Should Operations Focus on Customer Pain Points?

Celia had been thinking all afternoon about Jack and Kim’s presentation on customer-centered innovation at the leadership meeting.  She was intrigued. Using the customer as the focal point for determining where to invest their innovation dollars seemed like an approach that could help their strategic decision making. How could this approach help her organization?

As the VP of Operations, Celia’s organization received the most cost scrutiny.  Every improvement they undertook was in the name of efficiency, to reduce costs.  It was harder to address effectiveness, to look at ways they could do their work better.  As a result, her employees sometimes felt marginalized, only looked at as a cost instead of a benefit they provided to the business.  And sometimes it seemed as though their cost cutting efforts were at the customers’ expense.

For example, just last week they tested a new phone triage system that automatically directed incoming customer calls to the correct department.  It streamlined the process but for a concierge level experience, Kim wondered whether it was the right decision.  Sure, it reduced time her staff spent on the phone with customers.  But it also reduced the time customers spent interacting with their company, which didn’t seem like a good thing.

Celia wondered what would happen if they started their operational improvement efforts with the customer.  What would they discover if they took the time to listen to customers and find their pain points?  And then design solutions that addressed those pain points?  She thought her team would love it; her operations staff were natural problem solvers.  It would be great to let them loose on solving real customer problems.

Celia decided to go find Jack and Kim.  She knew it would be easy to get caught up in chasing the next emergency customer problem.  It would be easy to fall into the trap of employees proposing competing solutions for problems that weren’t well understood.  Solutions to ill-defined problems rarely provided lasting impact, often only revealing more warts. They needed a systematic way of determining and prioritizing the pain points to address … and then designing solutions that really met that need.