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Tickets Please

13 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I use the train a lot, and I buy a lot of tickets.  The guys on East Midlands Mainline are very determined that I pay for all this travel. 1.  They have ticket checking barriers at all entrances to the platforms to make sure I have a ticket. 2.  They have train “managers” on the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: bureaucracy, complexity, East Midlands Trains, poor service, revenue generation, service design

The Stretch

9 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

How should you manage a stretch?  We all have them.  A whopping great big number forced in on top of our budgets. A couple of options: 1.  Divide and conquer:  split the two or twenty million up between departments and set them up against each other, Mano a Mano.  See who succeeds and who fails. […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: cost saving, silo management, teamwork, video

The Monument Part 2

5 November, 2010 by James Lawther 4 Comments

I wrote about monuments. Perhaps a 500 seat call centre is a monument. We have them to optimise efficiency (occupancy and productivity), they are hugely expensive to own and because of their scale they become inflexible. It isn’t easy to change agent training or the front end telephony for a 500 seat call centre. Does […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: call centre, efficiency versus effectiveness, service improvement, silo management

The Monument

3 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

In the manufacturing world they use the term “monument” to refer to any piece of equipment that is too big for its purpose. They are expensive pieces of capital equipment that drive massive economies of scale at a local level but fundamentally mess up the total system. Because of their inflexibility they must be “fed” […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capital investment, graphical user interface, information technology, interactive voice response, service design, service improvement

Process Standards

25 October, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

The Problem:How do you make sure that all your agents follow a standard process? A Commonly Held Solution:Map all your processes and hold them in a “repository” where everyone can see them. Some Questions: How do you document everything in the first place? Who should you involve? Where do you draw the line? How do […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: best practice, process control, process mapping

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