flaws in the corporate system

HOWEVER, by the cash registers they have signs facing the customer that say something to the effect of:

“If you cannot report outstanding service on your customer survey, please call your the store manager at [phone number] instead.”

Now this is just a guess, but I suspect that the Home Depot stores are rated by the corporate office based in part on the survey results. So the stores “cheat” by trying to divert negative survey responses to the local store rather than letting the corporate office see them…

The MBA then came up with the brilliant metric of timing the service time, and displaying it. He also thought to himself that a great motivational tool would be to tie compensation to the average duration or a service call.

Unfortunately, he did not take into consideration that the person starting and stopping the timer would be the same person who would be compensated based on what the timer showed. Hence the little fiasco you mentioned.

So, rather than malice, this is probably an example of the law of uninteded consequences. My dad always says, given a choice between malice and stupidity, always put your money on stupidity. It is human nature.

This Sears wait-monitoring procedure originated at distant corporate headquarters, probably by some pampered MBA … who was clueless how the real world works.

Top management at Sears would like prompt customer service at its stores, but does not want to spend the time or money analyzing real customer service problems … and actually ‘improving’ that operational ‘process’.

Instead, management’s gut-reaction assumed the basic ‘problem’ was lazy employees in customer-service. Thus, another management ‘stick’ was “obviously” needed to poke all those slothful employees into action. That stick was this new waiting-time-reporting procedure, which undoubtedly floods Sears corporate staff meetings with impressive “statistics” on much improved waiting times — Sears top managers eagerly pat each other on the back.

Of course, back down at the retail store trenches, both the employees & customers see that nothing has changed — just an another worthless ‘reporting’ procedure to higher management… that does not improve the actual customer-service ‘process’ at all. A better logistics system & more trained employees are the actions that would really improve customer service — but empty cosmetic changes to the process are so much easier for top managemt.

Pencil-whipping/fudging reports & gaming the managment system is a way of life in bureaucracies. ‘Reporting’ procedures don’t add quality to any process

BTW, their website has a “Ready in 5″ guarantee; however, the link to the details of this seems to be broken for now.

AKB
P.S. Please check out my site, it’s brand new and I need input.

There is a problem, in that employees are not able to meet the expected wait time for customer’s pickup, but the company may have slightly unreasonale standards. And why do they set it at under 5, when people won’t necessarily care if they have to wait, say 10 minutes? Because it gives them bragging rights and attracts more customer is it’s under 5 mintues. If they actually took the time to see how long it would take the average order to be done, they could set a more reasonable goal, say 10 minutes if it takes about 10 minutes. But if the goal is 5 minutes, and it almost always takes 10 minutes, what’s an employee to do?

The correct thing to do would be let it take the 10 minutes to show the company, look, this is just how long it takes. BUT! People don’t want to lose their jobs, or lose opportunities for better pay, etc.

This also happens everyday where I work—-AT A PHARMACY. I don’t know about you, but I would like to think the pharmacist should be graded on how good of a job they are doing at preventing errors and helping people understand about their medications, but the CORPORATE retail companies, where $$$ is the bottom line, think that fast prescriptions = more satified customers = more $$$
So, they set unreasonable and sometimes unsafe (in my case)goals for things to be ready, and then they monitor everything you do with a computer and timer. If you stop to help a grandma pick out the right kind of eye drops, uh oh, that last prescription will turn red (yes they even color code your progress) I don’t want to lie, we have also found a way to cheat the computer.

Bottom line, the company may be unreasonal. AFM himself didn’t feel like it was a crazy long wait, but that the timer issue is fraudulant.

Sorry to get off on the tanget, and thanks AFM for the post, you may have just inspired one of my future blogs.