Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

What’s your process?

My bread-and-butter consulting comes from doing business analysis of process. There are about 3 main things to avoid when designing business process - and almost every client I work with has violated these rules…so I thought i’d put these out for you to think about.

1. Don’t replicate something you can reuse. I have a client that supports their products with 2 different processes. One process if you call their call center. A completely different process if you order via the web. The customer experience is VASTLY different, depending on the channel you choose, but the product you receive is the same. It costs the client twice as much to support their product, because they’ve replicated their entire product support infrastructure twice. This also illustrates one of my favorite tenets of the “new” web economy: Putting a traditional business on the web will usually highlight the poor business practices of the business…because now all the internal workings of customer service are now exposed to the customer.

2. Avoid audits & inspections. Any time you have someone checking someone else’s work - this is ALWAYS a waste of time. One client has 80 people performing a check of sales orders - rejecting those orders back to the sales people to correct them. Better process design would be to enforce some edits on the sales people’s order forms so that they can’t make bad selections…that way, you don’t have to check them. While this example isn’t quite so extreme for small business - it should illustrate that good process design will ensure that work gets done right the first time - instead of inspecting it into the back end - at additional cost.

3. Avoid handoffs - collapse the job responsibilities. Your customer is the ONLY focus you should keep as you design your customer service process. If you hand off from an ordering clerk, to an inventory clerk, to a shipping clerk, to a billing clerk as part of your fulfillment process, you run the risk of providing poor customer service. Many times, each department will insist upon the “longest interval” as their agreement to provide service. If each department listed has an “allowed” 72 hour turnaround, there will be a 12 day lag before your customer is served. Better process design would collapse the job responsibilities (with more training) to a “customer service agent” that can handle the transaction from initial order through to billing fulfillment. That way, inefficiencies of handoffs are avoided, and your “customer service agent” can ensure that the customer has been truly served.

A business is nothing but a collection of it’s processes. Make sure yours are designed to take care of your customers - not your internal groups.

Posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.