The No Tool Zone

I see this talked about everywhere I go.  The call center representative (CSR) that needs to be coached.  The “managers of people” one has been asked to become can drive you to coach people.  When training someone new they can be coached, there’s an operational definition we can live with in a call center atmosphere.  Most would call this training.

The type of “coaching” I see is of the prescription kind.  You know, he/she didn’t hit the numbers or targets as prescribed by management.  You AHT is a little high this month we need to have a coaching session with the violater.  What managers lack is an understanding of variation and its impact on systems.  The first is that 95% of organizational performance is attributable to the system the CSR works in . . . meaning the technology, work design, management roles, structure, procedures, etc will have more of an impact than the indivdual (5%).  Further, once an indivdual reaches statistical control (see Service Metrics: What You Need to Understand) it does not good to continue to train or coach.  It is to take the wrong action and only frustrates the worker and demoralize the culture.  This presents a management paradox for many.

Most metrics I see used in call centers are not helpful for anything other than resource planning.  The prescribed methods of number of calls, average handle time and service levels tell us virtually nothing about the performance of the system.  Better (end-to-end measures) that cross functions are more useful in seeing things from a customer perspective.  But wait, that would mean individual coaching sessions become meaningless . . . Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!  Coaching is highly over-rated in the improvement of either system performance or individual performance. Call center management would be better off taking a systems thinking approach.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

The appeal for a change of thinking in the design and management of work in US service organizations is one requiring a certain . . . attention.  So, as opposed to a change of thinking, a brain enema may seem more appropriate.  A complete flushing, not of gray matter, but of the flawed beliefs that inhabit the gray matter regarding business improvement.

What is at issue?  Quite a lot for service organizations, these items are well-documented on my website.  The command and control approach which is diametrically different than systems approach I promote (see command and control vs. systems thinking).  But the problems run deeper for me, as a “reformed” Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt I have seen more waste and sub-optimization than I care to post.  When you see that Lean and Six Sigma are very limiting compared to the magnitude of change that you get from a management brain enema.  I have seen black belt projects that save anywhere from $25,000 to $300,000, but with systems thinking the magnitude is far greater and systemic.  This is especially applicable to service and improvements come quickly.

What needs to be flushed?  One management paradigm to be expelled is the notion that work is activity and activity is cost.  The preoccupation with 3 questions:

How much work is there to do?
How many people will it take to do the work?
How long will it take people to do the work?

These questions lead to focus on the wrong things like targets, procedures, scripts technology, standardization and many other cost increasing, service decreasing actions.

Economies of flow has caught the attention of many readers.  Here is where we flush out the three questions (above) and look at our systems from the perspective of the customer outside-in and dump measures of activity to those associated with customer purpose.  The result is better service, increased capacity, reduced costs and improved culture.  Yes, even culture is improved as purpose is understood and better measures from the work a service company can allow the worker to engage their gray matter to improve method and even to innovate.  Sure beats the prescribed, command and control method that only audits compliance based on subjective criteria.

Flushing out the brain can lead to improved performance for your service company, but only if you replace it with better thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I completed the first of a trilogy about Call Center Myth Busters at customermanagementIQ.com and found myself wanting for a comparison of what it was like being a customer at many call centers.  “Please sir, I want some more” (in this case “more soup”).  But this is indicative of the type of service one might expect when one is looked at with disdain for their audacity to actually place a demand on ”their” organization for service.

To start with we are met with an IVR system that is supposed to get us to the right person to take care of our order, question or issue.  Instead we are directed by (in many cases) a plethora of choices to navigate to get there, trying to interpret the internally devised options that make no sense to the problem from the customer perspective.  Once getting to someone the customer sees a triage unit to determine whether you have the “right” to talk to a someone that can help you or maybe you “fat fingered” or coughed during the menu options and wound up in the “land of the forgotten.” 

