Fish Bone for Customer Excellence

Customer Excellence has been and still is one of the most favorite topics of discussion among professionals from different industries. Some of the gurus from different fields share their thought on the topic:

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
-Peter Drucker

The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
-Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
-Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; with respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
-Azim Premji

Many professionals say and believe that these are all motherly statements/sweet talk and get confused when it comes to using science & technology to achieve their organizations’ prime objective – Satisfied Customers

Customer Excellence has evolved over time and now it’s more a science then arts. Today there are many tools available which can help professionals deal with their Customer Excellence challenges in an organized manner.

Fish Bone is one such tool that could be used to get to the root cause of Poor Customer Excellence efficiently in a structured approach.

One may use this tool almost with as many factors one wants to evaluate, be it 4Ps of Marketing (Product, Price, Promotion, Placement), 5 Ss used in Service Industry (Surrounding, Suppliers, Systems, Skills, Safety) or the 6Ms used in Manufacturing Industry (Machine, Method, Material, Man Power, Measurement, Mother Nature) or any other relevant method.

Using Fish Bone, An Example:

Let’s see how it works! Assume that we are running an organization that offers some service to customers. For the past few months we are observing that our Churn ratio is increasing (Churn= Customers who quit our service and switched to competition). So we need to find out the exact cause which will then help us take corrective actions to get back on track. Hence we use Fish Bone diagram and evaluate the factors we think might be responsible for the high churn ratio.

For example we want to evaluate above four factors (Equipment, people, Process, Culture) as shown in the fish bone:

Equipment: Brainstorming with team if our equipment played/playing any role in the churn? Maybe our customers are leaving because of our equipment being obsolete or slow.

People: Most of the times customers churn because of how the service providing organizations treat them. Time to reflect if our team is taking care of customers? What did some of the customers complain about before churning? Was it because of any mishap from any team member?

Process: At times customers churn because of organization’s specific process, policy, SOP (the killer….). We should ponder if our SOPs are there to serve customers or just to make things difficult? If it’s latter then it could possibly be one of the main reasons of high churn ratio. Discuss with team, especially members who are in direct contact with customers, they know best which process is helping customers and which one needs to be garbaged.

Culture: One of the most critical aspects of customer service is the culture of the organization itself. This is probably one factor that has the power to make or break any organization, especially a service providing firm. Evaluate how team members feel about the organization? Are things getting delayed even when proper equipment and processes are in place? Could this be the reason why customers are churning?

Once we have brainstormed all the possible causes and the reasons why they are happening, we get a clearer picture of the situation in hand and hence reach the root cause of the problem efficiently. If you want to take Fish Bone to the next level, you may use an extended version (Fish Bone -CNX) which focuses on other dimensions that play a vital role in reaching a solution, one which is simplest and most suitable to organization’s needs.

Food for Thought – Conclusion:

Steve Jobs once said: “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.“

Albert Einstein said something similar long ago: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex; It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

So start making things simpler when it comes to resolving Customer Excellence challenges in your organization. Remember simple is always better 🙂