Is your service-based company firing on all cylinders? Are there areas where productivity is not where it should be? If so, it’s time to find where the breakdowns are happening. To do that you need to take a look under the hood of your company’s systems. That’s a lot of moving parts. So how are you going to capture the breakdowns?
Categorize your company’s systems into workflows, – your team’s responsibilities, and services, -what your customers see and interact with. Each workflow or service is made up of scenarios, meaning it has a distinct beginning and end. These scenarios can then be broken into manageable phases that can be analyzed for breakdowns.
Breaking down scenarios into phases will allow you to take a deeper look into your company’s systems.
How do we do this? First, think about different areas of your business. For example, customer service, shipping receiving, employee workflows, and standard operating procedures (SOP).
- What services do you provide your customers?
- What workflows do your teams perform?
- Finally, what services and workflows blend both the customer and team experience?
You are the expert in your company. Ask yourself: where are the areas that missteps happen the most, where do your clients struggle the most with your services, are your employees struggling to follow a particular SOP correctly?
Once you’ve narrowed down the workflow or service. Such as the customer’s experience in your store or restaurant. Next, identify the scenarios of the service, and list the steps. The customer pulls into the parking lot, enters the store and gets in line. She looks at the menu, and places the order, and finally takes her seat. Are there any areas within the lifecycle that you see opportunities for improvement? This is a very simplified and incomplete scenario but within just this, there are at least five phases that can be broken out and examined.
For example, customer navigation through the restaurant is one small phase in the entire customer scenario but now you have a focused aspect of your service. You can break this phase into steps, which define what is happening. Each phase should have no less than seven or no more than 12 steps, any more then you’re probably overlapping into another phase of the service.
If the phase is smaller than seven steps combine it with another phase. Having said that, overlap is a good thing, it will happen as you analyze more phases and will begin to show you a more holistic map of your company and even help you realize other associations in your company’s systems that you can take advantage of. For example, how the placement of merchandise in your store affects customer navigation.
If you create step definitions for all the phases in a scenario and keep doing that for other scenarios you will gain a better understanding of how your workflows and systems interact and may even see opportunism you didn’t know existed.
In the next post, I will describe how to isolate those breakdowns and create a heat map to visualize where the breakdowns are occurring through the phases.
