Don’t Break It Trying To Fix It.

We tinker with things all the time, trying to make them just a little better. The same thing goes for processes in a company. Someone, somewhere, sees something they think is broken – or might be done just a little bit better – and they try to fix it. As noble as this may seem, it often results in a further fracture of the business process.

You see, broken is a relative term. If you drop a glass on the floor and it shatters, it is most certainly broken. But in a company’s process, it’s not quite so easy to see exactly what is broken. The interpretation is often that the process must be broken just like the glass – in a dozen pieces. But more often than not the focus falls on the pieces of the glass scattered across the floor rather than why the glass was dropped in the first place, and most importantly, how to prevent this in the future.

We are not all automatons. People slip, and most certainly when dealing with emotion and perception, our decisions are often biased in some shape, form or fashion. More often than not, the cure offered does not necessarily match all the symptoms.

You missed your turn:

In our zeal to help make our business processes more efficient, more cost-effective, more customer-focused we run the risk of upsetting the proverbial applecart.

A few months ago I ran a study of our customers, looking at both call metrics as well as speaking with our customer care representatives. Even with an average response time of 28 seconds, some calls were remaining on hold up to 15 minutes. For our group, this was not desirable, so we sought ways to impact this without adjusting headcount.

I made the call to force customers to leave a message after 7-8 minutes on hold out of respect for their time, and even offered the option to dial “0″ to reach the operator. I was focused on the glass laying in a few pieces on the floor – not why customers stayed on hold.

I received several frustrated calls, and waited things out about 2 weeks. Often times, customers don’t like change, so I wanted to wait out the changes to ensure our care team was communicating the new process and allowing for an adjustment period – convinced I was making the decision to help our customers help themselves.

The frustrated comments didn’t stop, so I took the opportunity to speak with the most frustrated of the callers to ascertain where the frustration was occurring. What I found was a “hand-palm” moment.

The reason customers had been choosing to stay on hold was simple: They wanted to talk with someone live. Our company had always focused on placing live people closer to our customers, but with various economic constraints coupled with dramatically increased call volumes and complexity of calls the downward pressure dictated apply technology smartly.

Instead of forwarding the voicemail jail, I dropped the threshold to forward directly back to our reception desk  when our customer care team could reach the caller within 5 minutes. I am proud to say, this only happens 6% of the time, but those 6% of our customers now at least receive the courtesy of talking to someone after 5 minutes giving them the power of choice.

I was focused upon the glass fragments scattered on the floor, not why the glass had been dropped. So when you are tempted to improve a business process, ensure you don’t break it in the process of your repair. It’s easy to misread the symptoms and make the wrong call. If you do, be adult enough to admit it and make corrections in your course, but that’s advice for another post.

Image courtesy of Duke LeNoir.