{"id":1119,"date":"2025-01-13T22:56:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T22:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=1119"},"modified":"2025-01-14T10:29:07","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T10:29:07","slug":"customer-care-and-organisation-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/customer-care-and-organisation-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Customer Care and Organisation Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s great when writing your last blog gives you an idea about what to write for your next!\u00a0 In \u2018Hooray for Humanity<\/a>\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve talked before about how there are two main types of improvement activity within \u2018lean\u2019 1) big, radical, transformative change or \u2018Kaikaku\u2019 in the Japanese and 2) \u2018Kaizen<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 incremental \u2018change for the better\u2019, smaller in nature but when all of the changes culminate together they create a culture where brilliant things happen. I\u2019ve also written previously about \u2018Organisational Tempo<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 the pace at which an organisation is able to innovate and try new things\u2026 \u00a0well \u2026. 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. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s amazing how willing they are to try new things to help the customer out.\u00a0 One of the most powerful ways to create a culture of continuous improvement is to appeal to your employees\u2019 humanity.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The \u201cwould you be happy if your mum was going through this experience?\u201d test can certainly help to focus the improvement team\u2019s mind – that\u2019s 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 \u2018this isn\u2019t good enough\u2019 urgency within an improvement project.<\/p>\n

The problem is that people get ground down working within terrible processes within broken systems \u2013 i.e. a system which doesn\u2019t allow staff to make decisions and \u2018get on and do\u2019 in the customer\u2019s best interest. \u00a0So even when you appeal to their humanity, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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\u2019t suffered a haemorrhage.\u00a0 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\u2019s neurological specialist, the consultant requested the urgent scan.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Plus \u201cpassionate healthcare advocate\u201d is one of my special skills. And I love my mum.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s imminent arrival on any of their systems.<\/p>\n

Relatively quickly however, we were seen by a first year Doctor who seemed confident that my mum hadn\u2019t suffered an \u2018acute incident\u2019 but that we needed to wait until she could ascertain why we were there.\u00a0 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 \u2018with more experience\u2019. \u00a0So we waited, in a tiny<\/em> room full of, it seemed to me (the un-medically trained), people who all had extreme chest infections.\u00a0 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 \u2018is there any way I can hurry this process along\u2019 mode.<\/p>\n

Yes, I am that irritating.<\/p>\n

Hours went by and I pleaded with staff to let my mum go home, she wasn\u2019t 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? \u00a0\u201cCouldn\u2019t we just come back tomorrow after she had had a good night\u2019s sleep, you know, in a bed, with a blanket, away from all the disease?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, that\u2019s not \u201cthe process\u201d (f.y.i. chucking \u201cthe process\u201d back in a process improvement person\u2019s 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\u2019ll miss your place in the queue and you\u2019ll have to start again from the beginning tomorrow\u201d.<\/p>\n

We eventually got the brain scan at 2am and were allowed to leave at 4am after I begged the Registrar to let us go.\u00a0 Ironically, to enable us to leave he gave us a \u201cvirtual ward\u201d 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.\u00a0 The first year Doctor obviously wasn\u2019t allowed to give those babies out.<\/p>\n

Other things I invented: a special disclaimer contract which was a halfway house between a self-discharge and going home \u2013 a \u201clook, I know that you\u2019d 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\u2019t sue you if something goes wrong, I forgo that right, but I\u2019d really rather not spend 9 hours in the TOVF.\u00a0 However, please can I keep my place in the queue? I don\u2019t want to start this hideous process again from scratch. Regards!\u201d<\/p>\n

If a waiver is good enough for a trampoline park\u2026<\/p>\n

Something else I \u2018invented\u2019: using a restaurant\u2019s \u201cyour order is ready\u201d buzzer to let people go home, or even to wait in a corridor that didn\u2019t 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\u2019t be as fun).<\/p>\n

I guess I\u2019m automatically wired to be on the look out for such improvements and innovations and let\u2019s 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\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process IS the process\u201d.<\/p>\n

But within organisations where employees are empowered to do what they need to do to care for the customer, you don\u2019t encounter as many members of staff who emit those \u2018there\u2019s nothing we can do\u2019 vibes of woe. \u00a0Of course this type of culture is easier to achieve in settings which aren\u2019t so \u2018life and death\u2019 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A couple of little innovations would have helped us to have a much better, and safer, experience.<\/p>\n

Teams whose purpose is to deliver customer service excellence are hardwired to start to think of little innovative ways to make their customer\u2019s lives better. \u00a0So as a lean person, it might be a strange thing for me to say, but I\u2019d urge you to think less about \u2018the process\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s great when writing your last blog gives you an idea about what to write for your next!\u00a0 In \u2018Hooray for Humanity\u2019 I promised to pick up on how, I […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,6,8],"tags":[76,77,32],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-organisational-culture","category-service-improvement","category-value","tag-customer-care","tag-organisation-innovation","tag-organisational-tempo","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2025\/01\/Customer-Care.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1125,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions\/1125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}