Scenario 1: A Retail Business
Your retail business has a street presence and growing online service. In both, customer service is paramount for your success. You are constantly striving to find good staff that are focused on meeting your customers’ needs and the quick and cost effective fulfilment of online orders.
Business has been growing, but customer service has started to slip. This is leading to lost orders, more overtime and higher freight charges to expedite badly managed and delayed orders. Your staff appear to be working hard, but your managers are struggling to improve performance.
The same issues seem to keep coming up, with attempts to fix them being “band-aids” rather than permanent solutions. Your organisation needs to grow to remain competitive, but the inability to effectively manage the current business will prevent that growth.
Your stress levels are starting to build as you start to fear a decline in your business.
To turn the situation around you need to rapidly bring service performance back under control without incurring increased labour and shipping costs.
To do this your managers need to be better able to manage the process: predict the work, make sure that priorities are met and costs are controlled.
Once back in control you will be able to focus on growing the business.
