One day, she exclaimed how it was a pity that some internal mails continued to have a P O Box number on them. These mails were inadvertently considered as external, got franked and came back into our mail box. "If only the department replaced the P O Box with an internal address, we would save money, time and indeed effort."
Peter, a Training Consultant, was approached to run a negotiation training workshop for a sales call centre. Senior Management had observed that call centre staff were compensating customers at an alarmingly high rate. In fact, the estimation was that if nothing was done, the compensation level could hit an all time high of $24 million for the year. The Director of the Call Centre’s response was to do more training around negotiation skills.
Instead of agreeing with the Director, Peter asked permission to investigate the problem further. He started by analysing the compensation data; fortunately, these were captured by the computer system. He, then, broke them into logical categories of time, team and staff member. The Goal? To see whether any pattern could be observed.
He next spoke to team members at the call centre in order to get their perspective; people at the frontline often have the ‘best’ solutions as they knew the root cause(s) more than anyone else. In Kaizen terminology, Peter went to ‘gemba’ (the place where the ‘problem’ took place or, simply, the place of action).
He next studied the available documents including the ‘Compensation Policy’. The policy read as follows:
“The Company does not compensate unless the error is definitely made by the Company and ONLY IF the customer asks for it. And if they are adamant, then the limit given to each call centre team member is up to $200 per incident per customer. If the amount asked is higher than that, then the team member can escalate it to their team manager.”
At first glance, the limit of $200 per incident per customer seemed rather ‘generous’ to Peter. In fact, further discussion showed that a customer might be compensated far higher than the $200 limit as s/he might have more than one incident per complaint. When he probed some of the longer serving staff, he was told that the limit was set up at a time when the Company was promoting the value of ‘empowerment’. To make it simple for ‘empowered’ staff, Management encouraged them to treat the Company as their own and they were given the ‘flexibility’ to compensate based on their empowered judgment.
Problems are generally caused by either a Policy, Process, System or People issue. If it was a ‘People’ issue, then training is potentially a good solution. Together with the more insightful front-liners, Peter drew up a Cause & Effect diagram to identify the ‘root cause’. The conclusion of the group was that ‘Policy’ misalignment seemed to be the root cause. In addition, the group could also see how the Policy statement created more downstream problems as the statement ‘ONLY IF the customer asks for it’ meant that different customers could end up with different experience although the incident might well be similar. It potentially could create a ‘suspicious customer-public’ as the Company did not consider the impact of customer chatter (talk among customers).
Peter’s recommendation to the Director was to alter the ‘Compensation Policy’ by reducing the limit of each centre’s team member to $50 per call and to involve team leaders to decide on anything up to $200. He also added that there was a need to provide clarity around what could be compensated and by how much. That way, frontline staff would be more consistent in administering compensation to customers depending on the type of issues.
Shirley offered a ‘simple’ solution. Peter’s was a bit more complex. However, both were applying the trait of ‘problem sensitivity’, ‘Problem Sensitivity’ being the ability of a person to recognise that a problem exists or to be able to cut through misunderstanding, misconception, lack of facts, or other obscuring handicaps to recognise the real problem, and hence, devise the real solution.
‘Problem Sensitivity’ is a critical trait of a creative person, a trait that is often ignored by people who talk about creativity. Most people would think that ‘Imagination’ or ‘Originality’ represent creativity. That is true but there are other equally critical ones.
Research shows that other than ‘Imagination’, ‘Originality’ and ‘Problem Sensitivity’, the other key traits are ‘Curiosity’ (this one is obvious), ‘Fluency of Ideas (the ability to generate many solutions), and ‘Flexibility of Thoughts (or the willingness to consider a wide variety of approaches to a problem).
The good news in Shirley and Peter’s case was that both had a good ending. Shirley’s idea was adopted; all internal mails had since had their PO Boxes removed. Peter’s idea was handed over to another team to complete the task. The savings? A mouth-watering estimated figure of $7.9 million.
Good ideas are everywhere and they do offer payback, some bigger than others. But, like Forrest Gump said infamously, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” The moral of the story is to keep fishing.
More important than financial payback is the element of motivation for its staff, that their ideas matter and do make a difference. Because fundamental to our human need is the element of feeling valued.
The crux is still how do we unleash ideas to flow within the organisation. That tends to be more difficult than we think and it will be for another time that I follow up on this issue.
Happy reading.
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