See it … Say it … and Sort it or Flag it (SSSF)
Following on from my previous article Customers are the North Star, I wanted to make a quick post about SSSF.
Everyone in an organisation, needs to feel empowered not only complete the day-to-day tasks and assignments, but to flag anything they see whether that be an improvement, a fault or a potential future problem; both within their direct domain or outside of it.
So Why is This so Important?
As a leader I can say, I'd rather spend 10-15mins having a conversation with someone who's flagging something to me, so that I can empower them to spend time pursuing the opportunity, or start assessing the risks and impact (if any) of a potential problem.
Also no-one has the bandwidth or capability to be involved with all projects at all times and therefore be aware of everything that's going on. So as a leader I rely on my team and those around me to subject matter experts as well as to be my eyes and ears when I can't be there, and finally bring domain knowledge and background to a situation.
A Short Story
To emphasise my point, here's an example which points out that organisations can be “organised to neglect their awareness. Like most companies, Expedia divided its workforce into groups, each with its own focus.”.
This in my opinion, needs to be avoided at all costs, as this neglect of awareness leads to inefficiencies, disorganisation, blame culture and the dreaded “not my problem”.
"In 2012, Ryan O’Neill, the head of the customer experience group for the travel website Expedia, had been sifting through some data from the company’s call center. One number he uncovered was so farfetched as to be almost unbelievable. For every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia—reserving flights or hotel rooms or rental cars—58 of them placed a call afterward for help
The primary appeal of an online travel site, of course, is self-service. No calls necessary. Imagine a gas station that allowed you to swipe a credit card right at the pump—and then, about 60% of the time, something went wrong that forced you to go inside the store for help. That was Expedia.
Traditionally, the call center had been managed for efficiency and customer satisfaction. Reps were trained to make the customer happy—as quickly as possible. Short calls minimized expenses. “The lens we were using was cost,” said O’Neill. “We had been trying to reduce that cost. Instead of a ten-minute call, could we make it a two-minute call? But the real question was: Why two minutes? Why any minutes?”
When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them. O’Neill shared his findings with his boss, Tucker Moodey, the executive vice president of global customer operations. Together, they dug into a basic but neglected question: Why in the world are so many customers calling us?
They compiled a ranking of the top reasons customers sought support. The number one reason customers called?
To get a copy of their itinerary. In 2012, roughly 20 million calls were logged for that purpose. Twenty million calls!
That’s like everyone in Florida calling Expedia in one year. At a support cost of roughly $5 per call, that’s a $100 million problem. So why weren’t customers receiving their itineraries automatically? The answers were pretty simple: The customer had mistyped her email address. Or the itinerary ended up in her spam folder. Or she deleted the itinerary by accident, thinking it was a solicitation. Compounding the problem was that there was no way on the website for customers to retrieve their itineraries.
O’Neill and Moodey took their data to Dara Khosrowshahi, then the CEO of Expedia. “We’ve got to do something about this,” O’Neill recalled saying. Khosrowshahi not only agreed with their focus on reducing call volume, he made it the customer experience team’s top priority.3 A “war room” was assembled, where people from different operating groups met on a daily basis, and the group was given a simple mandate: Save customers from needing to call us. The war room group deployed solutions for the top drivers of customer calls, knocking off one at a time. The fixes for the number one issue—the itinerary requests—came relatively quickly: Adding an automated option to the company’s voice- response system (“Press two to resend your itinerary”); changing how emails were sent to avoid spam filters; and creating an online tool to allow customers to handle the task themselves. Today, virtually all of those calls have been eliminated. Twenty million support calls just vanished. Similar progress was made on the other “top 10” issues. Since 2012, the percentage of Expedia customers who call for support has declined from 58% to roughly 15%.4 The effort to reduce call volume at Expedia was a successful upstream intervention. Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening. You can answer a customer’s call and address her complaint about a missing itinerary (downstream), or you can render that call unnecessary by ensuring that she receives her itinerary up front (upstream).
Surely we’d all prefer to live in the upstream world where problems are prevented rather than reacted to. What holds us back? Looking back on Expedia’s success, what’s particularly hard to understand is why it took so long to act.
How could the company have reached the point where 20 million people were calling for itineraries? Shouldn’t the alarm bells have been ringing rather loudly by the time, say, the 7 millionth call was logged? Expedia’s executives were not oblivious. They were aware of the huge volume of calls.
It’s just that they were organized to neglect their awareness.
Like most companies, Expedia divided its workforce into groups, each with its own focus. The marketing team attracted customers to the site. The product team nudged customers to complete a reservation. The tech group kept the website’s features humming along smoothly. And the support group addressed customers’ issues quickly and satisfactorily. Notice what was missing: It was no group’s job to ensure that customers didn’t need to call for support. In fact, no team really stood to gain if customers stopped calling. It wasn’t what they were measured on. In some ways, the goals of the groups actually encouraged more calls. For the product group, whose goal was to maximize bookings, the best move was to ask for a customer’s email only once, because asking her to type it a second time would add friction. They might lose 1 person in 100 who’d be annoyed enough to abandon the transaction. But the side effect of that decision, of course, is that some customers would mistype their emails, and they’d end up calling for an itinerary. That’s a system failure. That customer never needed to call. Yet both teams would still look like heroes according to their goals: The product team closed a transaction, and the support team handled the resulting call quickly. Mark Okerstrom, who was Expedia’s CFO in 2012 and became CEO in 2017, said, “When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a license to be myopic. We’re saying: This is your problem. Define your mission and create your strategy and align your resources to solve that problem. And you have the divine right to ignore all of the other stuff that doesn’t align with that.” Okerstrom’s point is that focus is both the strength and the weakness of organizations. The specialization inherent to organizations creates great efficiencies. But it also deters efforts to integrate in new, advantageous ways. In upstream ways. And this is true in many parts of society. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We handle one problem after another, but we never get around to fixing the systems that caused the problems."
Upstream by Dan Heath
