Too many processes will not help your business
Businesses exist to help customers with their problems, and not giving them more problems than they already have. This may seem like a simple theory which anyone can tell if they bother to use common sense, and yet it is something that most businesses, big and small, failed to do.
For example, a customer needs to claim for a medical fee. It would help if the business concerned can make the entire process of approving the claim as simple as possible. Things like 12 hours or even 24 hours approval certain help. Imagine what would happen if the claim process is 1 month long and the customer is required to provide not only photocopied receipts but also original ones, handed to the company’s office by the customer himself. To make things worse, the company’s offices don’t operate on weekends.
Talk about helpful customer service 
Another example, a customer recently lost his wallet to a robber. He called company A to cancel all his cards, and also to ask for an insurance claim (to cover the cost of the card replacement). Company A said yes, it can be done. The customer was relieved and thanked company A for it. Few weeks later, the claim was rejected. Why? Because the customer did not provide the original supporting documents (including the official bank statement which is required to cover the cost of the lost ATM card – worth RM 12). The customer was furious because he still could not get his credit cards back and he, who has been the customer for 5 years, was forced to show so many documents for something worth RM 12. He called the company up, scolded them and cancelled the membership on the spot. The company lost a very loyal customer who used to spread the good words about this company to his friends.
The above 2 examples, I believe, might have been experienced by many of you before. When we’re in trouble, we expect the companies which we’ve paid to help us, to…well…help us. Instead, what we get is processes and unnecessary procedures, which only give us more headaches than help. I must admit that it’s not wrong for these businesses to have processes and procedures, but they need to abstract them from the customers and not troubling them.
Look, if your business is giving me more headache than helping me, then I will just go to another business and you most probably won’t see me AND my friends. End of story.
Its common. Many processes are written to make life easy for internal operations, not the public.
Actually companies do know the problem and they also know the solution. So why aren’t they rushing to fix it? Because in some cases, the benefits of inefficiency far outweigh efficiency.
If you’ve looked around, you’ll sometimes find an internal corporate ecosystem feeding off the wastage produced by inefficiency. You bust that open and you might stand to lose tax benefits, supplier relationships, partner relationships, even client relationships. You could destabilize an inefficient-but-working service delivery mechanism. The question is often, how do you cure the cancer without killing the patient. It can be very hard to do depending on what’s at stake.
So I’ve learnt that not all companies want efficiency, especially established companies who think they are too large to fail. These companies often count on the probability that for every fussy customer like you and me, there are thousands who just shrug and keep their silence. They know that other companies might actually be worse and that eventually you’ll come back to them.
It seems to be the reality of business in a lot of places.
Damien Tan
6 May 09 at 11:21 am
@ Damien
Actually there are some businesses which remove the “extra layers” in order to help the customers better. I’ve encountered some of them and sadly, most of them are based in UK. Seems like our culture here is — businesses have the final say, not the customers.
We can see that in telco, banks, etc. When you need help, there will always be that many level of “stages” that you need to go through. But when they need your help, such as pushing a credit card to you, they will remove all those “stages” in order to reach you easily.
Alvin Lim
6 May 09 at 4:37 pm