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2000 by Jobs and Money. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Reduce Backlog Before It Reduces Your Business
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It's not the technology, it's the people
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By Mark Heisler and Suzanne Baldino Jones
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It's not the technology, it's the people By Mark Heisler and Suzanne Baldino Jones Lincoln Investment Planning, Inc.Vice President of Marketing Tom Forst was in trouble and he knew it. Backlogged orders, requests for information and routine requests were piling up at Lincoln Investment, a Wyncote, Pa-based investment planning firm.
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As sales, customer service and management consultants, we've seen this situation time and time again. The backlog problem becomes even more severe-especially for retailers or season providers of "soft" services-around this time of year.
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Backlogs impact more than service delivery. While things may look golden at the front office, for the people filling the orders, dealing with communication problems and other mishaps, backlogs can easily become a nightmare.
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L incoln was just such a company, having grown steadily since its founding in 1968 by offering a broad selection of investment options for diverse clientele such as school districts, universities, churches and hospitals. That kept Lincoln financial representatives busy designing portfolios and strategies to help investors meet their goals.
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Maybe too busy.
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Forst described while new business was constantly coming in the door, it wasn't being processed very quickly. Reducing the backlog and instituting same-day processing became our mission. Where oh where was our enemy?
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While it is easy to blame technology as the leading suspect in the crime of backlog, this is not usually the case.
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In Lincoln's case-and most others-it isn't so much the technical systems that need work, but the people. When we were called in to remedy the situation, we began to look at how employees interacted with each other. From that, we got a good snapshot of how they were relating to their customers. We found that while the customer service fulfillment process needed some adjustment, some real overhauls had to be accomplished on the human side of the business equation.
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If people inside your company aren't listening to each other, it's quite a stretch to ask them to grant that same consideration to your customers. Unfortunately, it's easy to forget who the most important people are when things seem crazy at the office. Put simply, it's the customer. It's always the customer.
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Most business owners pay more attention to getting new customers than taking care of the ones they have, and that could be a big mistake.
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On average, most businesses lose 20 percent of their customer base every year. Seven of 10 of those customers leave because they feel ignored. It doesn't have to be that way. By concentrating upon reducing bureaucracy within the organization and satisfying the customer's needs first, Lincoln's backlog soon became a bad memory. We tell companies to "listen with their eyes."
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Change is another big consideration. Because we have extensive corporate and consulting backgrounds, we happen to be quite accomplished at identifying necessary change within an organization to meet goals such as reducing backlog and implementing same-day order processing. The steps aren't that difficult, but they are huge. Prepare the staff for change, eliminating the confusion and increasing the quality of the product by enhanced customer service will result in a more profitable bottom line. It makes little sense when one side of the company doesn't know what the other is doing. For that reason, we suggest integrating service delivery and customer retention efforts.
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Once same-day processing was instituted at Lincoln, processing backlog was reduced to zero. Forst tells us service calls dropped by more than 50 percent and overtime was reduced by 20 percent. Those are numbers with which we could all be happy.
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It also helps that we practice the same advice we offer our clients: Since our inception in 1996, our growth and revenue have doubled each year. What we tell our clients, we do ourselves.
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Mark Heisler and Suzanne Baldino Jones are principals of Competitive Business Strategy Group, a management consulting practice located in Mount Laurel, N.J. For more information, call (888) 411-5800. E-mail at mheisler@cbsg.com or sbjones@cbsg.com.