Continuous improvement: how to centralize employee suggestions?

Giving operational staff the opportunity to feed back suggestions for structural improvements to your operations is the best way to improve customer satisfaction over the long term. This also implies having the organization in place to process, analyze and respond to these suggestions.

What's it all about?

Feedback Management is often referred to as the "Bottom-Up" approach. In other words, it's recognized that operational staff, in contact with your customers on a day-to-day basis, have the information they need to improve your services and operations.

You can carry out audits and ad-hoc surveys with representative panels of your customers, and you'll probably get more or less the same result. Your operational staff know. Don't doubt it.

All you have to do is open the floodgates and let them come back to you with suggestions.

Train your teams

It's like a customer satisfaction survey. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction with your barometer, you have to respond. Well, it's the same thing here. As soon as you let your operational staff make suggestions, you owe them a response.

It's important to guard against possible excesses and excesses. This means training your teams in the art and craft of this, and providing feedback on the themes, tone and justifications required.

Channel the upwelling

Worried about being overwhelmed by suggestions? Of always coming up with the same ones? Not knowing how to respond or procrastinating endlessly? This is already anticipating the death of the program before it starts. That's why you need to delegate and define a structured process. You could, for example, ask your regional departments to carry out an initial filter and redirect relevant suggestions to the right department. Each department (Purchasing, Logistics, Operations, etc.) must then devote a certain number of hours per week to responding to suggestions. Your role as program coordinator will simply be to ensure that everyone performs the tasks due to them and does not cause a bottleneck in your process.

Give a firm answer

As any salesperson will tell you, a negative response is better than no response at all. In our case, we have to be firm and prefer a "No" answer rather than leaving the suggestion in a queue, with the secret hope of one day being able to give a positive answer. Any answer is valid for the moment it is given. No operator will reproach you for having changed his mind in his favor a few weeks or months later. But in the meantime, he'll know where he stands.

Conclusion

Implementing a suggestion system is a challenge for any organization, because it involves several departments. You have to manage everyone's sensitivities ("What right does a line manager have to tell me what to do?"), but convince everyone that this is the best way to improve the customer experience.