John Linton
......operating a small data communications company? Apparently an endless number of things relating to every aspect of everything you do.
Following a suggestion by our senior forum administrator (not an Exetel employee) we implemented a customer suggestion box in February of this year accessed from the Exetel User Facilities. Since that time we have averaged around 6 suggestions every day of things we should do to improve our services - I am discounting the 'suggestions' that relate to some customers using the facility as a method of assistance with personal service issues. Our method of dealing with suggestions is that an Exetel director reads EVERY suggestion and either answers it themselves and then passes it to the manager in the company responsible for that area of the business to implement or answers it directly themselves as to why the suggestion cannot be implemented.
We used to keep a count of the number of suggestions we received and the number we actually implemented but I gave up maintaining that record when the numbers exceeded 1,000. I see no diminution in the number of suggestions being made after nine months and, if anything, they are increasing which leads me to the 'head line' of this musing - how can a sensibly run company over look so many good (and sometimes blatantly obvious) ideas for improving the way it operates? We would, generally as a group of people, think that we took a very pro-active approach to managing all aspects of Exetel and were constant innovators in terms of operating a technology based business but we come up with a tiny fraction of the detailed improvements to the business that our customers have done over the past 9 months - it makes you wonder how bad a shape the business would be in without the customer's inputs.....and, I suppose, how completely unfit we are to manage a business that needs so much 'tweaking' with no end in sight.
Prior to the suggestion box we used our customer forum to obtain customer feedback on improvements required and errors that needed to be corrected and the forum still generates a steady stream of very useful suggestions - though nothing like the volume from the suggestion box. Also our employees constantly made, and make, suggestions on how other parts of the company in which they are not directly involved can be improved but the sheer volume and breadth of processes covered by the suggestion box is quite stunning in comparison. I don't know what other data communications companies do in this regard - perhaps they don't have the huge number of short comings that we do?
In my early working days, in the early dawn of time, IBM used to have 'plaques' with the single word "THINK" on them scattered around various walls in the offices, corridors and even car parks and fire stairs together with a formal employee suggestion program with boxes of suggestion forms in most offices whereby any employee could make a suggestion and send it to corporate head quarters where it would be read and reviewed and, if after whatever review processes were then extant it was accepted, IBM used to pay the employee a percentage of the revenue it generated or the costs it saved over a given period. Over any given year many, many hundreds of suggestions were 'published' in the employee newsletter and some of the employee rewards were very, very large - hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. It was a very successful program in its day but I don't know, whether having to have achieved operational perfection by now, whether or not it is still in use.
I suppose that one reason we get so many suggestions is that Exetel is still a very 'young' company and we keep adding new services and processes and constantly modifying our processes and procedures and that because so much of our internal and external processing is automated our own staff have far less visibility of the minutae of the actual processes than our customers do. But that wouldn't account for the huge imbalance of suggestions customers make to the suggestions we make ourselves. I am, in no way, complaining about this situation - I am deeply grateful that we implemented it - but I am concerned that the flow of suggestions shows no sign of diminishing even after we have made, at least 1,000 corrections in less than a year. I never thought it would be possible to survive in such a tough business while doing such a huge number of things wrong.
It's a sobering thought.