PROBLEM SOLVING (CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS)

Do you sleep well at night?

Do you work 40 hours a week?  Say, 8:30~5:00 … a nice eight hour work-day?  Do you get to work just five days a week, with no Saturdays or Sundays.  Do you get to spend the holidays with your family?

Did you get to use all your vacation last year?  And by “use”, I mean actually relaxing, doing something besides worrying about work, or working from home.  Something besides calling in from the road to fix all the day’s problems that no one else seems to be able to fix, while your family spends the day at the beach or off seeing that giant ball of string in Tuscaloosa.

The reason I’m asking is because, while the idea of a giant ball of string might not seem all that important, that’s exactly why it is important.  Everybody knows that problems are important.  Or they seem to be, anyway.  Problems cause stress because they seem to be too important; they seem disproportionately important.  Seeing a giant ball of string, well that’s just a way to get away from that stress.  Don’t worry – it’ll still be there when you get back.  Not the ball of string, the stress.  I think termites got into the ball of string.

The reality is, ‘problems’ are a part of life, so problems are a part of doing business.  Problems are a part of your business.  One of the keys to achieving your goals, then, is to keep those problems, including customer complaints, from consuming a disproportionate amount of your company’s resources.  And that’s where I’m at my best.

I’ll give you one free tip on problem solving (anything beyond this you have to pay for):  the first step to effectively solving a problem is to realize the problem can be resolved.  One of the things that makes problems seem so disproportionately important, ergo stressful, is the misconception that they are too big for us to handle.  One of the first things I tell my Clients, when it comes to resolving a problem, is they may not know the answer now but we will be able to find it, together.

Problem-solving is one of my favorite services to provide my Clients.  Partly that’s because I’m an engineer by nature, and I just have a knack for fixing things more efficiently and effectively than most people.  In part, I like it because I’ve been in so many plants at so many different levels and in so many different settings, there’s not a lot that I haven’t seen by this point so there’s not a lot of things that scare me.  But mostly, I think I’m good at it because I’ve done so much of it that I’ve grown confident I can help an organization fix just about any problem they run into.  When you have a proven history of success, the ride becomes a lot more enjoyable.

Would you like to enjoy more success in your plant?

For more information, call me at 815-728-1710 or email dmarsh@bcsbydm.com.  You can also find more details about specific problem-solving successes with some of my Clients in our QOM – Question of the Month section, where you are welcome to submit specific problems for discussion to see how I might be able to help your business achieve its goals.

Helping Your Business Achieve Its Goals._™