Lean services

Last June I listened to Peter Day give a lovely talk to our 2007 Economics conference about the heartbeat economy - a talk built around the notion that successful businesses now and in the future will be those who manage to reduce our heartbeats when they sell us a good or a service. Increasingly customers are willing and able to switch providers, either because of declining brand loyalty (fickleness!), or because they have been enraged at the cost of time-wasting and negligible benefit from countless customer service calls to an outsourced call-centre. Or perhaps it is also because our expectations of what is good customer service have snowballed? The heartbeat rises and the blood-pressure heads north.

Peter Day’s In Business programme (31 January 2008) returned to the theme of the heartbeat economy when he looked at how lean manufacturing is being adopted in the service industry from customer fulfillment at Amazon to a refreshingly enlightened call centre on Northern Ireland. The lean services principle is customer centric since disconnecting from customers might be cheap in the short run but is hugely costly in the long run - lean means tailing service to the particular needs of the consumer. And then tracking and using the comments from them to either improve a service or get information in a feedback loop to the original supplier of a manufactured product. It is a world away from the corporate culture of the usual perception of a business call centre.

James Womack from the Lean Enterprise Institute ends this excellent programme by asking how things might change if service providers might change their processes if they had to pay compensation for every minute you have to spend in a call queue on the phone or waiting at a car dealers to get your car back after a routine service.