“Voice of the Customer” – VOC in short – is a key topic in all kind of customer service, TQM or Lean Six Sigma training and related project work. There are two main categories for VOC data, reactive and proactive.…
The Moment of Truth is the short time frame when a customer experiences the product or service that many people have prepared often over many months. It is the moment when a small, often unintentional mishap has the huge potential to spoil the result of hard work by others in the organisation behind the scenes. Good process managers know this and put their focus on the Moment of Truth.
In response to evolving conditions, you came to realise that your organisation must change. Change leadership consists of project sponsor, with overall responsibility, seconded by a project manager. These people will be your change agent – the ones upon which success of your initiative will rely.…
Ting is a sophisticated traditional Chinese character that exemplifies the most important activity related to customer service in an impressive way: Listening. The old Chinese already knew that by listening you open your ears (not the mouth), you treat the speaker as a king, focus wholeheartedly with 100% attention.…
Not every organisation needs to develop process managers with Lean and Six Sigma skills. Yet, every organisation deserves to have managers with some basic process management skills. Even better, if process management skills became part of the daily business routine and were applied unconsciously, became habits. What are the seven habits of highly effective process managers you should be cultivating?…
Especially in service organisations, productivity is usually quite low due to a lack of efficiency caused by a missing focus on the process.
We often accept Rework as Normal Part of the Process.…
“We need to increase productivity!” What sounds very reasonable on a country scale could be damaging on a company level.
Now, after nearly two years of recession the economy is back on track, i.e. companies of all sectors sell more. This is good news, isn’t it? It brings our productivity to new heights, meeting and even surpassing the levels we had seen before the recession. Stop! This is not really good news. This is expected news. Every company – well managed or not – will be able to show these figures. The question is: have companies used the time of low productivity to expand the productivity potential in preparation for the future?
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Productivity measures the ratio of output quantity over input quantity. Increase of productivity means growing the output quantity faster than the input quantity. Output quantity can stand for anything from number of products made over number of customers served to number of donors treated or number of work passes produced. Input is usually summarising all resources needed to do this from raw material over equipment to man hours.
How is productivity increase possible?
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A typical Friday evening starts with a family dinner in a nice atmosphere. This time we decide to visit one of our favourite restaurants for a light dinner with Sushi. Upon arrival we are amazed.
Usually, this place is packed on a Friday evening. Today, more than half of the seats are empty. Therefore, going in and taking a seat at the conveyor belt is very easy. Before the waitress has a chance to approach us we have taken some plates with Sushi already. …
Everyone, undoubtedly, has had the unenviable honour of experiencing ‘bureaucratic government processes.’ Be it applying for your first ID or passport, to initially obtaining a driving license and the inevitable dealings with the tax man.
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An Australian construction equipment rental & leasing firm had decided to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning system in 12 months. During this 12 month period there was an expectation that all front-end services including Sales, Customer Service, Receivables, Payables, would be re-designed to achieve streamlining and simplification prior to ERP implementation.
Operations spanned 18 cities across Australia with many more small ‘re-sellers’ located in the Australian interior or ‘outback’ as it is locally known. Compounding a normal organisational and operational setup was the fact that this firm grew a substantial portion of its business through the acquisition route thus effectively incorporating myriad systems and practices. There were 5 Receivables systems, 4 Payables systems and a decentralized customer service database (more than 200 input platforms) which needed to be tied together to make the ERP implementation work.
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