Quality and Innovation

This post is a collaboration between Eric Sessoms at MyCustomerCloud & Nicole Radziwill.

Everyone knows what a tool is. We use tools all the time, every day. Hammers to drive nails… cars to drive to work… glasses to read a book. Tools help us do stuff. They make our jobs easier, our lives simpler, and our existence more orderly. But we have to remember that tools only exist to help us achieve our goals… we humans are the real brains behind the brawn of our tools! And we have to figure out what goals we’re trying to achieve – or else we could inadvertently use our tools and technologies to just stumble about without making any progress towards our goals!

In the words of the political scientist Langdon Winner [1], “What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.” It’s the context of what you’re trying to achieve that makes a tool work – or fail miserably!

Here’s the scenario: you have a bunch of experts sitting in a room, trying to make a big decision about which of TWO proposed scenarios to accept. One proposal is lower risk, and one is much higher risk. ONLY ONE has the potential for an outcome to fall above the “threshold for a brighter future” – which is kind of (sort of) important in a visceral sense, but not so important that it disqualifies the lower risk proposal.

What would you do? How would you approach the decision making task in this case? How might you approach social and political concerns here (political meaning the politics of institutions in general, not necessarily the government)?

Note: This example is BASED ON A TRUE STORY and a real conversation in a panel of experts! All characters, fictional and otherwise, have been modified to protect the innocent.

If you have at least 5 years broad experience in quality, please help us validate the “Quality Systems Development Roadmap” originally published in Quality Progress in 2008 (http://asq.org/quality-progress/2008/09/basic-quality/starting-from-scratch.html). This is part of an expert systems project developed by Doug Jin, a student at James Madison University, under the guidance of Nicole Radziwill, JMU faculty member and ASQ member leader.

The 5-page, 13-question survey will be available until January 15, 2011 or 1500 responses are received, whatever comes first, so contribute now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2LYFYP!

I love the most recent XKCD that takes a swing at the soulless customer service scripts that prevent mere mortal CSRs from actually connecting with their customer and delivering authentic customer service.

This adds a new dimension to “Getting Blocked” – “I’d like to help you, but I just don’t know enough to figure this out for you, so you’re going to have to wait (possibly forever) for advice from one of our (possibly nonexistent) technology ninjas”.

However, I’d like to enthusiastically support the notion of Expert Easter Eggs so that people with challenging problems can connect to CSRs with great skills whose mouths are watering for those challenges! Great idea, XKCD.

A couple weeks ago, the students in my ISAT 654 (Advanced Technology Management) class at JMU asked about where and when Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing actually started in the United States. Although I still can’t identify the FIRST company to adopt this approach, I was also curious about how the adoption of JIT in the US grew from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

Just-in-Time (JIT) is only one element of lean manufacturing, which is a broader philosophy that seeks to eliminate all kinds of waste in a process.  Although JIT is often considered an enterprise-wide philosophy of continuous improvement, I’d like to focus on the mechanistic aspects of JIT – that is, the development and operations of a production system that employs continuous flow and preventive maintenance. In an effectively implemented JIT production system, there is little or no inventory – which includes Work-In-Process (WIP) – and production is tightly coupled to demand.

The origin of JIT can be traced back to Henry Ford’s production line, in which he was keenly aware of the burdens of inventory. However, Ford’s production system generated large volumes of identical products created in large batches – there was no room for variety, and the system was not coupled to demand levels.

In post-war Japan, Taiichi Ohno (“Father of JIT”) adapted the system at Toyota to handle smaller batch sizes and more variety in the parts that could be used to construct assemblies. In 1952, work on their JIT system was initiated, with full deployment of the kanban pull system by 1962. This was the genesis of the Toyota Production System, an elegant (and sometimes elusive) socio-technical system for production and operations. This approach bridged the gaps between production and continuous improvement and became the basis for lean manufacturing as it is known today.

After the oil crisis in 1973, other Japanese companies started to take note of the success of Toyotaand the approach became more widely adopted. The JIT technique spread to the United States in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, but due to inconsistencies in implementation and a less mature grasp on the human and cultural elements of the Toyota Production System, western companies experienced limited success. The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack made the JIT+TPS concept more accessible to US companies in 1990, which led to the widespread adoption of lean manufacturing techniques and philosophies thereafter.

