Fumbling Customer Service Handoffs

Source: NY Times

In healthcare, practitioners have been paying attention to "handoffs" for quite some time in an effort to improve patient safety.  An handoff is when a patient is transferred from one clinical team to another, or when critical information about a patient is transferred from clinician to clinician.  Fumbling a handoff can lead to a serious medical error.

Now, KPMG's Scott Lieberman argues that similar fumbled handoffs lead to many customer service problems at companies.  In Fast Company, Lieberman writes:

Ask your department heads how things are going, and you’ll hear good news. Leads and engagement are up, sales hit quota, and customer service is chipping away at response time. Every dashboard is green.

But ask your customer, the one that’s been passed along three times in five minutes between chatbots and agents and intervention specialists, and you’ll get a different report. Because she’s explaining her story for a fourth time: This company knows my birthday, my shopping history, and my shoe size. But they can’t remember the conversation they had with me 60 seconds ago.

And yet both things are true. Your dashboard is green, and your customer is on a hamster wheel. That’s the trap. Companies grade their performance one department at a time. But your customer is grading based on her experience of one company, start to finish, and the whole operation’s getting a D-plus.

The gap between those two scorecards lives in the handoffs—the moments a customer passes from one team to another—and that’s precisely where most companies are struggling.

Lieberman's description rings true for those of us who have called a customer service center recently.  The process can be maddening, particularly when you are transferred from one department to another.  Understanding how customers live through an entire process is critical.  How often must they be transferred? For what reasons?  How often do they get frustrated and hang up?  What information must be constantly repeated because it is not transferred effectively?   Solving these pain points requires understanding the ENTIRE customer journey, and that often can be very complicated.  

Fumbling the Creative Handoff

Source: statetechmagazine.com

What happens when someone runs with a creative idea initiated and formulated by someone else? What pitfalls arise when there is a transition from idea generator to idea executor? These are the questions examined by scholars Justin Berg and Alisa Yu in a fascinating new study. They studied the movie industry, examining approximately 5,700 films released over the past century. The scholars identified the person who generated, elaborated, and executed the idea. They evaluated Rotten Tomatoes scores as a measure of the creativity of the movies. What did Berg and Yu discover?  Stanford Leadership Insights summarized their findings:

Films in which there was a “late handoff” — that is, a director received a screenplay written by someone else to make into a movie — tended to be less creative than films in which the same person drove the entire process or drove the process from screenwriting on (an “early handoff”). “The notion of handoffs has been studied very thoroughly in medicine, but not in the context of creative projects,” Berg says. Yet handoffs are quite common in creative work. Engineers often build based on others’ designs; many marketers execute others’ ideas for campaigns; employees are increasingly asked to implement ideas that were crowdsourced from customers. “With creative projects, it’s clear how much handoffs should matter, as you need to be deeply committed, you need to go the extra mile to get this new thing born into the world.”

Berg explained by many filmmakers "fumble" these creative handoffs, particularly if they occur late in the game. “If you’re working on something creative, you can certainly receive the project as a handoff, but it shouldn’t be too late in the process.  Make sure you’re not handing over a mature idea for someone to implement, as you cut off the opportunity for them to develop psychological ownership and a coherent vision, which are key ingredients for turning creative ideas into creative final products.”   Does that mean you should avoid handoffs altogether?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes, you need a different set of skills to bring an idea to fruition.  However, you should get that implementor involved earlier in the process, so that they are part of the idea elaboration process.   They need to understand the concept clearly and become part of shaping and enhancing it.   As they come to "own" the idea, they are more likely to help shepherd it to completion successfully.  

Studying Analogous Experiences: A Hospital and a Formula One Ferrari Racing Team

Source:  http://asq.org/healthcare-use/why-quality/
great-ormond-street-hospital.html

Firms can learn a great deal from studying organizations in other fields, rather than simply benchmarking rivals within their industry.   How do you choose the organizations to examine? Think in terms of analogous experiences.  What specific process, system, or behavior do we want to improve?  Who has similar challenges, and how might we learn about how they overcome those challenges?   For Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, Great Britain's largest pediatric hospital, the payoff from studying an analogous experience turned out to be quite substantial.  Who did they study? A superb Formula One Ferrari racing team!   Several years ago, Gautum Naik of the Wall Street Journal reported on this fascinating cross-industry learning experience. Here's an excerpt:  

Thousands of such "handoffs" occur in hospitals every day, and devastating mistakes can happen during them. This one went off without a hitch, thanks to pit-stop techniques of the Ferrari race-car team.

"It was smooth. We didn't miss anything," said Dr. McEwan, a senior anesthesiologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. His role as leader of the handoff was partly modeled after Ferrari's "lollipop man," who uses a large paddle to direct drivers to the pit.

In one of the more unlikely collaborations of modern medicine, Britain's largest children's hospital has revamped its patient handoff techniques by copying the choreographed pit stops of Italy's Formula One Ferrari racing team. The hospital project has been in place for two years and has already helped reduce the number of mishaps.