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The Seven Service Wastes

In our last blog we mentioned the concept of Lean Consumption and mentioned the seven Service Wastes. The following are the seven wastes of service that you should endeavour to avoid at all costs if you want to retain customers and build your business;

1. Delay: Providing the customers with information, product, or a service may be “free” to the supplier, that is until the customer takes their business to another supplier. Delays for the customer can take many forms; from standing in queues, on hold or waiting on the phone to waiting in at home for a service engineer.

2. Unnecessary Movement: Have you queued in one location to do one thing then had to join another queue or proceed to a different building or department to complete your mission? Too many organisations fail to consider the customer experience and set themselves up to satisfy internal departments causing excessive stress and time wasting on the part of their customers.

3. Duplication: How many times have you found yourself filling in multiple forms or repeating data when you have been to a government department, tried to book a holiday, called a contact centre or opened a new account at your bank? Duplication is a time consuming and highly annoying waste that can drive your customers away.

4. Errors: Not receiving what was expected, or even not receiving anything at all.  How many times have you received defective goods or has a service not actually performed as expected?

5. Incorrect Inventory: Products that are out of stock, expired; how many times have you had to “make do” with an alternative product or service because what you really wanted was not available?

6. Opportunity lost: How many times has a customer facing representative been rude to you, ignored you whilst conducting conversations with staff, been unfriendly, or just lacked basic knowledge? All of these are opportunity lost for attracting new customers or retaining current ones.

7. Unclear Communication: How clear are the instructions and messages that you send out to your customers? How many times in your experience have you had to fill in forms with industry jargon that you do not understand, or have you stood in the wrong queue or gone to the wrong department? Organizations must consider how clear their communications are for their customers.

Extract from John Bicheno’s excellent ‘The Service Systems Toolbox’, 2012. Also recommended ‘The New Lean Toolbox’ and the ‘The Lean Games Book’ by John Bicheno published by PICSIE Books

Find out more about Lean Consumption here…

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