A common question customer service teams ask themselves is "how we can become for adaptable, resilient and responsive to customers?"
In our view, it's not about new tools, frameworks or rituals. Sure, they can help and are part of the mix but alone they won’t give you the operational agility you seek unless you also have these three key ingredients:
1. TRUE CUSTOMER FOCUS
Most companies and teams have this in some shape or form as one of their main values and goals. Every service organisation has some sort of customer satisfaction statement on its website, as part of their marketing campaigns, or in posters around the office. But the reality is that many organisations still fail to achieve this objective.
There are two main reasons for this. One is that organisations skew the purpose of the customer service function towards lowering costs, so what we find is managers creating a system of work that runs too lean, focused on reducing handle times, and putting pressure on people to do more with less without the right structure, implementing new technology without properly designing the service experience leading to more customer interactions when things don’t go as planned.
The second reason is the way servicing teams are traditionally structured. Teams are segregated in front and back office, in most cases, leading to different areas of the business working in isolation – functional structure causes silos. What you then start to see is teams setting their own goals, targets, and KPI’s without understanding the impact of those for the company’s customers.
For true agility, we believe that service organisations and teams need to use a Systems Thinking or a Design Thinking approach to the way they structure and organise themselves, starting with the customer first.
2. KEEP IT LEAN
By keeping it Lean, I mean build a culture in your organisation or team where the focus of everyone is on: eliminating waste, adding value for the customer, and improving the flow of work.
This culture will then flow through to the way people work, that is, an organisation where SIMPLICITY is well regarded and seen as a key competitive advantage. This involves looking at the way products or services are designed, built, and delivered to customers and also the way internal processes, meetings, and collaboration tools are designed and run.
A service organisation or a team where an iterative approach of working (plan, do, check and adapt), a continuous improvement mindset are used by all teams, and metrics and goals are set with what matters to the customer in mind will be gain the advantages of operational agility.
3. BRAVE LEADERSHIP
The third key ingredient to achieve agility is having brave leaders across all levels of the organisation.
None of the previous two points will work or even be considered by an organisation if their leaders are not willing to take some risks and do things differently. To challenge the norm in the way most teams and organisations are being managed.
So, what makes a brave leader? In our view, brave leaders are servant leaders. They relinquish power in favour of the team. They are there to remove roadblocks. They set a vision and let the smart people they hire to do their work. Only to intercede when there is a need or the vision is not being met. They feel a tremendous sense of achievement through others achieving.
Brave leaders also cultivate a culture of trust and develop other leaders; and above all, brave leaders are vulnerable. They are willing to take imperfect action and are not afraid of admitting they don’t know all the answers.
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