Are poor business processes letting your customers down?

I recently finished building a house of which after settlement, I had a number of outstanding electrical issues that needed to be fixed. The electricians who the building company had used was asked to come and complete the list of work. The electrician company was a good sized business, with a staff list of around 70 people.

There were 10 items to fix and at the end of their visit, for various reasons they were only able to complete 6 of them - the remaining 4 items would need to be followed up. After 3 weeks of silence, I called to chase up the items only to find they had been forgotten. We immediately made another appointment to have these addressed, along with 2 new issues to be added that had since occurred.

After their next visit, they again were finished with 2 of the 6 items outstanding again. No surprises that despite a promise to follow these up, they were also forgotten and so the pattern continued.

A couple of appointments later, I got tired of the chase and raised a complaint with the company. After a bit more run around, they offered to send the director of the company to my house to meet with me and understand what was going wrong. He turned up to the appointment convinced that his company were delivering an outstanding level of service and couldn’t understand the issues I had raised or why I was seemingly unimpressed.

I took him through the story and the look of frustration on his face was clear. His comment at that time said it all. “Within our company we have put in a place a set of processes that stops this from occurring. How did this happen? We do not expect to have these types of complaints any more from our customers.”

He left my house intent on sorting out where the disconnect was in his business.

Companies spend an enormous amount of time and money putting procedures and processes in place to make sure that the customer experience is the best it can be.

Organisations then place much of their faith in their employees and field teams that they will be able to execute these processes.

For all the good intentions, the reality is that if the people in the field can’t properly follow and execute the processes, the customer experience will never improve. Equally if management don’t properly manage the outcomes, companies will fail to make any difference to the quality of their service delivery.

What is worse is that the only time they will become aware of what is not working is when a situation gets so bad that a customer complains and that complaint makes its way to the more senior levels of management.

Management’s response is usually “How did this happen?" They believe that they have processes to stop these situations. When they look into the complaint, to their disappointment what they find is that the processes that they spent so much time developing and implementing may not be realistic enough for their people on the ground to carry out.

Big or small, the problem I have described is not one that is typical of small business, nor is it more common to only large organisations - the size of the organisation doesn’t matter! It is a problem every day for all businesses.

So why does this happen? Is it due to a lack of time, a lack of knowledge or just a lack of interest? In the case of the electricians, the company needs to understand why their people were so poor in coming back to the office and working through the list of actions. What are the reasons for the lack of follow through on their promises? Do they not have enough time to do that before they are off the next job?

The electrical business, as the example, must make sure that their staff have a working environment that makes it easy for them to do these follow ups. Are their electricians encouraged to return to the office, sit at a desk and do their follow up? Or do they have to login to the office from their phone sitting in their car!

The challenge of delivering the best customer experience lies in the hands of the people who represent your business out in the field. If they don’t deliver it then it doesn’t matter how good your operations and management are back at the office. If the customer doesn’t see it then why would they want to call you again with more work?

Here are 5 important tips on how to improve customer experience successfully through better processes.

Tip 1: Keep every process simple.

It doesn’t matter what it is you’re trying to do, always remember that your staff have to implement it. What may seem like a good idea at the time in theory, may be difficult to execute in practice. If it is difficult to implement and even more difficult to monitor, then no one will want to do it.

Tip 2: Allocate a manager who will own its success.

When you introduce a new process, you must make sure that you have someone allocated to monitor and manage its execution and success. This includes spotchecks externally with select customers, and internally with specific field staff. Through these checks, you need to make sure that things are being done as expected, that the process is workable and can deliver the outcomes as planned.

Tip 3: Be prepared to review and adjust.

It’s very rare that you’ll get a process right first time. When you carry out this exercise make sure you also have a process in place to get feedback - from your customer, field staff and internal operations. Be prepared to fine tune it until you get the best outcome.

Tip 4: Make sure your company culture is consistent with the new process.

Very often management and directors have great ideas and want to see certain things happen in the business. However in reality you may find that these ideas are not aligned with the company culture, especially with those expected to deliver the services. It is very important to make sure that any new process you implement is aligned with the culture of the organisation as it is today, and importantly that it also aligns with the culture that you want your organisation to be.

Tip 5: Would you be prepared to do it yourself if you had to?

A great test for any new process is to consider if it is something that you would be prepared to do yourself. In other words, put yourself in the shoes of your worker and consider if you would be prepared to do what it is you are asking them to do. If it is not a process you would want to do, then why would it be okay to expect anyone else to do it, and more the point, do it well.

Strong management in conjunction with strong delivery are the keys to the success of implementing any process change.