The pain from broken systems effects businesses in multiple ways. Some of the common pains include high customer service costs, high warranty claim costs, frustrated employees and low customer retention. Of course all these pains eat away at your profits and impact your ability to remain competitive and develop loyal customers.
I’ve recently experienced this as a customer with my cell phone carrier company. I switched cell phone providers – rolled 2 out of 3 numbers over to a new provider and cancelled the last line. I’d talked to this company 2 times on the phone to verify that the last line was cancelled and that the old account was closed out. But somehow they kept billing for that last line that they couldn’t figure out how to cancel. They kept saying that it was a glitch with their system. They’ve had great customer service and empathized with me on the phone, but they have a system issue. And the system issue was wasting my time and creating a lot of frustration for me. After this experience, I’ll never use their services again. And I’ll never recommend anyone else do business with them either. I can only imagine how frustrating it was on the employees’ end to want to provide excellent customer service, but not being able to deliver.
Employees, wanting to deliver on their job expectations, frequently create manual workarounds to avoid system issues. These workarounds can create a lot of busy work that’s adding to your labor costs. These workarounds become undocumented work processes, or “tribal knowledge” which may or may not get transferred to all required parties. What is the impact of these workarounds? Does the manual work introduce mistakes? Are different people using different workarounds? If so, you’ve got inconsistent processes which will lead to more mistakes that will impact the customer and cost the company money.
So, take a look at how well your systems are working. Is your system effective in helping you run an efficient business that’s producing a consistent high quality product/ service/ experience for your customer? What is the impact to the customer? What is the impact on your employees? What are your customer service and/ or warranty costs? How do your labor and material costs compare to industry leaders? After you identify areas for improvement, put together a plan to shore up these weaknesses. Standardizing and improving processes and fixing system issues are a critical component of running a competitive and successful business.
