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In: Operations Reporting-Analytics

We have all heard the phrase; “you can’t manage it, if you can’t measure it”. I also believe that “you can’t manage, it if you are always adjusting it”. When you work in a culture that is very numbers driven or reliant, there will always be pressure to adjust your data or reporting to account for outliers, one-offs, process errors etc. This is a very slippery slope. You can not eat a single potato chip and you can not make only one adjustment. When data and reports are “clean”, i.e. with no manual adjustments, the data is objective and we treat all parties/divisions consistently andRead More →

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In: Operations Best Practices, Operations Leadership

Last night I had dinner with four girlfriends and the subject of bosses came up. When the discussion ended, it was very clear that we have an epidemic of UB disease in the Boston area. And, the UBs, A.K.A, unavailable bosses are working at some of the largest, most prestigious companies, have mastered the art of managing up, but have lost sight of why they became leaders in the first place- to lead others! One friend works at one of the billion dollar, global, office supply giants and shared that when she was first hired, she worked for an awesome boss. This boss was supportive,Read More →

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In: Customer Experience, Operations Best Practices

Ben Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.  I think he may have been in technical support! Technical support and customer support leaders must begin to think of their top priority as incident prevention not incident management. Incident management focuses on reacting to customer demand (incidents, tickets, questions) and solving problems. It’s about reducing case aging, reducing backlog, achieving service levels and achieving case closure SLAs. And… as I mentioned in a previous post, there is a BIG problem with problem solving as it happens too late in the process. In most cases, once there is an incident, weRead More →