The Success Stories is where I will put various business case studies. Each one is from a business where systems thinking related to Start. Somewhere. was vital in correcting a systems, process, or personnel issue. To kick things off, I have started with this summary of a customer service department where...they haven't actually identified all their customers.
Customer service is everywhere. Any organization with customers also has internal customers who require the same sort of attention and consideration. Organizations who pontificate about “great customer service” yet fail their own internal customers may be on borrowed time. They are developing relationships inside where stress, inefficiency, failure, and resentment are building up. Those internal customer failures will escape and you won’t be able to stop it. Whether it is on a site like Glassdoor or through employee attrition, they can be difficult to correct. So why not prevent them altogether?
The first component of Start. Somewhere. is about discovering your “whys”. The purpose of this exercise is to identify all your customers for each level of process. Internal customers ultimately serve your external customer and as such, must receive similar consideration. To this end, I wanted to go through a customer service department solution where customer determination was not adequately addressed.
The situation: Customer service departments for consumer goods commonly receive warranty calls and process returns for repair or service. These professionals collect data about the situation to ensure the product is received, processed, fixed, and repaired to specification. As an external customer facing component of the business, their performance is critical to customer sentiment metrics and consumer perception. If your brand touts this portion of customer interactions as excellent, they had better be excellent. In this case, the department was every bit as great to the customer as you would desire.
Your
Customer
Process
Is the Next
The data the department collected was, unfortunately, not as excellent as it could be. Over the seven to eight years the company existed, the diligently collected returns, failures, corrections, and RMA data consisted of a large spreadsheet with many, many flavors of responses. In aggregate, it would appear they collected what was important. They did acquire accurate information for each return and categorized it all well enough.
The issue with the data was its formatting. Between the five to six agents who worked in the department through the years, each one recorded the same type of problem in a myriad of ways. The result was an essentially useless database of entries. This event was about ten years ago, it is likely possible such a file could be thrown into an AI of some sort and have it data mine this. When the problem needed fixing however, no such tool was economically feasible if it was available.
Before I get into how the situation was improved, we should consider the reason it developed in the first place. The department did not fully understand who all their customers were or their specific needs. They were amazing at ensuring product was repaired and returned promptly. Their inconsistent data collection was creating a failure point for every customer they served.
Who exactly does a customer service department serve though? Obviously the paying customer, but who else and why? Customer service groups in product manufacture have at least three customers. The first is the paying customer (external) who reaches out for warranty or other product support. Their performance in acquiring pertinent contact information to facilitate solving the customer problem is key to maintaining company success. If repair turnaround is a commitment, this becomes even more important to the external customer. Don't make promises you can't or won't keep.
The second customer is the operations department. This group needs to understand the nature of the repair to adequately prepare resources to complete the work in the promised window.
The third customer is the engineering or R&D group. They require the product performance data to properly determine if production specifications are adequate. Hand in hand with operations, this data is critical to identifying if recalls may be needed or if specific process areas are failing to meet standards.
Downstream of these needs are those within specific process families and the need for quality information about each level's performance.
The inconsistent data collection prevented any tracking or charting of the information without significant additional effort. A manufacturer of hard goods who cannot accurately understand product and systems performance from customer feedback is woefully ignorant and on a path to disaster.
Had the organization spent the time to understand all customer levels for product performance data better products could have been developed and existing product lines would have seen common failure corrections sooner.
Defining the customer and market
is considered crucial to starting a business. Too often this doesn't include the internal customers your business will also create. Ignore these at your peril.
Understanding your organizational “whys” is relevant no matter what your company does. You have to understand this inside and out, you (leadership) are responsible for these customers and serving them. Find your why’s and delight your customers.
The solution, well, most of it. Through weeks of sifting and working with the department, we built a structured entry form for customer service. With different paths for different products, failures, and issues. Every response was canned or used simple language (before AI this was important). All these spilled into a single spreadsheet where pivot tables could provide live response metrics. The old data was moderately sorted, but the volume was deemed to be too large to justify the expense to fix it. Though modern tools might not care if you don’t go through and build canned message lines for your form entries, there is value in fully understanding how to simply this type of information. I would advise such exercises should still be completed.
To conclude, you must understand where all your customers live. You need to know what they need and why they need it. You need to serve the next process in the line with as much concern as the customer who sends you a purchase order. Find all your customers!
