Do You run a Car Crash or a Plane Crash Organization?

Plane crashes are rare, so when they happen, they make the news. Authorities ensure that crashes are thoroughly investigated, causes established and that something is done to prevent them in future. Car crashes, however, are treated differently. While they sometimes will make news, we do not investigate much, neither are resources invested to ensure they are eliminated completely. We assume that car crashes are the price we pay for convenient transportation. In fact, we commonly refer to car crashes as “road accidents”. They are an “oops!”

In this episode of the Impact Podcast, they compare how two hospitals in America (John’s Hopkins and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital) handled central line infections. These were common infections that led to hundreds of deaths each year. It was discovered that hospitals had ignored recommendations on how to prevent these infections and Johns Hopkins set out to make simple but effective changes as a result. This saw the rate of infections drop by 70% while Lucile Packard (at first) only gave explanations and didn’t do much else. Their approach was the typical response given by organisations that do not care about their mess ups.

When mistakes happen in your organisation, what is your approach? Often, we give our customers the plane crash explanation but a car crash treatment “we regret the mistake/outage/overcharge/loss, we will do everything we can to resolve the issue”. Or the full car crash treatment “we apologize for the inconvenience, but this is our process.” We hope that at some point the customer will stop complaining.

Think about your internet service provider, mobile operator, power company, water supplier, the school your child goes to, the hospital you regularly go to? Do you get the feeling that they handle mistakes as plane crashes or car accidents?

I suspect most are car crash organizations. All customers complain about the same things over and over, until they either leave or they get tired. Where customers have little choice, they stick around while complaining, until a competitor shows up and the company resorts to literally begging them to stay.

When I listened to that episode on the Podcast, I felt challenged by a number of things that plane crash organisations do, those car crash organizations do not:

1. They are genuinely distressed about their customers’ distress. This is not only at the customer service front but at the core of the institution. When mistakes keep recurring, everyone in the organization commits to working to eliminate or at least reduce those mistakes. At Johns Hopkins, everyone right from the top had to be involved in making the changes that were necessary to reduce central line infections. This speaks to institutional concern that most organisations do not apply to customer problems.

2. ‎They take time to study the problem. Often, institutional mistakes, even when caused by human error are as a result of a systemic failure in the organisation. Either the organisation has not set up the systems necessary to reduce human error, or it has the systems but they are not being adhered to. In addition to this, there are very few unique problems in organisations. If you are experiencing a problem, another organisation probably has as well and resolved it. Plane crash organisations take time to diagnose the problem right at the core, learn from best practice and set up systems that work.

3. ‎They design solutions that deal with the systemic problem. Every so often, you will see an announcement, that Company XYZ has invested in a “state of the art customer care center”. This amuses me because while taking customer calls is important, what customers care the most is the organization resolving the systemic problems that cause them to call the customer service center in the first place. Customers do not enjoy making these calls. Plane crash organizations do not view customer service as a solution to be proud of. Customer service is just a tool, to support the solutions they have invested in to resolve mistakes. How come our companies do not publish their problem resolution stats, or customer calls stats to show us how they are doing on ensuring customers do not keep calling? That would be better than a photo op at the snazzy customer care center.

4. ‎They upset egos if it will benefit the customers. It is not uncommon for customer problems to remain unsolved because of a key decision maker’s ego. Where people below them can see the problem and know how to solve it, but because of the rank, they do not have the courage to propose the solution, or when they do, the boss blocks it. Do your staff have to work around you to get their jobs done? Do they have to “handle” your ego because they know you block ideas that did not come from you? If so, then you are most likely running a car crash organisation.

5. ‎They measure progress and keep constantly improving themselves. In this age of fancy customer service solutions, it is possible to measure how well you are doing at resolving customer problems. Plane crash organisations own the results completely. It is not the responsibility of one or two managers to keep the customer complaints low, but the entire organisation. Every department will have a key performance indicator (KPI) that relates to reducing customer problems and this measure is checked every so often and corrections made.

What kind of organisation are you running / working in? Would you consider it a plane crash or a car crash organisation?

This article originally appeared on Kellie Murungi’s blog, Rookie Manager, where she writes about budgeting, personal finance, management and doing business in Kenya in a way that everyone will understand. Read the full version of the article here. Kellie also runs Lattice Training, where they offer customized training solutions for businesses of all sizes, from startup entrepreneurs all the way to large corporations. She is also a trainer for their Business Acumen course, which imparts finance and business skills using a fun, educative simulation.

*Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice to Kellie for sharing this article with us!