Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Business Lessons Through Tragedy

We can't fail to be moved by the tragic story of 17 year old David Iredale who lost his life on a bush walk which went wrong in 2006.

The greatest tragedy of the entire story, emerging during the inquest, is that it appears his death could have been avoided. It has been reported that his repeated calls to the 000 emergency number were met with sarcasm, insensitivity and slavish attention to an ill-conceived script. Vital information from the calls, which may have helped pinpoint where David was lost, was apparently not passed onto police until some days after the calls were made.

According to reports :

"The court heard a major failure of all calls was that relevant information David provided about his whereabouts was not recorded or passed on to police rescuers. The operators had been "fixated" on asking for a street address because it was in accordance with their training and the steps they were to follow within the computer program."One particular call, the last call we received from Mr Iredale, the calltaker's demeanour appeared quite uncaring, not responsive to information received and the distress that was evident from the caller," Superintendent Payne said."

The operators were 'fixated' on a scripted call procedure and they allowed this fixation to override their common sense (and perhaps compassion). In this case this slavish adherence to procedure my have helped contribute to a death. Most of us can understand that no street address can be provided for a walker lost in dense bushland - it is common sense.

Perhaps there are factors here which might mitigate the actions of the triple-0 staff - maybe it has been proven that deviation from procedure in emergency calls causes more tragedy than it averts - after all in many emergency situations, such as the evacuation of an aircraft, failure to observe procedure may risk other's lives.

Most of us in business don't live in a world where our actions have life or death consequences (thank goodness), and this blog is about business. But, there are business situations where systems and procedures are allowed to overrule common sense in the same way as occurred in the David Iredale case, and it is generally to the detriment of the customers of the business.

How many times have you bumped into a futile conversation with a call centre operator which defies all common sense; or tried to fill out a web form which demands a field which you can't fathom before you can move on?

I once had a situation where I had four separate accounts with a major corporation. I had always wanted one consolidated account but after some of months of trying to organise it I gave up - their systems just didn't allow it. Apart from the fact that this meant frustratingly that I had four separate monthly payments to make rather than one it wasn't much of a bother - until I moved and had to change the billing address. I phoned to change the billing address and first had to "identify myself" to the operator. We went through the long list of questions and my responses until I heard the magic words , "OK, thank you sir, I have identified you so now I can update your address details.", which he proceeded to do for the first account. I then asked him to change the details for the next account and the first thing he said was he would have to ask me some questions in order to "identify me"! On the same phone call to the same operator, for four separate accounts in the same name, I had to go through the same identification process four separate times. As I got increasingly annoyed, he kept on telling me "it was procedure" and he had no choice other than to go through it. I kept on pleading it was nonsense and it was clear to me that he agreed but he had to do it anyway.

Common sense and empathy are the two most valuable attributes any business can apply when dealing with it's customers - unfortunately so many businesses mistakenly don't allow them to come to the fore.

Organisations, particularly larger, distributed ones, need procedures and some rules if they are to function efficiently. But if you really want to satisfy and delight customers, and even potentially turn them into evangelists for your brand, you need to make sure you build 'escape hatches' into processes which allow common sense to override dogma.

It shouldn't be an afterthought. It is fundamentally important in engineering a customer experience in a high growth business.

1 comment:

The Profit Frog said...

Tim, Your comments are valid to a degree re the illogical process that some businesses follow to the detriment of customer service.
However, I have learned one truth and that is, the person who is the telephone with you is NOT the person capable of making a logical decision - nor do they show any willingness to take responsibility nor initiative to address your problem - or the problem with the systems that limit application of real customer service.
Worse still, is that most often they are too scared to take the risk to raise the issue with management. It is more of a problem in big corporations. I have found smaller orgs are willing to hear feedback.
Good luck if you are able to shake the big bizs into action. Cheers, Terri