Service Delivery – Improve all the things

Businesses grow, teams go from 2 people to 15 and for some reason things still tend to get done the same way.   Why do we continue to do the same things?  Because that’s how it’s always been done of course.  Why is this so bad?

You’ve added a number of people, and things hasn’t been reassessed and determine if this is indeed the most efficient way to do things. We’re going to assume you’ve picked up a alot more clients then you had 5 or 10 years ago.  How do you manage all their data.  Typically you should have the data listed here available to you.

• Process:  Actual service delivery process for the services sold.  Complete workflow and approvals mapped out.
• Time:  Time entries for all tasks, applied against employee pay rates to calculate financials.  Job Margin analysis.
• Feedback/Issues:  Incidents/Complaints/Compliments from Client
• CRM:  Full view of relationship of all contact with Client
• Overall Improvements:  Service improvements or enhanced customer service possible or noticed along the way you could do for all clients
• Service Improvements:  Service delivery efficiencies (always improving your service for the next time)

More often than not however, this is not the case.   What we see more than we’d hope is:

• Process:  Broken down in an overly complex spreadsheet, or worse yet, just in a few people’s heads.
• Time:  Estimation of time or no time records kept at all (Overall day to day clock-in clock-out records don’t count)
• Feedback/Issues:  Contained merely in email and people have search for them to find them.  Feedback isn’t being utilized.
• CRM:  No system in place, Email and spreadsheets contain most data
• Overall Improvements:  No logs or notes kept to brainstorm or utilize
• Service Improvements:  Just in people’s heads, for an added step they might do next time.

Good news is that even if half of these were implemented, you’d see a drastic different in your business.  The ability to create data that will then help you make decisions, makes the choice much more impactful.  If we can’t measure it, we can’t improve it.  If we don’t have the data at all, we’re merely guessing.  Don’t guess when you could KNOW the correct answer.