Customer Service Sludge

Part 6: How To Eliminate The 5 Key Causes of Customer Service Sludge

This is the sixth in a 7-part Profitability series coinciding with the July 14 release of my new book, Profit In Plain Sight: The Proven Leadership Path to Unlock Profit Passion and Growth by New York publisher Morgan James, AND the accompanying 2015 Return on People Benchmark Report that will help you shatter your profitability speed limits, set the bar higher, and achieve your new goals.

Part 6: The Hidden Secret to Quality: Eliminate The 5 Key Causes of Customer Service Sludge

I’m sure you’ve had nightmare experiences as a customer, and I sure know I have. In fact, I remember being on the other side of the fence back in my corporate days, passionately pleading for additional staff in the department we called Client (don’t) Care to deal with 2 hour wait times on hold… only to be told by the CEO that since our clients were under contract, we didn’t care about customer service! I left shortly thereafter.

But here’s a huge AHA! you’ll get from reading Profit In Plain Sight: 80% of the time or more, it’s our own self-inflicted wounds as business owners that create the nightmares our customers tell everyone about and put unnecessary costs into our business!

Here are the surprising facts: tackling just 5 categories of issues will eliminate almost all of your self-inflicted wounds that keep customer service busy fixing, fixing, fixing… along with all the needless costs that go with that.   Even more surprising… with just a little bit of time and effort, you can quickly identify just those issues are that you’re solving over and over again, and get rid of them for good, just by doing a simple little exercise called root cause analysis.

I remember working with one client who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lean consultants and still had a pile of defective products at the end of the assembly line. We went at the problem with something as simple and basic as coloured post-it notes, and the pattern that emerged was crystal clear. Within 60 days, he’d cut the costs of rework and waste in half. What I hope you’ll love about the book is that every single chapter has 3 practical solutions, but for readers who want to dig deeper, I’ve included links to free training videos that move past the ‘shoulds’ that most books are full of, and take you right to the hows. This book reflects my desire to really have impact and revitalize the economy. All you have to do is step up and use it!

Just following the simple prescription for getting that sludge out of your business can double your profits in a hurry, AND it creates unbeatable value that makes customers want to come back for more.

What’s the biggest self-inflicted wound you ever discovered in your business, and how did you get rid of it?