In any company, processes are quickly established whether you design them specifically or by pure happenstance. While processes can be great in handling situations, they can often lead to less than ideal outcomes with customers.
I realize that this is highly dependent on both the industry and the type of interaction, but the ability to be flexible within processes is something that ought to be worked on more.
Far too many companies create and design strict processes by their own administrational structure, instead of thinking about the customer. This is most often apparent in support structures. How many times have a company not asked you to “please contact department XYZ instead”?
To me, this is foreign. I can see why such a process has been developed and why it is appealing, but as a company you should really fight it. Why should the customer, who contacted the company be forced to find the right contact? Isn’t this simply the job of the company?
Apparently many companies don’t seem to think so, which is a shame. Because what we also very frequently see, is that new companies to the market become wildly successful just one a very basic premise: They make the customer’s life easier.
Now I ask you, would you really want a competitor to challenge your company based on just the simple thing of a better process to deal with the customer? I didn’t think so.
