Ms. Ramos was a customer advocate for BofA. Her job was collections and she was told to do three things:
- Think of yourself as the customer,
- Do the right thing for the customer, and
- Do the right thing for the company.
She apparently did less of #3 and was fired for it. Her crime was refunding fees and putting people that weren’t qualified for a "fix pay" (accommodating payment plan rather than 29.99% interest).
Jackie isn’t the first person to be fired for doing what she felt was right and certainly won’t be the last
I am not here to debate the responsibility of debt (things like people should pay off their loans or who gave these people the loans in the first place) or even what corporations made bad decisions that started this financial mess. And, I am sure there are many others including our lawmakers. There is plenty of blame to go around.
My focus is on customer purpose. Doing right by the customer always costs less. Yet our organizations are built around business cost reductions and costs. Few look to the causes of costs.
In the above BofA/Jackie Ramos scenario who is in a position to do what is right for the customer (in my world called who has knowledge). Ms. Ramos outlines in detail some cases she had worked – a cancer patient and legally blind lady to name a couple. These cases did not meet the criteria of getting relief based on policies (most likely) developed based on costs and not knowledge of the work.
What is the purpose of not working with a customer to help them. The job of any collections department devoid of helping customers finding ways to make payments is to miss an opportunity. The result of bankruptcy most likely ends in no payments to the bank, never mind the fallout of an angry customer or disenchanted employee.
The belief that helping customers costs money is one founded in the zero-sum mentality that there is a trade-off between costs and good service. This is a fallacy. Many times executives don’t see the costs of poor service until they get into the work and see for themselves the damage of bad policies and other cost-control decisions.
My business is to help organizations design their systems against customer demand. This approach is powerful as the purpose of the work is not to submit to a policy or specification, but to serve the customer in the context of their demand.
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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public). His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work. Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com "Understanding Your Organization as a System" and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected]. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.
public sector it began with the budget, filtering down the numbers by function (sales, operations, etc) and then monitoring the numbers in executive or functional meetings with performance against plan. Riches for those that make the numbers or unwanted attention (or worse) to those that don’t.
increases them. My other posts have shown why standardization, scripts and best practices don’t allow the absorption of variety that customers give service organizations. The number of transaction increases in the form of failure demand (demand caused by the failure to do something or do something right for the customer) increases and the system works against itself to increase costs.
I have posted many times on this subject, yet as companies find ways to "save money" they turn to technology that increase costs, makes customers shake their heads and take actions that make companies more unprofitable and less competitive. Really, enough with the snake-oil and one of the worse technologies ever invented . . . the IVR.
OK, Labor Day and I’m looking for a picture of istock.com that depicts the cooperation between workers and management . . . none found. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by the absence of such a picture. The management and the work have been separated for far too long . . . one of the reasons we have too many chiefs and not enough indians. You can either be counted as a manager that does something (command, control, edicts, policies, rules, etc.) to someone or be the someone and most people don’t like to be the someone. Because the someone gets coaching, appraisals, targets, carrots, sticks and when things really get bad blamed or reduced. If that isn’t enough, management gives the someone tools and technology that make the work harder. By the way, I am not talking about your company . . . I’m talking about the other company. Like Congress, it’s not MY representative it’s the other ones.
What if I were to tell you . . . it is not the representative’s fault? Indulge me for a moment.
back to the supporting role it once had, up until IT vendors started selling solutions with out understanding the problem . . . and the problem is variety of demand. The work and the people who understand the work need to "pull" technology as needed to enable the work that needs to be done. Something all service organizations need to improve to achieve corporate cost reductions that last.
OK, I’ll come clean. It really isn’t "new" thinking. I got it from The New Economics written by W, Edwards Deming. In the United States, the dividend is the last thing cut (typically). We will lay off people before cutting the dividend. In Japan, the worker is the last to take the hit and rarely do they cut positions. Consider what Deming outlined in the steps Japanese companies take (from The New Economics):
Vanguard partners and you can witness the improvements yourself by going to www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk. This is a great resource for local, city, state and federal government. The debate wages on how big or small government should be, but whatever side you stand on, services still have to be provisioned. And it is in our best interest to provision them with the least amount of cost and improved service. I have established in previous posts that there is no trade off between good service and costs. If you improve service costs will go down . . . this is a government management paradox (read: 
Shared services fares no better, the idea is to achieve economies of scale and reduce transaction costs. The problem is that costs are reduced by economies of flow (not scale). We typically get the double-whammy of shared services and outsourcing where we are allowing our government to contract out our waste and add to it in many cases. Most of the waste in shared services is because government management has separated the work into front office-back office or skilled – simple (functional or transactional). A better way is to design against demand where the variety produced by service can be absorbed.
questions with a greater sense of urgency. After all, Moses was given the charge (by the Pharaoh) of creating the same tally of bricks with no straw. Regardless, this is not a new problem.
their life for their company? A few weeks pass (maybe months if you are lucky) and the worker you just hired has lost that gung-ho attitude in favor of that dismal attitude of other employees. Dr. Deming would often be asked in his 4-day seminar about what an organization should do about all the dead wood in their organization. In which he would reply, "Did you hire the wrong people or just kill’em." The suggestion for this article is . . . we just kill’em.
and control thinkers is I must cut costs and in a management paradox have increased costs and worsened service to customers. If a service organization wants to communicate authenticity, energy and trust to customers we must return the front-line worker to the forefront . . . only they can deliver these things . . . they are the humanator of bad service and increased costs.
cost or "economies of scale." With schedules and targets needed to produce batches, overproduction is common place. This overproduction requires marketing to sell this excess inventory.
American view vs. the Ohno view, "So it comes down to a choice: use marketing to stimulate demand for what we have made, or build relationships with customers to deliver what customers want – push vs. pull."