JIT is very sensitive to the external environment in which it is implemented. For a review of Polito & Watson’s excellent 2006 article that describes the key barriers to smooth JIT, read Shocks to the System: Financial Meltdown and a Fragile Supply Chain.

(P.S. Why the picture of butter? Because JIT, when implemented appropriately, is perfectly smooth and slippery and thus passes The Butter Test.)

A Facebook friend wrote a status update yesterday that caught my eye. He was ranting about an interaction he had with a customer service rep, saying “Does ‘customer service rep’ mean liar nowadays? They B.S. so much they should be in politics. And returning phone calls? Forget it.”

His experience, as well my own recent negative experiences with customer service reps, begs the question: What’s wrong with customer service these days?

– http://www.1to1media.com/weblog/2010/07/whats_wrong_with_customer_serv.html

What’s wrong is that authenticity is missing. It’s been overhyped, oversold, and underrepresented (in many cases). Some even argue that authenticity is dead. To be authentic means to be genuine, or alternatively, to portray facts accurately. As a result, authenticity is a behavior as well as a value. When authenticity is a value, you’ll have a true desire to help the customer and better understand their needs. For a customer service rep, being authentic means you continually work to build trust between a company and its customers.

Trust between a customer and the company that a customer service person represents results from combining authentic behavior with an authentic desire to do what’s best for the customer. Both aspects of authenticity are demonstrated when great customer service happens – meaning you can truly get somewhere – but what happens when one (or both) of these aspects are missing?

• Getting Somewhere: Zappo’s has an unparalleled reputation for genuine, heartfelt, helpful customer service. Testimonials written by previously irate customers are typically gushing. Zappo’s reps don’t work from a script, and handle bizarre scenarios with amazing finesse.
• Getting By: The recent antics of a JetBlue flight attendant caught the attention of the nation. Many people view Steven Slater as a hero, envying the freedom of expression embodied in a trip down an airplane escape slide. But certainly his profanity-riddled monologue made it clear that the best interests of the customer were no longer a concern.
• Getting Blocked: Stephen R. Covey, in his book The Speed of Trust, describes an incident where a very apologetic customer service rep refused to take back an unopened stereo without an “inspection by Electronics” that was required by company policy. After waiting more than 10 minutes, the inspector arrived and agreed that “yeah, the box is unopened.” The return happened, but not without time wasted and tempers flared.
• Getting Outta Here: Customer Lip Service provides an excellent example of how scripted behavior and a disinterest in what’s best for the customer are a toxic combination. Over 18 excruciating and painstaking days, a company erodes the trust of a once loyal and long-term customer by bludgeoning him with mindless scripted scenarios. The end result? The customer takes his business elsewhere, choosing to use a lesser product instead.

 

authentic behavior +

authentic desire to do what’s best for the customer (empathy) =

 

great customer service (which is great because it builds trust)

This reflection was inspired by thinking about the value proposition from My Customer Cloud.

In the quality profession, we are accustomed to thinking about product and component quality in terms of compliance (whether specifications are met), performance (e.g. whether requirements for reliability or availability are met), or other factors (like whether we are controlling for variation effectively, or “being lean” which is realized in the costs to users and consumers). So this morning I attended Ed Seidel’s keynote talk at TeraGrid 09, and was struck by one of his passing statements on the quality issues associated with a large supercomputer or grid of supercomputers.

He said (and I paraphrase, so this might be slightly off):

We are used to thinking about the reliability of one processor, or a small group of processors. But in some of these new facilities, there are hundreds of thousands of processors. Fault tolerance takes on a new meaning because there will be a failure somewhere in the system at all times.

This immediately made me think of society: no matter how much “fault tolerance” a nation or society builds into its social systems and institutions, at the level of the individual there will always be someone at any given time who is dealing with a problem (in technical terms, “in a failure state”). Our programs that aim for quality on the scale of society should take this into account, and learn some lessons from how today’s researchers will deal with fault tolerance in hugely complex technological systems.

It also makes me wonder whether there is any potential in exploring the idea of quality holography. In large-scale systems built of closely related components, is the quality of the whole system embodied in the quality of each individual part? And is there a way to measure or assess this or otherwise relate these two concepts operationally? Food for thought.