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This is the 5th
article in the series “Avoiding the Death Spiral While Reducing
Operating Costs” covering approaches to reduce operating costs
while maintaining customer confidence and increasing customer
satisfaction. Topics in this series include:
- Cease activities that provide
no value-add
- Implement efficient and
repeatable processes
- Focus on existing product
quality instead of new features and functions
- Enabling customers to
self-serve
- Perform elements of the work
with lower cost labor
- Segment the customer base and
provide “appropriate” levels of support for each
- Make informed, not random,
cuts
- Cease big, expensive projects
with long-term ROI
- Renegotiate vendor contracts
In this edition
we will cover: Focus on product quality instead of new features
and functions.
To make the most
of the current economic environment you are encouraged to take
actions that will directly benefit your existing customers. While
your customers may have been originally “sold” on your features
and functions they now have significant experience with the
performance of your products and services. To the extent that you
are meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations on feature,
function, quality and reliability you have some of the key
ingredients necessary to establish a loyal customer-base and run a
highly efficient organization.
If, however, the
products you provide the market-place have quality and reliability
issues (i.e., hardware malfunctions, software bugs, etc.) then you
not only have a customer satisfaction issue, but your operating
costs are higher than they need to be.
Is the following
scenario all too familiar to you? Your company releases a new
product (or version of an existing product). New customers buy it
and existing customers upgrade to it. There are flaws that “could
have been” caught within an effective quality assurance test (or
prevented further upstream). Customers call-in to report the
problem (they aren’t sure if they have installed it properly, are
using it right, or if there is a quality/reliability issue). Your
front-line team troubleshoots the issue, reproduces the outcome
experienced by the customer and determines that the customer has
properly installed and is correctly using the product. The
call-center hands-off the issue to your Tier II organization. Tier
II troubleshoots, reproduces the outcome and confirms that it is
an Engineering issue. Tier II hands-off the issue to Engineering.
Engineering must prioritize this problem report amongst others
previously received and provide feedback to the call center to set
customer expectations. This chain of events could take hours,
days, weeks or months…
Back to the
customer…Meanwhile, the customer cannot effectively perform their
job, using your product. If the issue is causing significant
impact and cannot be immediately resolved by Engineering the
customer demands a work-around. This work-around could come in the
form of identifying ways to accomplish the objective using an
alternative function in your product, or it could require a
temporary fix created by your Tier II or Engineering organization.
The impact of the above scenario includes, at a minimum:
- Customers
becoming increasingly skeptical about your products and their
satisfaction will decrease.
- Your call
center, Tier II and Engineering teams spending time in
“reactionary” mode, a highly inefficient way to use your
resources.
- Your
Engineering team being required to ensure that the “next”
product release includes the temporary fix(es) that have been
implemented ensuring subsequent releases don’t reintroduce the
problem(s).
The adage “get it
right the first time” is what this lesson is all about. If you
should find yourself in this scenario you are encouraged to:
- Implement an
effective quality assurance process and methodology through-out
the product development lifecycle.
- Put
significant focus (senior management attention) on “plowing
through” oustanding quality and reliability issues.
- Let your
customer-base know what you are doing, to set their
expectations.
- Do what you
said you will do.
The above steps
“may” initially have to come at the cost of delays in releasing
new features and functions. In many cases you will find that your
customers would rather have what they’ve already purchased working
properly than new features and functions.
If the products
you provide the market-place have a high-degree of quality and
reliability then not only will your customers be more satisfied,
but your operating costs will be lower than they otherwise would
be if you are “subsidizing” inefficiencies inherent in
organizations delivering poor quality products. Make no mistake,
where there is software (for example) there are bugs. However, the
ratio of problem reports, due to malfunctions or bugs, should
represent a very small percentage of the total number of inquiries
your call center receives from the customer.
Upcoming
newsletter editions will cover additional items on the topic of
“Avoiding the Death Spiral While Reducing Operating Costs”.
Previous articles in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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