The No Tool Zone

I ran across the “Sourcing Sage” and his creative cartoons about outsourcing.  I found the cartoons to be entertaining but not-so-much the sage advice.  His wisdom is that in order to outsource/share services an organization needs to do the following:

1. Process Documentation
2. Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
3. Training Curriculum
4. Knowledge Base
5. Product Documentation
6. Organizational Optimization
7. Workstation Standardization
8. Systems Inventory
9. Metrics
10. Costs

Nothing new or creative but does “re-emphasize” what most big IT firms will tell you.  Unfortunately, most of this stuff guarantees nothing when sharing services and/or outsourcing.  In fact, most of it is waste.  However, in the industry this is best practice.  A fool and his money are soon parted.

And it happens all too often . . .

Standardization leads to failure demand as these manufacturing factories can not absorb variety found in service.  The result is a colossal waste of organizational dollars.  All the documentation in the world is not going to fix an already broken work design, it just adds to the costs.

For more on outsourcing and shared services click the one that interests you.

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

You would see it more often in manufacturing, but divided responsibility plaques service organizations too.  Typically, in manufacturing it would be seen in quality control efforts where management would declare high-quality products.  The management paradox is that more inspection predictably led to higher error rates.  When two or more individuals inspect the same product to “inspect quality in” it means no one is responsible.

When action items are delved out amongst participants of a meeting, often you will find two (or more) individuals being given the same task to “share” the workload.  Nothing fundamentally wrong with that except someone has to take ownership with the other(s) supporting.  Clarity in ownership is important to avoid finger-pointing or sub-standard action.

President Harry Truman with "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To me, this divided responsibility is reflected in work designs where tasks are broken into so many pieces that no one can have a chance to know if they are doing a good job.  This is because the actual outcome is buried multiple levels beyond the first step.  Customers get frustrated as they have to figure out who does bear responsibility.  This often ends in escalations to management that unfortunately take a lot of time to “get up to speed” to resolve a customer issue.  “The buck stops here” is the famous phrase from Harry Truman that I hear from management in service organizations.  Finding the right answer for a customer is the problem.

Clear lines of communication in the design of the work and responsibility of tasks.  Keep the work together if at all possible, but make one person the owner.

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

My AT&T package (phone, internet, wireless and TV) has been under-performing for the past few months.  They replaced the modem which apparently they do quite often as the UPS store in my area indicated they got 6 – 10 a day through their store.  Solved part of my problem – phone works – but didn’t fix the frozen TV or the internet problems.

I was saved by a technician that came out and found several problems that when finished made everything clear and (so far) working very well.  That’s the way things go when you get a tech, things seem to work.  The troubleshooters on the phone will tell you tall tales when management uses AHT and other contact center measures that predictably drive wrong behavior.

One contact center call to AT&T for a problem with my remote was especially egregious.  I was told that the Sony TV I have had a known conflict.  The tech told me that this was not true and that he isn’t sure why I was given such misinformation.  He went on to share that the contact centers agents didn’t know how to troubleshoot and wished that management would actually see and understand the issues.

But why stop myths and legends when we can have BS?

More often than not, customers want something very simple . . . their problem solved.  Unfortunately, companies are too focused on saving money than resolving a customer’s problem.  The management paradox is that not solving my problem causes failure demand and adds to costs – as I have to keep calling back in to get my problem solved.

Sad, but true AT&T.

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I know what you are thinking . . . “my organization makes workers accountable with measures, performance reviews and inspection.”  Well, we aren’t talking the same lingo.

Rarely do you find measures in service organizations that matter to customers.  Usually the measures are all about reducing costs and meeting budget.  Let me tell you a secret . . . customers could care less about these measures.  And one counter-intuitive truth we have discovered is that measures that customers don’t care about lead to increased costs or a best a scorecard.  W. Edwards Deming referenced these lagging measures as useless to improving costs and service – “it is like driving a car looking out the rear view mirror.”  Customer measures lay out the road ahead.

Performance reviews make workers slaves to the system.  The game is to be compliant, not innovative.  It promotes a culture of brown-nosing and popularity contests, leaving most workers disenchanted.  They do make people accountable – to their boss.  The hierarchy is there to prevent accountability to customers, workers must bow to the next one up on the totem pole.

This thinking breeds inspection for compliance to measures that don’t matter to customers.  Most in inspection and compliance roles add little or no value from a customer perspective and too often creates animosity amongst workers.  Also, I find that workers are stuck in work designs that are sub-optimal and compliance means that we are perpetuating poor thinking and design.

So, what makes workers accountable?

Work that is challenging and designed to improve service is the short answer.  The long answer is that a worker that can see the impact to customer has a better chance of being accountable than a functionally separated one that your piece of work if blind to the one before or after.  This means that better designed work promotes accountability and it doesn’t require compliance.  Most workers willingly are accountable when they embrace a work design that makes them relevant and has ties to customer needs.

The bottom line is that accountability is attributable to the design and management of work.

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I recently read an article by Doc Searls in the Wall Street Journal called, “The Customer as a God.”  Customers have long catered to service organizations by being treated in a  herd mentality – meaning the customer has to adjust to to the service organization.  However, the future holds a very different environment.

Doc Searls references it as Vendor Relationship Management. The Customer is King!

This is yet another strike to economy of scale thinking .  Mass marketing soon will give way to individual marketing and economies of flow.  This future means that service organizations will need to absorb great variety in customer demands.  Standardization will not only cost more through failure demand, but will now not give what customers crave services fit for them in a customized manner.

Wow!  Redesigning our thinking about the design and management of work is now more important than ever.  Not only does it cost less, but it delivers service in a truly personal manner.

Are you ready for the future?

