Elisabeth Swan, Managing Partner of GoLeanSixSigma.com
Process is more important than training.
That's tough for me to admit as a trainer, but it's true. You can give someone the best training and then give them a lousy process, and the results will be poor. Give that same person minimal training but a fantastic process, and they'll likely do just fine.
So if you want to improve customer service, look at the process you're using to serve customers before you send anyone to training. The root cause of many service failures is a process that isn't working, or people aren't following it.
Elisabeth Swan thinks about process a lot.
She's the managing partner of GoLeanSixSigma.com, a company that provides Lean Six Sigma training and certification. The company's mission is: Revolutionize the way people learn process improvement–making it easy for everyone everywhere to build their problem-solving muscles.
Swan is also the co-author of The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit, which is a wonderful reference guide full of immediately useful process improvement tools.
We recently had a conversation to talk about how process mapping can be used to improve customer service. (You can find more information about swimlane mapping, one of the concepts we discussed, on page 64 of Swan’s book.)
Here are some of our discussion topics:
Creating an interactive process map with post-it notes.
Using swimlane maps to prevent issues from "falling through the cracks."
Maintaining customer-focus throughout the process.
Verifying processes are working as expected.
Identifying pain points in a process.
You can watch the full interview here.