Maybe it was just a nice gesture or an attempt to pacify a blogger. The phone call I received from Sprint yesterday about my blog Sprint Away from Good Service shows the type of waste we have in service. Just as in the service from Sprint my reader had experienced with them the attempt to recover is always to late . . . and more expensive.
Command and control thinkers manage their world from measures they can see on financial reports and not the value given to customers. Sprint is the epitome of this, but certainly not the only one. They bet that you (the customer) won’t complain, to save money. The same way they give you those stupid $100 coupons that you have to send in to get the rebate, they hope you won’t actually send them in. The problem is it takes the value out of their organization piece-by-piece until everyone hates your service. Unfortunately, that doesn’t show up on an income statement. However, I will tell you that the damage is far more than can measured by financials . . . the numbers are just “unknown and unknowable.” How could you measure the decline of reputation?
The complaints logged to Sprint are what we call “failure demand.” Unwanted demand from customers that include complaints, chasing (follow-ups), rework,etc. are all types of failure demand. If I were to sit at Sprint’s call centers or stores how much failure demand do you suspect I would find. I would guess 60% or more and any service industry I have ever worked with had between 25% and 75% failure demand. You see command and control organizations like Sprint process your phone calls like a production line, “how cheaply can I handle them” is the mantra. So they implement measures of production like talk time that matter little to the customer and wind up causing more failure demand. All of this command and control non-sense is born from scientific management theory over 100 years ago.
A systems thinking organization knows better, they understand that servicing the customer costs less. They understand that service and costs are not a zero-sum game that you have to have a trade-off between good service and increased costs. Better service always costs less. Think about it, if Sprint gave the customer what they asked for on a timely basis failure demand goes down, customer satisfaction goes up and Verizon, AT&T, etc. would be getting their heads kicked-in.
Like most service organizations Sprint decided to play the recovery game. Thank you Sprint for the phone call, but your opportunity to serve my reader has passed. If you want to do all of us Sprint customers (including me), look at your failure demand and your end-to-end processing times and you will see how to be a better telecomm company. Oh, and you won’t need this recovery customer management process which does show up on your income statement.
To learn more about systems thinking download “Understanding Your Organization as a System” (free). If your company provides service this will help you to begin to think in a different way that is simpler and easier than command and control methods.
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