Have you ever doubled your investment in capacity only to find it eaten up by an unexpected increase in demand? Customer service and call center managers have this happen all the time. More equipment, more agents, more capacity don’t seem to show up in better customer experience performance.

Why does this happen? Over the next few blog posts we take a look at the use of “lean philosophy” within the customer service environment.
A friend of mine made a simple point: “if you want to reduce traffic jams don’t build bigger roads”. He explained that it actually encouraged more people onto the road and it quickly filled up with more cars.The supply in turn created more demand. Adding more capacity does not automatically give you the ability to do more.

Lean Start-Ups

Right now everyone is abuzz with the term “Lean Start-Up”, a phrase popularized by Eric Reiss based on some of the early work of Steve Blank. The breakthrough thought was that although agile development principles had been adapted by technical teams for some time, projects continued to fail because they had not defined the customer problem correctly. Companies don’t fail because of IT problems they fail because of customer acquisition problems. Steve Blank knew that:

• The best place to test a product is in the marketplace with real, paying, target customers
• Seeing the interaction between the customer and the product leads to faster feedback loops, which are then integrated into the product
• When you have a number of target customers who want this product as it is now delivered, you achieve “product-market fit”, i.e. an addressable market.

The job of the development team in a lean start-up is to launch a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) of product features, functions, and properties that are barely acceptable to a new customer. Then you iterate, iterate, iterate until you have a real addressable problem that the customer cares about, and that your product solves better than anyone else. They key is that you have good interactions with the users of the product and that your platform is built for iteration.

Lean Service – Lean Communications

John Seddon of Vanguard uses the example of a local authority that was building endless call centers but making very little impact on the customer’s experience of their services.
The problem was that an agent would take the call and then a field service person would turn up at the property, and often, would leave the premises without the problem being fully fixed. Every call after that, every reschedule is termed “failure demand”. Failure demand adds no new value.

By looking at what it takes to get the job done first time the entire flow of activities takes on a different character. Imagine John says “if the customer called you and you let them pick a time that suited them? Imagine if you turned up at this time? If you fixed the whole job when you were there? Then customer service results would go through the roof wouldn’t they? Yes they would. If you are not examining the customer context and looking at the problem in terms of flows, you are missing the real drivers of both cost and customer satisfaction.

It also meant that the field service personnel had to be able to pull on the right resources when they were on-site; those plumbers, carpenters and other tradespeople would have to be available to assist. As a system “The Jobs To Be Done” were getting done, getting done for a lower total cost, and actual customer experience of the repairs and maintenance service had been vastly improved.

Some Thoughts

1. Getting to the root cause of a problem is essential for resolving issues early and cheaply
2. Companies don’t always count the down stream costs of not getting it right first time
3. When you don’t manage the interaction points for outcomes you will drive more inbound calls, and this is failure demand
4. You cannot deliver Customer Experience if your systems are designed to deliver internal efficiencies
5. Achieving a change of orientation from “stocks of people” to “flows of people” is a key change in your organisation culture

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll take a look at how we did this at Portsmouth Hospital, and the day after we’ll take a look at some lean service principles.

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