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sinha.rk.dr@gmail.com
Is your quest for Efficiency killing customer service?
Most businesses, being customer centric, claim to give high importance to their customer service levels. However, their internal focus and measurements often lead to employees behaving in a contradictory manner.
I was recently discussing with the Supply Chain team of a leading company which was struggling to achieve its customer service objectives. When we analysed the misses over the past few days, these pointed to delays in production. The requirements were low, so they had to wait till a bigger batch could be taken up for production. When I asked them as to why a smaller batch could not be taken, they mentioned that it would drop the production efficiency. It was ironical because the production line wasn’t a bottleneck, it had significant surplus capacity.
My experience suggests that most such misses in customer service are due to faulty measurements used to assess functional performance. If we change these local performance measures to a truly global one, which influences what the business wants to achieve, employee behaviour would change to improve customer service levels.
Look out for such faulty local functional measures which are coming in the way of business performance…