TAKE AWAY from PART 1
Please recall from my first blog: A poor help desk is often an indicator of the overall company's financial health and long term viability as a competitive force. If the employees are not committed to the service they provide, they certainly are not providing the best that they can. Customers will and do get fed up and find other providers. Link: Part 1LEAN
Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. - Wikipedia.comExcept that LEAN is not only for production manufacturing processes. In any process, you have a customer, including Help Desk or Customer Service. What does your customer want?
- No run-around
- Issue or problem resolved promptly
In a nutshell:
- Project Management: Develop a LEAN vision for your Customer Service. Do the gap analysis. How far are you today from your ideal? Develop the plan to get them there.
- Continuous Improvement: As part of your continuous improvement, maintain and track your Pareto charts. Twenty percent of the problems are causing eighty percent of your customer service time. Track them, find them and address that 20% that are taking 80% of your customer service time. Follow the Plan/Do/Check/Act cycle.
Diagram from: Wikimedia Commons - The 5S: Don't have complicated automated phone menus. Be LEAN.... no more than 3 choices for your customers. Don't waste your customer's time. Besides being rude, it isn't LEAN either.
- Empower your customer service desk to actually do something. Let them give back to the customer for the inconvenience.
- PM 101 - Treat your customers and employees well. A little good will goes a long way in retaining customers and quality employees. Retaining repeat customers is of more value than getting new customers as these are the customers that will bring in new customers, so it is well worth your company's time to invest in good customer service. Sales and Customer Service are the most visible positions, take care and keep these folks positive.
- Address Complexity through 5S: If the savvy level of your customers can range alot, then you also need to address that variation through your customer service. Like wise a complex product will also require multiple levels of support for the product.
- Project Management problem resolution and more Kaizen: Fix your product problems. Give your Customer service folks access to engineering and policy makers in order to fix the problems.
- Delivery and Value Stream: Don't make the customer do your job. I don't know how many times, my mobile phone and even the land line, want me to do their troubleshooting and talk with their engineers. I don't have time to do their work. Unless they decide they are willing to reimburse me for my time.
- Value Stream: Remember your Customer Service is not to make their jobs or lives or even your job and life easier, but to make your customer's life easier. Too many companies forget this key point. They are there to service the customer. Process improvement is not an improvement if your customers are spending more time instead of less on the phone waiting on your processes. Again check your
Although it looks simple it can be daunting. If you need assistance with PM, Lean concepts, value stream mapping please feel free to contact me and I can refer someone to assist. .
