Why Efficient Processes Can Transform Service

We understand why service-focused teams tend to be sceptical about the relevance of systems like Lean Manufacturing. After all, to stand out and inspire confidence, we strive to anticipate - to meet customers' needs ahead of time -  because "just in time" can mean too darn late. We insist on keeping "excess" inventory, because it means we can maintain our high service standards even when unexpected demand occur. We even encourage our employees to make "repetitive" motions on behalf of customers precisely because willingness to be inefficient on their behalf is read by our customers as caring. More generally, we often need our employees to be "inefficient" in their caring for customers, because it enhances the customer's valuation of us.

For these reasons, our kind of enterprise seems more easily reconciled with a second principle of Lean Manufacturing: Value is determined by your customers. If it takes a thousand "inefficient" experiences to create loyal customers with confidence in us, so be it. Yes, It's slow, hard work to provide the kind of lavish, painstaking attention that produces unqualified positive reactions. But when our customers' satisfaction and loyalty are high, they value us highly. And when we are highly valued, we earn more. Hard measurements such as defect reduction metrics are important in service as well as in manufacturing, but there is something more here as well: In service-focused businesses, our customers don't tend to quantify the source of their happiness with a generalised glow, a vague feeling that they like us and want to return, and a desire to tell their friends about us. That is the only sort of "value assessment" our loyal customers tend to assign to superb service.

so can the "efficiency value" concept really help us serve our customers better? It can, we believe - so long as you restrict its territory a bit. We do want to be highly efficient - especially behind the scenes. Improving behind-the-scenes efficiency also serves our customers well by reducing errors, improving delivery time, and keeping staff fresh and alert.

Similarly, in online commerce, behind-the-scenes streamlining of customer choices through analysis of customer patterns increases value for company and customers want to proverbially "help out in the back" by doing their own account management, this can increase your efficiency and help you provide faster service at a lower price. We recommend such self-service be voluntary in most business contexts, or that you at least include systems that monitor customer frustration levels an provide them with many escape hatches - like effective, well-staffed online support chat and a toll-free hotline, just in case they get stuck.