Product quality and over‐efficient business processes...

Abstract

One of the ‘blessings of modern times’ that many of us have; without any doubt, increasingly experienced over the last decade is the fact that companies increasingly make use of specialized call centers. The reason, many companies claim, why they are using these call centers is that they, on the one hand, reduce the costs of their after-care process and on the other hand, allow them to concentrate on their core-business. And efficient these call centers certainly are! A large part of their processes is automated via menus where users, via entering pre-selected numbers, hopefully arrive at the solution/call agent of their choice. And, unfortunately, this is not always the case. I recently experienced this when I wanted to buy a train ticket for a colleague who was traveling to a railway station directly across the German border. It was a border station served by a Dutch regional train and in the menu structure I got stuck between the international call agent who told me that, since this was about a Dutch regional train, I needed to select the numbers corresponding to national rail service; at the call agent for national rail services I was told that I needed to select the numbers that correspond to international trains since the destination station was not in the Netherlands. And, however hard I tried, there was no escape hatch in the system; I either landed at A referring me to B or at B referring me to A. You can imagine that I was not entirely pleased with the quality of service. As a last resort I went to the local railway station where, at an extra cost of €3.50, I could buy a ticket from a person employed by the railway company and with knowledge of the system. He told me that you can buy local national train tickets also for the major railway station across the border. With this example I do not want to raise a negative image of the Dutch railway system; I use it often and, generally speaking, I am a happy customer. The case presented earlier is just an example how many large companies chop their main business process into individually very efficient pieces in the expectation that the efficiency of the overall business process will improve. With respect to costs, this is probably the case; I have visited, professionally, these call centers quite often and it is impressive how fast they are in handling calls for a wide range of, often very diverse, companies. Their core-business, however, is handling a maximum number of calls at a minimum cost. You can see therefore that many call agents handling phone calls from country A are often located in, far more cheaper, country B. I recently even came across people in India who were fluent in various western-European languages because they were working in call centers, in India, handling calls as if they were in western Europe. What many companies may not realize is the crucial role that especially these back-end processes have in their quality control system. I wonder, given the example above, whether the fact that I got stuck in a feedback system was by any means noticed by the quality system of the Dutch railroad. The likelihood that this will re-occur is therefore considerable. I expect that quality problems, such as the example mentioned above, will strongly increase in the future. One reason is that, especially for modern high-tech products, the service provided by the product is becoming more important than the product itself; products such as GSM phones, PDAs and modern entertainment products are more an enabler for services provided than traditional products. As a result the likelihood of problems, such as the one mentioned above, will increase. Especially with services provided by complex dynamic networks there is an increasing chance that there will be unforeseen quality issues that do not easily fit in the system. If companies, on the other hand, will continue to drive for (financial) efficiency I predict that it is likely that we will see not only very interesting new classes of quality problems in the future but also that companies will lose a considerable amount of customers because they are too efficient.