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Dead Connection

4 April, 2011 by James Lawther 1 Comment

A lady in America lost her father to cancer. His old telephone supplier are chasing her for the £300 he owes them (since he died), despite the fact that she has no legal obligation to pay. She is, understandably,  a tad upset. Innovative things that they could have done instead: Apologised profusely and cancelled the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: cost of poor quality, customer focus, information technology, innovation, service design, service improvement

Salty Coffee

31 March, 2011 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I worked for a coffee shop. It was great, we only had one problem; occasionally there was a bit of a mix up at the serving hatch. The salt and sugar were in similar containers. Sometimes we put a pinch or two of salt in our customer’s coffee, not very often, and then just a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capability, continuous improvement, customer focus, poor service, service improvement

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

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