Managing customer suggestions during issue resolution starts with 6 questions
In your weekly problem resolution status update meeting, your customer, despite their lack of detailed understanding of your product and process, keeps offering “helpful suggestions” about what to do next. Your team, not wanting to upset the customer, accepts all the extra work, regardless of whether they think the new activities will help solve the problem or not. Frustrating, right?
The heuristic described in this infographic is your first line of defense. Assessing each customer suggestion using the series of 6 criteria will help you determine whether or not to agree to follow up on it. Well-founded, testable suggestions can be considered for action. Implausible or unverifiable ones should be rejected.
Not sure how to go about telling your customer “no” without causing a backlash? Let us help! Our proven strategies, tactics, and tools enable teams to defend their precious time and stay focused on value-added actions while simultaneously maintaining customer confidence and good will.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
