Tag: small steps

Customer Experience

Do you know what is the best thing you can do to achieve Customer Satisfaction?

If you have a business, then you know how important it is to know how much the customers like your service or product. They are the best source for learning about improvement opportunities, their ideas tell you what needs to be improved, and sometimes they even suggest solutions. You need to listen to the Voice of the Customer, if you and your team understand this, you won half of the battle, already.

I remember a situation years ago when one of our most important clients was complaining about a recurring problem. The plant was consistently delivering late, causing them problems with their customers. The root cause analysis pointed to the packaging department, where the team was encouraged to have larger runs. Their goal was to avoid changing products to minimize downtime.

In a different case, the warehouse team was ignoring the 360ยบ inspection before shipping to save time. The customer was receiving products with defects. They wanted to achieve the goal of two hours trucks turn around. The problem with these two examples is that neither of those team leaders understood the relationship between what they do and customer satisfaction.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that your business strategy and goals are aligned. Your team must know the priorities. Encourage asking questions when they have doubts. Talked with them about customer expectations and how their work affects them.

The best thing you can do to achieve your customer satisfaction goals is to accept that your team is first. It has to be a priority for you to train and develop your people. Provide them with the tools and information they need to do their job and opportunities to learn more and grow. If the team feels appreciated, they will be your secret weapon to achieve success. When you take care of your team, they take care of the customers.

CI Basics

How can you create changes in your business?

Often business owners see something that tells them that something different needs to be done. Perhaps it is a recurring problem or realizes that the business is not reaching financial goals. What is the solution? You need to identify what areas need change and prioritize. How can you create changes? There are two major ways to create change: innovation and continuous improvement.

Create changes by innovating, or not.

More often than not, innovation is a high-cost solution. While it is necessary to keep yourself ahead of the game, I like to start somewhere else. My first stop in creating improvements is to use common sense, low-cost solutions.

Common-sense solutions

What are common-sense solutions? It is to approach a problem using good judgment. For example, let’s use one of my favorite low-cost tools: housekeeping and organization. Will you agree that keeping a clean and organized workplace is common-sense? Why do you think it is? Perhaps because you know some of the following facts.

  • Clutter and disorganization are against productivity, reduces the ability to concentrate.
  • A messy workplace causes anxiety, stress, and has the potential to foster a negative state of mind, like feeling overwhelmed.

Your good judgment tells you that an efficient workplace is cleaned and organized. Therefore, a lack of cleaning and organization is a visual indicator of inefficiency. You know that this condition has to change.

Two different ways to create changes

To improve housekeeping, you can buy a fancy computerized program or use a simple low-cost solution. Your new high-cost application will help you to create checklists, assign responsibilities and follow up on the cleaning activities. But it will not help you to ensure the workplace is clean and organized.

An alternative is to use 5S, a housekeeping and organization program. This program along with waste elimination and standardization are the basics of practicing continuous improvement. CI is about creating small changes using common-sense solutions that are easy to implement and follow. When you add up all those changes you will see a huge improvement in the overall performance of your business.