cause.

5 – Develop and reinforce a client-oriented perspective
We start with the initial citizen feedback I collected but need ongoing insights. At day’s end, one team member calls five citizens whose requests were just completed. Using a structured questionnaire we created, he gathered facts about areas needing improvement.

Results: Three-Month Progress

We started our Lean coaching project in “Month 1”. Let’s look at how our key metrics evolved over three months:

Month 1 (Starting Point):

• Email backlog: 320 requests (baseline)
• Client satisfaction: 6.2/10

Month 2 (Progress):

• Email backlog: 92 requests (71% reduction)
• WhatsApp backlog: 95 requests (baseline)
• Client satisfaction: 7.4/10 (19% improvement)

Month 3 (Latest Results):

• Email backlog: 20 requests (94% reduction from baseline)
• WhatsApp backlog: 23 requests (76% reduction from baseline)
• Client satisfaction: 8.5/10 (37% improvement)

The email backlog reduction shows the power of making work visible and establishing clear targets. The team moved from firefighting mode (320 pending requests) to a controlled situation where they could handle daily volume efficiently. This transformation enabled them to focus on request quality rather than just quantity.

The WhatsApp channel, added to measurement in Month 2, showed the same improvement pattern as email. From 95 pending requests, the team reduced the backlog to 23, demonstrating that the visual management and pull system worked effectively across different communication channels.

The rise in citizen satisfaction, from 6.2 to 8.5, demonstrates that lead time was a critical factor in citizens’ experience. As response times shortened, satisfaction scores steadily increased, confirming that citizens value quick responses to their e-services requests. This direct correlation between reduced lead time and improved satisfaction validated our focus on response time reduction.

Sustainability: Maintaining the Improvements

This story exemplifies Lean Management in action. But achieving results is one thing – sustaining them is another. My approach to sustainability revolves around management engagement. Throughout the project, we had regular management visits. They didn’t just observe – they actively participated in our journey. They acknowledged progress. They celebrated successes. Most importantly, they set the following milestones during each visit, challenging the team to reach new heights. This cycle of visit-celebrate-challenge helped maintain our continuous improvement momentum.

This story focused on how we reduced lead time for e-services support requests. With this same team, we had the opportunity to work on other aspects, such as service quality, which I will cover in another article.

Disclaimer: This story is based on a real Lean coaching project. Some elements have been modified to ensure confidentiality.