Blog posts on customer service

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Steve Jobs on Quality, Business and Joseph Juran

  "The importance of customer focus is obvious at the companies Jobs led. It wasn’t a weak, mere claim of concern for the customer, it was a deep passionate drive to delight customers."

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• Practicing Mistake-Promoting Instead of Mistake-Proofing at Apple

  Mistake proofing is a wonderful management concept. Design systems not just to be effective when everything goes right but designing them so mistakes are prevented.

  ...

  But guess what, the unnecessary steps Apple decided to force me through are broken so I can’t just waste my time to make them happy. No. They have created a failure point where they never should have forced the customer in the first place.

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• Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints

  If the complaint is not something that should be addressed or explored fine. But that has nothing to do with the category of the person (“complainer” or not); it has to do with the merit of the complaint.

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• Using Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies in Roadless Areas

  This is an awesome use of technology to tackle important problems. Engineers are great.

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• Quality Comes to City Hall

  Changing to a culture that has a Deming perspective on customer focus is not easy. When you succeed though the way people think is profoundly changed. The City of Madison police department even did customer surveys for those they arrested and used the results to improve the process in ways that make sense. Obviously there are restrictions on what you can do to please those being arrested but this is really always the case – you can’t give all your products and services away for free even if that would make customers happy.

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• Golden Rules for Making Money

  P. T. Barnum wrote the Golden Rules for Making Money in 1880. He provides a few paragraphs on each of the 20 golden rules:

  1. Don’t mistake your vocation
  2. Select the right location
  3. Avoid debt

  ...

  "Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly."

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• Product and Service Innovation is Driven by Customer Focused Organizations

  At the core of W. Edwards Deming’s philosophy is a focus on delighting customers, allowing everyone to contribute what they have to offer and continually improving.

  ...

  An organization must have a deep focus on customers in order to continually improve the value delivered to those customers and to innovate and create new products and services that delight those customers and future customers that the business can win over.

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• Support Theatre

  Support theatre provides the appearance of supporting customers when in fact it is just treating customers poorly based on a management system that disrespects customers. It is a similar idea to security theatre that has become so popular for government in the USA for the last 10 years.

  Companies that practices support theatre are usually very focused on cutting the company's cost and not "wasting" the companies time fixing the problems they create for customers or even helping customers put on "band-aids" to cope with the injuries the company has inflicted on the customer.  Those companies also don't learn from their failures to improve and stop future customers from suffering the consequences of their poor processes.

  It is painful to interact with such companies.

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• Unintended Consequences - distorting the system or distorting the data

  Using data to understand your processes and improve them is very useful.

  But using data often results in unintended consequences. If you don’t have a good understanding on the pressures collecting data will bring to bear on the system you can create pressure for results that damage the delivery of value to customers...

  Distorting the system or distorting the data are often the result, instead of the process improvement that is desired and expected.

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• Functional Websites are Normally Far Superior to Apps

  Just like old school businesses were only comfortable with their old business models and didn’t create functional websites (instead using the web just to advertise that you should go to their store, or giving you forms to complete and fax back to them…) new businesses are often stuck on only using apps even though they often provide a lousy user experience compared to a functional website.

  There are some apps that are very useful and not having a functional web app can make sense, but it is fairly limited. Getting a ride apps I can see as only apps. Driving instructions and live maps using GPS to locate you is another great app use...

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• Continually Improving Using a Focus on Delighting Customers

  A deep appreciation for the long term needs of your customers and potential customers should guide where in the system to continually improve. And my belief on how to continual improve is to create and continually improving management system with principles of experimentation (with the necessary understanding of what conclusion can be drawn from results and what cannot), an understanding of the organization as a system and respect for people as principles to be guided by to achieve continual improvement.

  Quality practices of experimentation directed at continually improving management practices and internal processes need to be completely integrated with the efforts to continual improve customer delight. Those efforts should be one process and therefore they automatically grow together.

  The success of improvements should be evaluated at the system level (outcome measures not merely efficiency measures). In process measures are useful in adding evaluating improvement and monitoring processes but the end result for the overall system must always remain the primary concern.

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• Jobs to be Done

  If you see your job from the customer’s perspective you may change the scope of your offerings. You can add services that help the potential customer chose you. In the book, they explore the example mentioned in the article in more detail. They also discuss how an online university changed their processes to address the issues their potential customers faced in the “hiring” process. They changed, not the “product” (education), but the processes supporting potential students making the decision to hire Southern New Hampshire University.

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• Cater to Customers Desires to Achieve Customer Delight

  Customer delight requires understanding your customers needs and desires. Often even your customers don’t understand these well. Businesses that have a deep appreciation for what their customers, and potential customers, desire and that create systems to deliver solutions that delight those customers benefit greatly from that effort.

  To build a sustainable enterprise you must provide value customers will appreciate.

  Your customers do not have one unified set of desires. Some customers may want as good an experience as is possible and if that costs substantially more they are happy to pay. Others want to pay the least possible while having an acceptable experience.

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• Toyota as Homebuilder

  many organizations don’t apply many concepts that have been proven effective for decades. So I hope Toyota gets into any business that continues to provide lousy value to the consumer (at least those where that consumer is me). I wish they would create their own credit card (they offer Toyota branded Visa and MasterCard credit cards now, in Japan), provide high speed internet service and run an airline.

  Toyota is probably too smart to try and run an airline in the US (only Southwest seems to be able to that profitably).

  ...

  On the Toyota web site they list the following areas of non-automotive Toyota business: financial services, information and communications, marine and most surprisingly Biotechnology and Afforestation. Toyota states: “Biotechnology may seem far removed from the auto industry. It is, however, closely related to automaking in the context that they are both aiming to achieve a sustainable society, and their close relationship can be seen in the new Raum, launched in May 2003, which uses parts made from bioplastics.”

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• Lean Consumption: the Customer’s Perspective

  The concepts underlying lean consumption boil down to six simple principles that correspond closely with those of lean production.

  1. Solve the customer’s problem completely by making sure that all the goods and services work together to do so.
  2. Don’t waste the customer’s (or the provider’s) time.
  3. Provide exactly what the customer wants.
  4. ...

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