Lean CX Score – Using The Waste Basket

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Using the Waste Basket

If you’ve read anything about Lean or the Toyota Production System before, you will likely have heard mention of removing “wasteful” steps in your work to improve profit, speed, morale and more. In the old-world Lean, there were eight Wastes listed for you to remove and improve your business.

We’re not going to use the traditional Wastes, because they often don’t fit in a modern business and there’s a good chance you’re not a car manufacturing plant from the 1970s.

Instead I’m going to give you something better. Much better.

In our new method of Lean CX, we will look at waste from the Customer Experience point of view – remembering that customers are anyone that we, or our business, serves. The new Lean CX Wastes are also more streamlined, simpler, faster, and guaranteed to improve your Customer Experience once they are removed.

So what are these so-called CX Wastes that we can refer to quickly, to see if our process is winning or lagging behind? An easy way to remember them is with this handy acronym: NEWER.

Not getting what I want
Excessive Steps
Waiting
Excessive hand-offs
Rework

Let’s go through them in a bit more detail, starting with my favourite first.

Waiting

First of all, waiting is the devil when it comes to Customer Experience. You are more likely to lose a customer before you have even begun if they can’t get what they want quickly. With the rise of “digital natives”, those born into an era of technology and encouraged to use it from a young age, we have a whole generation of people used to “getting it now”. And here’s a hint – they’re not going to wait around for you.

As you’ll see in some of the stories coming up, there are companies in traditional industries where waiting is the norm (like call centres or product deliveries) which are coming up with ways to give an amazing customer experience by using the Lean CX Score and removing this waste.

Excessive Steps

Part of working with customers who “want it now” means removing excessive steps or actions to getting what they want. If something takes more than one “step” for a customer to get what they want, I can guarantee you that they will be looking for better alternatives. Not to mention having excessive steps or actions paves the way for other wastes to creep into the process too. Things like rework, hand-offs, queues or waiting are all things that drive your customer away.

Excessive Steps is also a closely related cousin of Excessive Hand-Offs, and it has just as high an impact on your Customer Experience.

Excessive Hand-offs

Have you ever played Chinese Whispers? It’s an old schoolyard game, but the results of the game are usually well known. For those of you who haven’t played it, you sit in a circle and whisper a message to the person on your right, who then whispers it to the person on their right – continuing until it comes all the way back to you. The final message is usually quite distorted from your original message, because different people mishear and change the words ever so slightly with each hand-off.

It is the same with this Waste – if you have too many hand-offs or people, departments or companies being a part of your customer’s experience, then you risk losing things, misinterpreting things, queueing for things, having to redo things and much more.

If the thing they want is not done in the same place and time, there’s a good chance more CX Waste will appear to scare your customers away.

Rework

Have you ever filled out a form on a website from top to bottom, only to have the webpage time out so you had to refresh it instead of submitting it? Then when you reloaded the page the form was empty again. What a pain.

While this scenario is the cause of many angry cat pictures screaming at their monitors (and maybe some real-life angry people too), the effects of this kind of rework on your customer experience is devastating, and highly likely to send your customers packing (you guessed it – right across to your competition).

Rework also allows things like queues or waiting, excessive hand-offs and excessive steps to creep into your work.

Not getting what I want

Here is the final and most important one of all – your customer not getting what they actually wanted. Even with the fastest, most streamlined, most friendly, incredible customer experience it’s all for nought if your customer didn’t get what they really wanted!

You could have the fastest shipping in the world, but if you’re not shipping what the customer wants, forget it. And you simply don’t know if your customer got what they wanted unless you ask them.

Research shows that a full 96% of customers won’t tell a company they had a bad experience *¹⁷, they will simply leave and take their business elsewhere (and then tell all their friends how horrible that business was when they next meet). This is absolutely crucial to remember. If your customers are not getting what they want and getting it quickly, easily, without fuss and preferably in a way that makes them feel good, then they are just one cold-call away from leaving your company behind.

So there you have the Lean CX Wastes. As you start to remove these CX wastes in your own business you will see a dramatic rise in customer and employee happiness, and both of those things have an impact on your bottom line. Removing the Lean CX Wastes is exactly what the steps in this book are designed to do.

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Project Success

Giving you the tools for Project Management Success

Lean CX Score – Using The Waste Basket

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