I frequently hear from people that they’re not satisfied with the performance of their Customer Facing System, whether it’s a customer service center, a collection center, a store front, or a front desk. Customer Facing Systems often don’t live up to expectations. Does yours? Have you asked why?

Some systems don’t work well because they “jest grow’d:”. No one ever designed them or considered them seriously, they started small and just kept adding new parts as the needs grew. Pretty soon, they were bigger than ever expected. One manager I spoke with who started with 6 people was frustrated when the 600 working for him couldn’t get things done as well as as fast as the 6!

Other systems were designed by ‘experts’ who applied basic system design principles, designed and implemented software, added telecommunications, and built processes. All of this at tremendous cost. I’ve come in after such projects and often found impressive equipment, massive reports, and a huge price tag, but a failed system. These designed are often the result of what we’ll learn to call ‘Hard Systems Thinking’.
If you’re exceptionally lucky, you got just the right system and just the right implementation and everything works perfectly. However, there are lots of places where this isn’t the case. Chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you are unsatisfied with your system. Maybe you don’t know why. Maybe it’s just a feeling of unease in the pit of your stomach that tells you it’s not doing as well as it could. Whatever the case, you know there’s a problem even if you can’t pin it down. Chances are, you’ve got a solution to the wrong problem.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about that phrase I used earlier: Hard Systems Thinking. Hard Systems Thinking is basically the engineering approach to building systems. It starts with a goal, creates a specification, builds a system, and delivers it. Often at great cost. A fundamental assumption though is that you know what the goal really is. What the problem is that you’re trying to solve. It’s amazing how often this isn’t true.

Many engagements have started with a company calling in a major or minor consulting firm, giving them explicit directions for what they wanted, and starting a massive project that went on and on and on. All to often, these projects either didn’t finish or finished with a system that just didn’t do what needed to be done. Getting the right system in such circumstances is pure chance because the starting point just wasn’t right.

When starting to resolve the problem in your gut, the worst thing you can do is decide on the problem and hire a consultant to fix it, because they’ll probably wind up solving the wrong problem. What you need to do is understand the problem in enough depth to deal with it. I’ve spoke to managers and executives many times in these situations and more often than not, they were certain they knew what it was all about and felt they didn’t need any assistance in determining the nature of their problem. Often, following up 1-2 years down the line, they had found out they really didn’t understand their problem.

A Hard Systems or Engineering approach works with systems and software and procedures and ignores the human issues. A great effort may be made to create user interfaces and to design processes and workflows, but the human element is still getting short shrift. If one is to really understand what’s going on, one has to recognize that a Customer Facing System is a Human Activity System which is more than just hardware, software, processes, and people, it’s also a sociological system and a political system with an underlying cultural system that can make or break even the best designs. Too often, the problem AFTER one of these very expensive interventions by a major consulting organization is that the cultural system is fighting back.

Any real system involves both sociology and technology, it’s a Sociotechnical system.

The system is also dependent on the environment. No human activity system stands on it’s own. It interacts with its environment. This leads to other problems. So how do you deal with this? By starting further back and working to understand the WHOLE system and not just the technological part of it. If you don’t you’re doomed to fail.

The approach I learned for dealing with this situation and have come to apply, though maybe not perfectly, is known as ‘Soft Systems Methodology’ (SSM). I certainly don’t do it as originally conceived, but it was always intended as a process that could be adapted by its practitioners. I adapt it as needed, building insight until I can explain the total system and it’s functioning at least as well as anyone within the organization. I’m going to spend some time going over how I apply SSM in learning how to make an organizations Customer Facing Systems work better.

Categories: Hard Systems, Human Activity Systems, Soft Systems