Optimized for whom? Your employees, your customers or neither?

I was checking out at my local grocery / general merchandise store and witnessed the shopper in front of me struggling through the checkout process. She was required to maneuver her cart a 90 degree angle so that it was assessable to the checker. “Like parking a car in the garage”, the checker suggested. Then the change came out in a dispenser on the other side of the cart, which required her to walk around the cart to get her change and return to the check stand to finish her transaction. (I was wondering how many people forgot their change, given the inconvenient location of the change dispenser.) And after checking out, she struggled over whether she should push the cart forward and make another sharp 90 degree turn to exit, or back out and go through. She muttered something about “what ever happened to just going straight through?” She was frustrated by the process and the checker said something about “I know, we all hate them; but we’re stuck with them.” Humm,.. I can only imagine that an individual or team designed this new process with the intent to minimize movement by the checker. But when your optimization process produces a cumbersome and irritating, not to mention error-prone experience for your customer; you’re doing something wrong. In this situation, that valuable face time with the customer was spent discussing the ackward process and the customer’s trouble with it instead of a pleasant exchange about the day, the weather or whether the customer got everything they were looking for. (In defense of the checker, she did insert “did you find everything you needed?” at some point in the transaction– but this wasn’t enough to sweeten the irritated customer’s frame of mind). And irritated customers tend to go elsewhere when they get a chance.

So when you’re looking at optimizing your operations – make sure your optimization efforts not only improve your efficiency, but also result in a positive customer experience. What makes for a positive customer experience? What do they want? Can you cut out steps and activities that they don’t care about? When you utilize the concepts of lean and process improvement to produce customer focused efficient processes and train your people to deliver a positive customer experience, you’ll be stealing those customers from your competitors.