Last updated on September 18, 2024
I didn’t want to be on the phone. It was a call I had tried to avoid, mostly through willing other people into action with positive thoughts. It didn’t work, and now I was about to have an unpleasant conversation. I navigated the response tree and made the nonsensical selections that could only have been created by a programmer looking at an org chart and eventually reached someone that couldn’t avoid helping me. The unfortunate woman that answered was about to solve my problem because she had to; we were out of time. She apologized. Everybody I spoke to apologized. What else could they do?
The answer is nothing. They couldn’t send information in ways that their systems didn’t permit. They couldn’t raise concerns outside of their command chain. They couldn’t call their suppliers outside of predefined channels. They couldn’t change their processes.
That’s the lesson. For decades we have been concentrating on systematizing our businesses. It allowed us to grow our businesses larger, cross-train employees, provide resilient operations, and improve the services provided to our customers. But the hidden side of this was the necrosis of our businesses. Slowly, the business of business has become to implement documented procedures first and satisfy customers second. When this happens, customer satisfaction and experience diminishes rapidly. We were told that once we managed our businesses through processes, all we would have to do is manage the processes. And then we removed the authority for anyone to change the processes.
Do your employees have the authority to change processes when it makes sense to satisfy a customer? Do they know the rules well enough to know when to break the rules and how far?
WSI is here to help you implement technology in a way that makes it easy to delight your customers. Please schedule an appointment to discuss how we can improve your business.
