Whether you’re running a Call Center, a Web Store, or just talking to customers across a counter, efficiency needs to be an important part of what you’re doing. The problem is, very few advisers give you the full story about efficiency when proposing changes to processes, technology, or anything else.

Efficiency is often looked down on by some and worshipped by others. Both go too far. Efficiency needs to be part of your planning and it needs to be part of your system, but not all efficiency is good. What could NOT be good about efficiency? The most obvious is when you can’t afford it.

Efficiency has to be cost effective and has to have the right sort of impact. If I could save you a penny per transaction at a cost of a Million Dollars, would that be good efficiency? Maybe, maybe not. If you do a million transactions a day and have a billion dollar business, that’s probably good efficiency. If you do one transaction a day and have a business that nets fifty-thousand dollars a year, it’s bad.

Even the first case where it looks like you can afford it and would have a quick payback on your investment, it could still be bad if that 1-penny change alienated customers or caused other problems that wound up either causing problems for your business or costing more than the penny per transaction you saved.

Figuring out what efficiencies are good or bad is not just a question of immediate effects, it also involves systemic effects. Unforeseen 2nd tier effects often cause problems. Anyone who has ever studied business strategy will have read cases where something that the business organization SHOULD have seen but didn’t, eventually came back to cause problems.

So this leads to the obvious question. How well do YOU understand YOUR Customer Facing System?

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, General