Customer Care and Organisation Innovation

It’s great when writing your last blog gives you an idea about what to write for your next!  In ‘Hooray for Humanity’ I promised to pick up on how, I believe, a relentless pursuit of excellent service experiences is directly linked to how innovative you are as an organisation, so in this January edition, let me expand on that notion.

I’ve talked before about how there are two main types of improvement activity within ‘lean’ 1) big, radical, transformative change or ‘Kaikaku’ in the Japanese and 2) ‘Kaizen’ – incremental ‘change for the better’, smaller in nature but when all of the changes culminate together they create a culture where brilliant things happen. I’ve also written previously about ‘Organisational Tempo’ – the pace at which an organisation is able to innovate and try new things…  well …. something that can really drive that aforementioned tempo and pace within small, incremental changes is an absolute care and an immense desire to deliver amazing customer experiences.

When teams have an acute sense of care for the customer, and are enabled to get on and make changes in their best interest, it’s amazing how willing they are to try new things to help the customer out.  One of the most powerful ways to create a culture of continuous improvement is to appeal to your employees’ humanity.

I learned long ago that the best way to drive improvement within healthcare for example, is to connect professionals to the feelings, hopes and fears of the patient.  The “would you be happy if your mum was going through this experience?” test can certainly help to focus the improvement team’s mind – that’s not to say that that kind of customer connection always works, particularly not out live in the field, but offline, when people have some time and space to think and reflect, it can definitely create a sense of ‘this isn’t good enough’ urgency within an improvement project.

The problem is that people get ground down working within terrible processes within broken systems – i.e. a system which doesn’t allow staff to make decisions and ‘get on and do’ in the customer’s best interest.  So even when you appeal to their humanity, there’s nothing they can do, or are able to do. They are deadened to the possibility that things might be better than they are right now.

I’ll preface this next story by sharing that my Mum was ultimately ok, but a few months ago, at 6pm, after visiting her GP at 10am that morning following some dizziness, my Mum’s GP rang her and asked her to report to a special ward in a hospital for an urgent brain scan to check that she hadn’t suffered a haemorrhage.  The GP had sent her away from the earlier appointment as she was lucid and in no pain, booked blood tests etc, but following a conversation with my mum’s neurological specialist, the consultant requested the urgent scan.

Receiving a phone call from your GP at 6pm at night is never great, particularly when they ask you to report to hospital immediately. My mum rang me to tell me what was going on and I offered to take her there and wait with her.  Plus “passionate healthcare advocate” is one of my special skills. And I love my mum.

We arrived and, despite the GP saying that she had booked my Mum into the special ward, there was seemingly no record of my mum’s imminent arrival on any of their systems.

Relatively quickly however, we were seen by a first year Doctor who seemed confident that my mum hadn’t suffered an ‘acute incident’ but that we needed to wait until she could ascertain why we were there.  After a few hours, she managed to speak to someone who confirmed that my mum had been asked to have a brain scan, so we were informed that we needed to wait to have the scan (there was a big queue) so that we could then be seen by someone ‘with more experience’.  So we waited, in a tiny room full of, it seemed to me (the un-medically trained), people who all had extreme chest infections.  I was getting increasingly tense at the thought of my delicate mum contracting something from the tiny, overcrowded virus factory (TOVF), and started to engage in full ‘is there any way I can hurry this process along’ mode.

Yes, I am that irritating.

Hours went by and I pleaded with staff to let my mum go home, she wasn’t mid crisis, and surely it was exposing her to risk, keeping her up all night in a tiny waiting room full of potentially infectious people?  “Couldn’t we just come back tomorrow after she had had a good night’s sleep, you know, in a bed, with a blanket, away from all the disease?”

“Sorry, that’s not “the process” (f.y.i. chucking “the process” back in a process improvement person’s face is a great way to anger one). The only way you can leave is if you discharge yourself and if you do that you’ll miss your place in the queue and you’ll have to start again from the beginning tomorrow”.

We eventually got the brain scan at 2am and were allowed to leave at 4am after I begged the Registrar to let us go.  Ironically, to enable us to leave he gave us a “virtual ward” appointment which was precisely the innovation that I had invented when I had worked out we were going to be sitting in the TOVF for the next 7 hours.  The first year Doctor obviously wasn’t allowed to give those babies out.

Other things I invented: a special disclaimer contract which was a halfway house between a self-discharge and going home – a “look, I know that you’d rather I stay here where I am close to medical care, but I would really rather go home. I accept liability for leaving, I can’t sue you if something goes wrong, I forgo that right, but I’d really rather not spend 9 hours in the TOVF.  However, please can I keep my place in the queue? I don’t want to start this hideous process again from scratch. Regards!”

If a waiver is good enough for a trampoline park…

Something else I ‘invented’: using a restaurant’s “your order is ready” buzzer to let people go home, or even to wait in a corridor that didn’t have a thousand coughing people in it, and the device would vibrate when it wanted you to come back for your scan (a text message would suffice but wouldn’t be as fun).

I guess I’m automatically wired to be on the look out for such improvements and innovations and let’s face it, I had a lot of time to think about how our experience could have been better that night, but I think what saddened me was how resigned everyone who was working within the system was that there really was “nothing that anyone could do”.

“The process IS the process”.

But within organisations where employees are empowered to do what they need to do to care for the customer, you don’t encounter as many members of staff who emit those ‘there’s nothing we can do’ vibes of woe.  Of course this type of culture is easier to achieve in settings which aren’t so ‘life and death’ and as litigious, like a coffee shop or a library say, but I think the principle remains – if you give people the permission to truly care about their customers and allow them to try new things to help them out, you’ll have kickstarted the innovation flywheel. Innovation has a tempo, a virtuous circle of loveliness, and that tempo is infectious. To achieve kaizen you need to enable the tiny, innovation experiments to happen.

Everything was fine with my mum in the end, and I was grateful that there were people there to check that she was ok, but there was something about that night that felt really wrong, something that felt like it was putting her in danger rather than protecting her.

A couple of little innovations would have helped us to have a much better, and safer, experience.

Teams whose purpose is to deliver customer service excellence are hardwired to start to think of little innovative ways to make their customer’s lives better.  So as a lean person, it might be a strange thing for me to say, but I’d urge you to think less about ‘the process’ and more about how your service can make people happy, how it can actually help them. Thinking about services in this way, I believe, will help people to start innovating because organisations that deliver exceptional customer service are the ones that are innovating all of the time.