THERE'S
MORE TO SERVICE THAN THINKING ABOUT IT
It
is hard to believe that there is anyone in the market place who does
not believe that delivering excellent customer service is important,
and yet
finding examples of poor customer service is all too easy. It is like
shooting fish in a barrel.
There are two principal reasons. First, most companies are internally focused.
As Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, arguably the most successful manager
in history, has said, “Most managers have their face towards their company
and their ass towards the customer.” As long as you look at the world from
inside your company out, you are not likely to understand what matters most
to the customer. Many companies decide what will make up the service offered
to their customers instead of finding out what their customers would like to
receive. The second reason customer service fails is because companies don’t
have the ability to deliver what they promise, and that is because most do
not have very robust processes. I believe the second rule of business is: After
the customer, the process is the most important thing. No business can reliably,
quickly and
easily deliver its products or services, or good information for that matter,
unless its processes
are sound. No worker, no matter how well motivated, can outperform a faulty
process. One of the lessons that quality management has taught us, is that
90% of the time that things go wrong the process, not people, are to blame.
Back in the days when quality management reigned supreme, many managers tried
to document
their processes. It was, after all, a requirement for ISO certification. What
most ended up doing, however, was documenting their procedures rather than
their processes. Procedures are the steps one person goes through to do his
job, and because most people do their jobs over and over again, this approach
was of little benefit. A process, on the other hand, is a series of activities
that takes an input, adds value to it, and produces an output. Because business
is the activity of creating value, how well a process operates affects the
very heart of business performance. Moreover, because processes involve more
than one person and, indeed, usually cut across departments, a process analysis
usually reveals gaps that explain why customers often don’t get the results
they have been promised.
The best approach to process review, in my experience, is for senior management
to identify the company’s main businesses processes and then to put together
a team of people for each process who are involved in activities related to
that process. The team’s first job is to meet together to flow chart the process.
This always reveals inconsistencies, confusion and problems that need to be
fixed. The team can then review the flowchart to identify ways the process
can be simplified and error-proofed. Finally they should choose three key performance
indicators they can use to monitor
how well the process is working. Without the discipline of measurement, there
can be no real understanding of process performance.
Reviewing your processes is like going to the gym. It takes hard work and discipline,
and it isn’t very sexy. On the other hand, it is very hard to be fit and to
perform well without doing it.
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