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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

As a general rule, businesses should organize work into well-defined processes when the goal is creating large numbers of identical or nearly identical outcomes, as when Volkswagen needed to install the software that conned the EPA into hundreds of thousands of identical diesel Passats, Beetles, and Jettas.

Designing the software? That’s more of a practice.

As it turns out, there’s a third way to organize work that can, in some situations, give you the best of both worlds — the scalability of business processes without losing too much of the flexibility you get from business practices. We’ll get there in a minute.

But first, closure. The heating coil showed up Tuesday. Tracking number? Never got one. The service tech showed up Thursday and installed it … but didn’t need it, as he already had the replacement part in his truck. He was also kind enough to reverse the charges for the heating coil that was damaged in transit and delivered to North Carolina.

Thanks to all who offered empathy, sympathy, and advice for last week’s account of our adventures in Customer Elimination Management (CEM) and the Six Stupid Methodology so often used to implement it.

Underneath the six stupids enumerated last week is a single root cause: An intense desire to dumb down work until any gerbil can handle it. It’s a fundamental underlying assumption of well-designed business processes: Execute the steps in the proper sequence and quality automatically happens.

Cooks follow processes — recipes — to make meals. Chefs, in contrast, are practitioners of the art of haute cuisine.

Trying to turn customer service into a fixed set of steps and instructions is a recipe for customer elimination, as a certain unnamed retailer demonstrated to yours truly in the Case of the Burnt Out Dryer.

And “case” is the operative word: When a process has failed and customer service is needed, either (1) the customer service representative resolves the problem during the initial contact; or (2) the situation enters … or at least should enter … the realm of case management.

Case management is an example of a hub-and-spoke practice — a practice in which one person owns the situation and calls on whatever business processes, relationships, or resources are needed to resolve it. Had the first person we contacted in the course of attempting to repair our dryer assigned a case manager, it would have been a far smoother and satisfactory experience — admittedly a low bar to hurdle, but still.

Enter “Next Best Action,” which should probably be called “best next action,” but that ship has already sailed.

Very briefly, it’s a way to combine decision trees, rules-based AI, internal customer knowledge, additional customer knowledge gleaned from the social web, process tracking, and predictive analytics. The result is a system that replaces a fixed sequence of one-size-fits-just-a-few process steps with a flexible collection of possible actions, driven by a system that figures out what most logically should happen next.

In the case of our dryer repair, a next-best-action system would have learned that UPS redirected the initial part shipment from its initial destination in Minnesota to North Carolina due to in-transit damage, immediately ordered a replacement part, and notified us of the situation … my wife by text and me by email because it knows our preferred contact channels.

Having ordered the part it would have monitored the case for status changes, notifying us again when UPS picked up the part and assigned a tracking number.

And, it would have set a timer. When it expired and no tracking number was forthcoming, it would have assigned a human case manager to take it from there. Next best action doesn’t eliminate the need for human intervention. But it can narrow it down quite a bit.

Which leads to this potentially uncomfortable question:

Next best action is real. You can implement it before your competitors and take customers away from them, or you can implement it later and lose customers to them.

The question: Is your IT organization … your developers and business analysts … ready to implement it?

Let’s go one level deeper: Even if next best action isn’t in your future, something else new, different, and more sophisticated probably is.

Is your IT organization equipped to recognize it, incubate it, and put it into production?

We’re in the era of pervasive technology and IT has only three choices:

Lead, follow, or wonder what happened.

* * *

My expertise in next best action is distinctly limited. For a more in-depth account, look here.

Or, wait for the soon-to-be published The Cognitive Enterprise, in which next best action has a prominent part to play. My co-author, Scott Lee, has been implementing next best action since being part of GM’s OnStar design team more years ago than he’s willing to admit.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Six Stupid, the preferred Customer Elimination Management (CEM) process design tool, is alive and well.

The circumstances: Our electric dryer’s heating coil burnt out.

The offender: In accordance with KJR policy you’ll have to infer which failing retailer that sells and services appliances is the culprit.

The plan: The service tech who diagnosed the problem ordered a replacement heating coil, to be delivered directly to my home, scheduling its installation a full week later to allow plenty of time for delivery.

What happened instead: The day before the scheduled repair I went on-line with the tracking number, and learned the part had been delivered to an address in North Carolina. My wife, the dryer, and I all reside in Minnesota.

Three days, ten phone calls (at least four dropped while I was on hold), and various queries, expostulations, and expressions of incredulity and annoyance, led to my being “informed” (in quotes for reasons that will be apparent) that:

  • The part was delivered to the store. The service tech would, I was told, pick it up. Which store? No answer no matter how many times and ways I asked. Had the information been U.S. troop deployments in Afghanistan, it would have been safe too.
  • The part was damaged in transit, but a replacement had been ordered and would be delivered the next day.
  • (Next day): No replacement order had been placed. But don’t worry, an emergency replacement order has now been placed, and should arrive in time for the rescheduled repair. Tracking number? None has been assigned yet. But it is an emergency order. May I speak directly to the dispatcher to confirm? No. Did the service tech speak directly to the dispatcher? No. But don’t worry. It’s an emergency order.
  • (Next day): No, there’s still no tracking number. But don’t worry. It’s an emergency order. What’s that mean? It’s an emergency order. Does that mean it will be overnighted? Don’t worry — it’s an emergency order.
  • It’s not our fault. “You can’t blame us. UPS damaged the original shipment. How were we supposed to know?”

One ray of sunshine: The company has already charged us in full for the repair.

It’s the six-stupid methodology because this little morality play sits at the confluence of at least six different pieces of stupidity:

1. Blamestorming: The customer service guy blamed UPS. Yes, UPS damaged the part. But who decided to not stock the repair part, and to ship directly to my address (presumably to save money by having no handling at a distribution center)?

Any time your company puts its reputation in the hands of another company, make sure your systems communicate so you know there’s a problem before your customer knows there’s a problem.

And don’t blame-shift. Your customers don’t care why you failed. Your customers care that you failed, and that you’re going to fix the problem.

2. Dropped phone calls? That’s so last century. Correction — I managed telecom in the 1990s for a couple of years. Dropped calls are so 1950s.

3. Failure to log: At least half of the folks I spoke with started our conversation by entering the original tracking number into the UPS site and explained to me that the part had already been delivered, as if my previous calls had never happened.

4. Keeping the customer in the dark. Don’t transfer calls. Conference them and perform a verbal hand-off. And don’t use the hold button when consulting someone else internally. Conference those, too.

Among the advantages: Irritated customers like me get to express our irritation at the person who’s in a position to do something useful … or who isn’t but should be. That gives them an incentive to do something useful without prompting next time.

5. Failure to anticipate process failure. Process designers take note: Your beautiful process will work most of the time. Your exception processes will often work too.

But not always. When they fail too, don’t hobble customer service reps with handcuffs, leg irons, and blindfolds. When the defined process has failed, Free Customer Service! The rules of hub-and-spoke practice management should take over.

6. Ignoring what IT knows. IT has mostly figured this stuff out, starting with a simple principle: If there’s an outage of any kind, the help desk should know before the first user calls to complain. If not, there’s something terribly wrong beyond the outage itself.

And a second principle: The job isn’t done when the call is over. The job is done when the user’s problem has been taken care of.

If that’s important enough for employees, shouldn’t it guide interactions with real paying customers — like the ones who will buy the appliances for their new abode from just about anyone else?

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