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

You can find almost anything on the internet these days.  I found a piece by A Current Affair on Australian TV that talks about how hard it is to voice a complaint in today’s IVR infected and functionally separated  organizations.  The piece highlights how fast sales lines are picked up and how slowly complaint lines are handled . . . if at all.

You have to love an voice recognition system that does not recognize “complaint” as something that should be routed.  Of course, I believe that the world would be a better place without IVRs in general.  Its not old-fashioned to have a human answer the phone, it’s just good business.

It doesn’t surprise me that sales lines are answered so quickly and most other inquiries are slow to be answered or even resolved.  With many organizations – private or public – running failure demand upwards of 4 – 9 out of 10 calls means that these organizations are frustrating or even chasing away customers.

Imagine what it would be like in reduced costs to organizations if it could be designed out with different and better thinking . . .

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

If it wasn’t bad enough that SPC charts disappeared from the Hawthorne Plant after WWII as management adopted a mass-production mindset, 67 years after Japan kicked our collective behinds we still think the same about management.  Worse, we have even fallen deeper into insignificance in the US.  Short-term thinking driven by the financial markets and management with an attention span of the TV generation struggle to compete and innovate.

Buying and selling companies for profit and mergers for economy of scale.  Except profit comes from satisfying customers in new and different ways  . . . and mergers have not achieved the scale needed to increase profit as this comes from economies of flow.  The scale fantasy continues to drive the wrong behavior.

With great embarrassment, the US still tries to copy Japan.  How do you catch a competitor by copying?  It always keeps you behind.  Finding out what matters to customers leads to innovation that is emergent from what you learn.

Instead of thinking for ourselves, we embrace “gurus” that study Japan and have never actually applied the hypothesis.  Because if they had they would discover the truth through application.

The clock is still ticking . . .

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

For a little over three years, information technology companies serving the service industry have been advocating call back technology.  Before you rush out and spend unnecessary capital, consider what you are actually getting – something to add costs to your already poor work design.

So, let’s take a look at what traditional thinkers say about call back technology.

From call center helper and their article titled, Everything you Need to Know about Call Back Technology.

• High abandon call rate – for example, 10%+
• Low abandon rate – for example 3%, with overstaffing for peaks
• New business call centre, where you don’t want to lose a single call
• High agent attrition
• Staffing difficulties and resultant problems managing call flow, for instance, during unpopular shifts
• Customer satisfaction issues
• Headcount restrictions and/or space constraints
• Training and agent deployment

These are the same management problems that every contact center faces, so why not call back technology?

Customers are calling when it is convenient for them and your organization is calling back when it is convenient for you.  Although customers don’t have to wait on the phone, they still have to wait.  We are solving the wrong problem.

Contact centers are concerned about the wrong things.  The problem they have is their thinking about the design and management of work.  Better designed work through better thinking can increase both capacity and capability.  Failure demand (the failure to do something or do something right for a customer) is the product of poor thinking and work design.

Failure demand runs upwards of 75% of all calls and sometimes more in contact centers.  Instead of treating all calls as work to be done, why not design a system (with better thinking) that doesn’t create all these calls in the first place?

The real beauty of redesigning the system is that it gives you capacity to take calls and provide good customer service.  Even better, it costs less . . . a lot less.  Want to learn more?  Download the Transforming Call Centers guide.

Come hear me speak at the CAST conference in San Jose, California!  Re-Thinking Management . . . Re-Thinking . . . IT!

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I am not much for surveys these days, but I ran across the 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer prepared for American Express by Echo.  The best way to find out how you are performing is to actually know before the customer hangs up.  Because, once the call is over the opportunity has passed to provide service – one reason I am not a fan of customer satisfaction surveys (another is that surveys rarely ask questions “that matter” to customers).

Some things that stood out for me in the survey:

• Customers are not seeing much change in customer service.
• Businesses are more likely to miss your expectations than exceed them.
• Customers will pay more for customer service.
• Consumers expect excellent customer service and don’t expect to pay more for it.
• Consumers are likely to tell 8 or more people about their excellent service.
• Consumers are likely to tell 11 or more people about their poor experience.
• Consumers prefer to speak to real person either by phone or face-to-face.

As anyone can see from the survey, consumers want good service.  Just so few deliver it.  Why is this?

Many organizations view customer service as a zero-sum game, where the belief is that good service costs more.  This is not true, great customer service costs less.

This also means if customers want to talk to a real person, it will be less expensive than that expensive IVR and voice system you just bought to save money.  I have often found these technologies entrap the customer and workers – increasing costs.

There are some numbers more nebulous than others.  For instance, knowing how many customers say good and bad things is a very difficult number to know for your service.  However, failure demand  is something to sink your teeth into.  When customers place demands on your customer service people that are failures it is very expensive.  Worse, is the amount of failure demand hitting contact centers or other service workers.  It is typically between 25 and 75%.  That is the bad news, the good news is that in most service organizations it can be designed out.

A better service design also requires better management thinking about how to manage the work.  Activity measures like AHT and service levels are the wrong measures.  They play to the zero-sum game, failure demand measurement is a whole different game.  To deliver better service, we have to reduce failure demand that reduces costs too.

There are other measures that are important too.  These may be end-to-end measures derived from “what matters” to customers.  These require others outside the customer service arena to support making a design that meets the demands of customers.

No matter what the survey says, it can not replace getting knowledge about that what and why of current performance of your organization.  Learning about customer purpose, types of demand (value/failure) and the flow of the work will help you understand about the assumptions associated with design and management of work.

Come hear me speak at the CAST conference in San Jose, California!  Re-Thinking Management . . . Re-Thinking . . . IT!

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.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.