 Once a customer reaches an agent it often times becomes a race to get you off the phone.  So much for the emotional customer connection. Or sometimes the scripts don’t match the demand.  Such is the life of those that try to get value at service centers.

I have advocated in my posts a better way that is to design against demand.  That standard work, scripts and entrapping technology make for poor service results.  Call center management needs better options that lead to reduced costs and better service without buying more technology or other items that actually increase costs in both purchase and worse service.  The customer management process is ripe with opportunities to improve without acquiring these things.  Shutting off the IVR will give you the opportunity to study customer demands as they present them and find out what “really matters” to these customers.  This is a step that will leave your “Oliver Twists” wanting more . . . in a positive way.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I have multiple blog posts on this subject, but decided it was time to devote a post just to this topic.  This thinking has dominated our collective US psyche for a century.  We don’t even recognize it, because it is the way we do business and organize our government agencies.  It is like breathing, we don’t have to think about it . . . we just do it.  If you ever want to screw someone up in golf, just ask them if they “breath in or out” on their backswing.  They start thinking about it and the result is they lose concentration.  Try it.

Systems thinking is an improvement over Frederick Taylor’s scientific management theory.  The functional separation of work of scientific management leads to what W. Edwards Deming called “sub-optimization” or when we optimize each function we don’t get a good end-to-end (system) result. 

One of the problems I have with outsourcing is that we take a function (call center typically) and try to optimize it by getting the “experts in that area” to do it.  Sounds plausible, but systems don’t react that way.  Some of my readers take exception (outsource vendors) and this isn’t to say that outsourcing is all bad, but the assumptions it will reduce costs are bad.  Unless the outsource vendor understands how to optimize a system and not a function all is lost.

The same can be said for those pursuing a shared services strategy.  If we combine call centers or back office functions we will reduce costs (or at least the visible ones).  Again, sounds plausible, but most of the time the organization winds up increasing the total/end-to-end costs to the system.  No savings and in a management paradox these moves increase costs.

Our best bet is to decrease costs by understanding our organizations as systems.  This will require that I ask you (my readers), Do you breath in or out on your backswing?  Maybe a break in our concentration is just the remedy for better thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

In my life, I have had the pleasure of meeting some very famous people.  I went to Hanover College with Woody Harrelson.  I met many Indy 500 race car drivers like A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Sr., Mark Donahue, Swede Savage, and Tom Sneva.  When I went to the ’93 Ryder Cup, I remember during a practice round striking up a conversation with the late Payne Stewart.

But the most memorable people I have had the pleasure of talking to are W. Edwards Deming and John Seddon.  I can safely say there are more differences than similarities between these two.  Dr. Deming had long forgotten probably more than I will ever know and he was not so dynamic in his delivery, but his message was undeniable.  More importantly, he pretty much said during his 4-day seminar that everything I had learned in my MBA program was well . . . wrong.  John Seddon on the other hand very spicy.  Likes to mix it up, calls them as he sees them and very dynamic . . . a stone that gathers no moss.

Long before I first met John Seddon, I read his book Freedom from Command and Control.  An excellent book, but John was not a statistician like Deming.  In a matter of fact, he is an occupational psychologist by education.  I was skeptical as any psychologist I had met in the US was usually associated with organizational development . . . and to quote Jerry Seinfeld “not that there is anything wrong with that.”  Just my previous experience was that he probably would be having clients give group hugs and kick balloons to develop teamwork.  The book itself laid to rest quickly those thoughts.  So, like anyone curious enough to learn more, I flew to the UK and met him.

The first thing you learn is that John rarely beats around the bush.  He is hard-hitting and brutally honest.  More importantly, he is in unwavering in his message that to improve service thinking has to change for business improvement to be effective and sustainable.  This was the fourth leg of the System of Profound Knowledge that Deming didn’t have much of a background in.  John Seddon had spent time understanding Deming (and Taiichi Ohno), not from a book, but from practical research on why change management programs failed.  His application of Deming and Ohno had advanced the thinking.  Something that TQM, Six Sigma, Lean or Lean Six Sigma in the US has failed to do.  The problem was tools were preventing learning.  And management thinking has failed to advance as process improvement made things better for a while leading to unsustained business improvement.

