When managers make changes without knowledge of the ‘what and why’ of performance they generally make things worse.
Some common examples in customer service centres:
- Buying a ‘CRM’ system when the service centre is full of failure demand. The new CRM system simply institutionalises the waste.
- Moving customer contacts to the internet as it is a ‘lower-cost channel’. If the service is one that has high variety in terms of customer needs the internet service will fail to absorb the variety of demand and failure demand will go up – more calls into the service centre.
- Creating new teams to handle ‘priorities’ or ‘problems’. Every time staff resources are separated out or specialised in some way to handle what managers perceive to be problems, exceptions or priorities the impact on capacity is negative.
Do you have a favourite example of change that has been made without knowledge? If so send it here.