Oh those redundant customer procedures…

Think about all those shopping experiences you have had… you had to return merchandise or someone ahead of you was doing so… the cashier calls for a supervisor and everybody in line waits for that person to arrive and then to bless the important and suspicious act of granting a refund… and, yes, (s)he arrives… puts a signature somewhere, without looking, and then returns to other important duties in a rush.

Does this have an eerie familiarity? How many times have you seen or heard supervisor refuse a standard refund??? Probably, like me, never. What is the use of this anyway? Stores have clear return policies. And yet, these things keep happening, over and over again, year after year. It really makes you wonder if anybody there has any sensibility to Moments of Truth, the waste of supervisory/management time and the sense of disempowerment this creates for a front line worker, the cashier.

Unfortunately, these things don't happen in retail only. I cannot even recall the number of times when I worked with frontline people during one of my many Customer Experience Workshops on analysing and improving Moments of Truth, that I heard about similarly redundant policies. And then I always think how great organizations often are in budgeteering and 'cost control' [read 'cutting']. They do this while at the same time creating and condoning the waste and damage created by non-value adding and redundant procedures.

You may well ask what my definition is on value adding. I always remember one of my very seasoned colleagues at (then) Coopers & Lybrand Consulting teaching me how simple the issue is. Ask yourself: Would the customer pay for this if (s)he knew we were doing this?

I am so convinced that the 'tightest' companies waste enormous amounts of human resources due to bad policies/processes and bad management. My bet is that most would be lucky to get 70 cents on the payroll dollar. And that is a pretty sound guesstimate, based on twenty years of experience and more. Count on me writing more about this. After all, it is a hugely pervasive organizational issue and it often stands in the way of making investments in initiatives that DO create value for the customer.

What say you? Comments? Ideas?


Eric Fraterman
eric@customerfocusconsult.com
www.customerfocusconsult.com