The Deming User’s group I had been President of in Indianapolis ultimately shut the doors.  I am afraid that as great a man as Deming was he was never able to get the thinking to “stick.”  The thinking was replaced by tools or arguments over what Deming said that really did little for us to advance the thinking.  Let’s give John Seddon of the UK some credit for doing what other great minds have failed to do . . . advance the thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

OK, I’ll come clean.  It really isn’t “new” thinking.  I got it from The New Economics written by W, Edwards Deming.  In the United States, the dividend is the last thing cut (typically).  We will lay off people before cutting the dividend.  In Japan, the worker is the last to take the hit and rarely do they cut positions.  Consider what Deming outlined in the steps Japanese companies take (from The New Economics):

1. Cut the dividend.  Maybe cut it out.
2. Reduce the salaries and bonuses of top management.
3. Further reduction for top management.
4. Last of all, the rank and file are asked to help out.  People that do not need to work may take a furlough.  People that can take an early retirement may do so, now.
5. Finally, if necessary, a cut in pay for those that stay, but no one loses a job.

Wow, quite a difference than the thinking in the US.  First sign of trouble with most US companies and the heads start rolling.  Can this be good for our overall economy or the state of our nation.  All those folks that complain about the inefficiency of the government we keep forcing people to use the government for unemployment checks, food stamps, medicaid, etc.  And by the way, more houses get foreclosed on and lessen our property values.

Toyota continues to stave off layoffs.  Who will be better off when the economy comes back?  The company that laid off a bunch of people and have to rehire and train or the company that hung on to workers?  Seems like a simulation game I played while getting my MBA.

I hear conversations from executives saying that we only laid-off the “dead wood” so this gave us a chance to clean house.  So, in the words of W. Edwards Deming, “Did you hire the wrong people or just kill’em?”  Meaning what part of your system hired the wrong people or is your system so poorly put together that no one could survive it.  Regardless, maybe executives should find a better leadership strategy.  With all the waste I see in organizations maybe a better idea for business cost reduction is finding better ways to manage and design the work.

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Okay, I am glad that Starbucks is recovering and they have found efficiency in “lean.”  But such articles (The Wall Street Journal’s article, “Latest Starbucks Buzzword: ‘Lean’ Japanese Techniques”) should come with a warning label as people need to understand that copying Starbucks will be a huge mistake.  Lean manufacturing tools and the pursuit of the customer experience do not always go together.  Lean tools tackle the customer experience as an efficiency problem and some times it is and some times it isn’t.  Think about it . . . does every service organization want their customers flying in and out of their business as fast as possible?  I don’t think so.

Working with a bank in North Dakota I found that large groups of customers like to come in and stand around, eat cookies, have a cup of coffee, some conversation.  Could you imagine someone rushing them out the door in this setting?  The point is your service organization may need something different than Starbucks.  A Service company shouldn’t start to go nuts on “lean”, “six sigma” or “lean six sigma” tools . . . like I know will happen anyway. 

“Lean” manufacturing tools really don’t transfer very well to service industry anyway (see: Lean Manufacturing is Not for Service Organizations).  The variety of demand gets in the way.  Although Starbucks is almost a “pseudo-manufacturing line” they will miss opportunities if they just have the “lean team” do the work for them.  They would be better off understanding the customer demand and purpose and allowing the front-line to figure out ways to absorb the variety of demand.  Business improvement need to be unique to each organization and their customers, demands, structure, management thinking, work design, technology, etc. it is what makes you different.  Copying will only lead to trouble.

So before every service organization runs around with stop watches and spaghetti maps, can we stop and think first before implementing “lean” manufacturing tools in service?

Leave me a comment. . . I can take it!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.