Most organisations know what their persistent problems look like: complaints that keep coming back, customers who have to get in touch three times about the same thing, handovers that never quite happen, or a dashboard reporting success while the people using the service say otherwise. What is often less clear is why it keeps happening.
These articles are about that question. They look at the gap between what an organisation measures and what the person on the other end experiences, between a task being completed and a problem being solved, and between where a failure shows up and where it actually started.
I don’t begin with an assumption about who or what is at fault, whether that’s staff, management, technology or customers. The point is to find out.
Why Three Failures Become One Problem
When a complaint is investigated one interaction at a time, each part can pass while the customer experienced one continuous failure. Why that happens, and how it can hide where the problem actually started.
Implemented on Paper
Why an action marked as complete doesn’t always mean anything changed, and what can get lost between a decision being made and the next customer getting a different outcome.
