Hi everyone, I’m back after a Christmas break and dealing with some side projects.
When I was at school getting 80% in a test was pretty good. But in your business if you’re trying to satisfy customers it can be disastrous.
It's difficult to keep all the parts of your business working as they should, like keeping all the plates spinning at once.
It's difficult to keep all the parts of your business working as they should, like keeping all the plates spinning at once.
If you consider the risk of not keeping your customers happy and how difficult it is to keep all the plates spinning it can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
Looking at the maths can help explain why.
Let’s look at the steps in running a coffee shop: get a shop, market yourself, design a menu, take an order, cook, serve, bill the customer - 7 steps.
If the likelihood of getting each one right is 80%, you are not 80% likely to satisfy your customer. Statistically, you don’t take the average of the probabilities, you multiply them.
So, 80% + 80% + 80% + 80% + 80% + 80% + 80% / 7 = 80% is WRONG
The correct probability is 80% x 80% x x 80% x 80% x 80% x 80% x 80% = 20.97%
Just 21%!!!!!! So, you will satisfy 1 in 5 customers. Scarey.
This working is conservative as I am assuming each step is independent. In reality getting an order wrong is likely to make serving and billing harder!!! See Khan Academy video for an explanation.
So what if we said we get things right 90% of the time, then the answer is overall we get it right 47.83% of the time from the customers perspective, satisfying less than half of the customers.
This is why you need to aim to get everything 100% right, and you need staff who endeavour to get it right 100% of the time.
Your operations need to be focussed on customer needs, simple (with complexity minimised) and straight forward to train out.
If you’re working too much for too little return commit to simplifying your business this year and training great staff and see what difference it makes.