Building Customer Satisfaction by Developing an Effective Organisation
Author: Eric Thompson
Eric Thompson shows that if you are committed to reducing internal costs and developing an effective organisation you gain the bonus of addressing quality and building customer satisfaction.
Developing an effective organisation is all about making sure that you deliver just what you have agreed with your customers at the lowest possible internal cost. However to be a top ranking supplier of goods or services you need to excel in delivery as well as achieve on cost. Effectiveness is an integral part of quality. This calls for more than a fiscal examination to show where we can cut back. Achieving effectiveness and at the same time building customer satisfaction requires a more sophisticated, structured and employee driven approach.
"Effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity… to workers…"
Tom Peters
"Achieving effectiveness and at the same time building customer satisfaction requires a more sophisticated, structured and employee driven approach.”
If each work team in the organisation takes that as a standpoint considerable cost savings can be made. Case studies suggest savings of up to 25% are possible at the same time as building customer satisfaction, and if the process is employee driven the benefit can be sustained for the long term.
Making the organisation effective, eliminating those unnecessary costs and building customer satisfaction requires you to do two things. Firstly, to identify any work that does not have to be done and eliminate it. We refer to that as making the organisation effective. Secondly, to identify those remaining tasks where we need to work out how to do them better. We refer to that as making the organisation efficient. In this article we are going to concentrate on a customer focused and quality driven process of identifying where these opportunities lie.
The Quality Delivery Process
The Quality Delivery Process helps us to identify those issues that require attention.
We call it the Quality Delivery Process because, by delivering to our customer a product or a service that fully meets their requirements at the lowest possible internal cost, we are focussing on the quality of our delivery to them and seeking to build customer satisfaction. Ultimately, if we want to improve the quality of the services that we deliver to our external customers we need to engage the work teams that are involved in the delivery of the specific service. It is the way that customer requests are received, decisions are made, outputs are processed, and so on, that actually impacts on the quality of the delivery. Each work team can and should be required to examine what they are doing and seek to improve. If the benefits are to be sustained, it is the work team themselves that need to lead that process because they will then be committed to the process.
"Each work team can and should be required to examine what they are doing and seek to improve.”
However the improvement process needs to start higher up the organisation. Local work teams can only sensibly examine what they are doing for their customers now. They may be able to step out of the box and propose radically different ways of delivering what they do, but they are unlikely to take a perspective that says "we oughtn't to be doing this any more". It is the more senior people in the organisation who can take the "helicopter view" that is needed to take that sort of decision. They need to decide whether any specific product or service is utilising a sustainable amount of the available resource and to set the priorities and challenges for the organisation. That top down review needs to take place before the bottom up, team by team, improvement process can engage.
Let's now examine each step of the Quality Delivery Process.
Clarifying the Work Team Objectives
Each team needs to be clear about why it exists. It needs to focus on the outputs that it produces and define what it is trying to achieve in terms of both short and long term objectives. It is the role of the senior people in this process to ensure that each work team is focused on a necessary and distinctive task and that, when taken together, the outputs of all of the work teams add up to the service that the organisation wants to deliver.
Checking the Outputs
The work team needs to identify everything that it currently produces. It needs to identify its tangible outputs, such as "decisions", rather than describe the process that has produced them. In the case of "decisions" that process might have been a meeting. As well as decisions typical outputs might include plans, reports, policies, procedures and services.
Having identified all of its outputs, the team then needs to prioritise them against an agreed set of criteria. The criteria may well be the same across the whole organisation and should be designed to test whether that output is really adding value for its customer.
It is not uncommon in organisations for outputs to be requested by customers at some point in time because a particular situation has arisen and then for those outputs to continue to be delivered irrespective of whether the need remains. Testing that requirements are still relevant has to be an on-going process for any work team.
Confirming the Customer Requirements
For each output that we identify we need to be clear about who the customer is and to understand their requirements. Depending on the role of the work team the customer might be external to the organisation or might be another internal team. Additionally we need to consider that the immediate customer might or might not be the ultimate end user of the product or service. If, for example, the service is outsourced, the paying customer will rarely be the end user. If the customer is not the end user, then we need to make sure that we seek to fully understand the end user's requirements as well as those of the immediate customer.
Understanding the requirements requires dialogue and challenge. It's only by challenging what is being asked for that we can really find out where the boundaries of acceptability lie. We can check the implications of changing the delivery requirements and explore whether routes to meeting those requirements can be made more cost effective without loss of quality in the delivery. Through discussion we can discover problems that trouble the customer, and test whether there are ways to overcome them. At the end of this testing process we should have an agreed definition of the customer's requirement.
Checking the Work Processes
Once we are clear about the customer's requirements we can begin to check out our processes for delivering those requirements. We can start with the processes as they are, and through checking, analysing, testing, debating and challenging we can identify steps that don't need to be there and identify steps that cause an adverse impact on the delivery. The problems might include steps that make it difficult to deliver at the right time or at the right quality or they may identify hot spots of internal cost.
"The need to eliminate unnecessary cost may be the focus of attention but it is an essential step along the road to quality and building customer satisfaction.”
For the problem areas that have been identified it is appropriate to gather further information. To measure what is going on at a detailed level allows us to make more informed judgements about the areas on which we need to concentrate. Measurements allow us to test whether the process as we have defined it causes a problem such as a bottleneck which will stop us meeting our targets. Measurements will also highlight where there are opportunities for making improvements. Importantly, once we start to propose improvements those same measurements act as a yard stick to check whether our "improvements" are taking us in the right direction.
Ineffectiveness and Inefficiency
By following the "Quality Delivery Process" as we have described it; we can identify how we can begin to develop an effective organisation and at the same time build customer satisfaction.
• Clarifying the work team's objectives
• Checking the team's outputs
• Agreeing the customer's requirements
• Checking the work processes
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Peter Drucker
By following this process we can identify those aspects of the team's work that are no longer required and are candidates for elimination. Addressing these will make the team more effective. We can then identify areas where problems need to be addressed that cause us to fall short on the agreed customer requirement or build in more delivery cost than we can afford. Addressing these will make the team more efficient. By eliminating unnecessary activities first, we ensure that any efficiency improvements are by default, worthwhile.
Eliminating ineffectiveness or reducing waste is of course a key component of delivering quality. The Quality Delivery Process seeks to help your team to delight their customers. Building customer satisfaction is achieved through a structured, employee driven approach to developing an effective organisation. The need to eliminate unnecessary cost may be the focus of attention but it is an essential step along the road to quality and building customer satisfaction. Reducing cost is actually an opportunity to increase quality. Why don't you grab the opportunity and make a difference to your organisation?
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