Who are Your Systems Serving?
See if this scenario sounds familiar. A customer of yours has an issue with your organization. They follow the company’s process and submit a written formal appeal. An employee looks at the appeal 29 days after it was submitted and notices that a form is needed by the organization in order to move forward with the appeal. They send the form to the customer. The next day, the case is closed because your organization has a standard of closing cases within 30 days. Without knowing that the case has been closed, the customer, upon receipt of the form, dutifully completes and submits the form as requested. The signed form reaches your offices within 2 weeks of the date it was sent.
The customer only discovers that the appeal has been closed when they call to inquire as to the status. Your customer service representative agrees that the timeline is nonsensical but tells the customer that there is nothing that they can do. The customer asks to speak to a supervisor and is told that not only is one not available but that even if they were there would be nothing they could do either. The only department that could help the customer is the appeals department. The customer asks to be transferred to the appeals department only to be told that the appeals department only communicates in writing.
This is a scene I witnessed recently. This organization is very familiar with NPS (Net Promoter Scores) which measures a customer’s loyalty to the organization and likelihood to recommend them. In working through the scenario with the team, I asked the team how likely they thought it was that this customer would recommend their organization. I also asked them to take a step back and put themselves in the shoes of the customer. Do they feel that the treatment the customer received represents what the organization aspires to deliver? And, finally, I asked them to take a look at the policies and processes that had led to this outcome and ask themselves who those systems served.
In this instance, this lack of institutional self-awareness led to multiple system failures when it came to serving this customer. What I find most often is that these policies and processes were not intentionally created to thwart the customer. Frequently, when I ask what the impact of a process is on the customer, I am met with blank stares. Seldom is the customer experience at the forefront of the mind of those creating the policy. Organizations, not just individuals, suffer from blindspots.
Fortunately, as the team reviewed their practices from the perspective of the customer journey, they were able to identify opportunities to modify policies and procedures that should positively impact future customers experiencing a similar issue. They even engaged the customer to discuss the changes they were intending to implement.
While we typically think about self-awareness at an individual level, it applies to organizations as well. Blindspots, whether at the individual or organizational level, are brought to light and addressed only through gaining broader perspective. Are you identifying and taking advantage of opportunities to ensure that the systems you have in place are serving, or at least not hindering, your customers?
