Why is consistency important? Your customers want predictability. In any business, customers expect the same standards every time. The practice of standardised work can help you deliver a great service or product, and ensure that your customers receive this value the same way every time.
A Quick Example…
Take the example of your favourite coffee shop (we’ll leave you to fill in the blanks with your brand of choice). The first time you go in, you order the best cappuccino you’ve ever had, a caffeinated cup (complete with chocolate sprinkles, of course) like no other.
As a customer, the bar has been set high. So, when you go back, you understandably expect your next drink to be of similarly high-quality. But what’s this? This cup is barely drinkable? Did this barista even know how to make coffee? Were they just winging it?
That’s what you get without standardised processes – inconsistency. And nothing is quite as off-putting or disappointing to customers as inconsistent results. If your customers are unhappy, your company’s reputation will suffer as a result.
Consistency Establishes Reputation
When people experience variation in the level or quality of service that you offer, what you’re showing is that your delivery can be inconsistent. Not bad, necessarily – although, as we’ve just highlighted in our example above, inconsistency can equate to negativity on the customer’s part – just not the same every time. And this makes it difficult for customers to build trust and make recommendations.
According to Strikedeck, 89% of customers say they get frustrated by inconsistency. Interestingly, however, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers make a complaint. If you want to build advocates for your brand, then consistency is everything. Because when it comes down to it, a brand is all about consistency.
The late Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author, said: "Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals."
Standardised Work Formalises Best Practice
One way to achieve better consistency is to document current best practices to create Standardised Work, one of the most powerful but underused tools in organisations. This is a set of tasks and standards implemented to produce the highest possible degree of consistency. It represents the best sequence and most efficient methods to perform a process.
1. Standardised Business Processes
When processes are standardised, each person who performs a task follows a method that is based on best practice.
According to research from the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM), companies that implement Business Process Management and standardise work methods for their team can benefit from as much as a 41% increase in ROI within one year. You don’t need to be a business expert to realise that that represents a pretty staggering improvement for just 12 months.
Standardising work reduces the opportunity for human error or variations in the standard of service. Promoting a consistently high job quality will produce a positive experience for your customers whilst minimising the opportunity for errors that might lead to costly rework.
Standardising work reduces the opportunity for human error or variations in the standard of service. Promoting a consistently high job quality will produce a positive experience for your customers whilst minimising the opportunity for errors that might lead to costly rework.
2. Safety
Standardised work enables tasks to be evaluated and managed in terms of safety and efficiency, and ensures legislative requirements for compliance are met. Measures for managing and mitigating risks can be built into standard work processes, making work safer in turn. As the tasks are evaluated and appropriately resourced, it avoids the need for staff to take risky shortcuts – the kind of shortcuts that could lead to a costly (and avoidable) mishap.
3. Improved Profitability
Once (and only once) a process is fully understood, it can then be cost and priced accurately. Furthermore, it makes work measurable and increases the predictability of results. Fewer problems allow for a proactive business approach, minimising the need to fight fires, and focus on the important things like generating new business and growth.
4. Baseline for Continuous Improvement (CI)
Standardised work facilitates continuous improvement by establishing a baseline of performance. If changes are required, they’re easier to implement when a process which has already been evaluated.
Opportunities for improvement or to eliminate waste can be easily visualised, making it quicker to adapt to external influences. Standardised work does not lead to inflexibility – just the opposite, in fact. It’s a structure that promotes positive results and productivity, and provides a mechanism for integrating change.
5. Support Your Employees
Your employees are crucial to your day-to-day success. When tasks are clear and well-defined, it reduces the time it takes to communicate your processes to your team. It gives them confidence to do their work, knowing that they always have clear instructions available to them. This is invaluable for successfully onboarding new members of staff, but can also be useful for long term employees, too.
Creating a transparent culture promotes individual responsibility and is an important part of strengthening employee accountability. Furthermore, it is possible to shift the blame for errors from the worker to the system, which is something that’s very positive for overall company culture.
Standardised Work – a Baseline for Continuous Improvement
Standardised work is established when the baseline is documented, and work is being carried out in a consistent, repeatable manner by anyone with the appropriate training. It's often considered fundamental to Continuous Improvement efforts, where processes are continually refined so that customer needs can be met in increasingly efficient ways.
Continuous Improvement is most successful when the people who perform the task highlight and solve the problems that stop work from being carried out efficiently. How can a working culture be created where everyone is proactive and naturally motivated to solve problems? To nurture this behaviour, it’s important to think about mindset.
Looking to Implement Standardised Processes? Look to Rugged Data
When it comes to streamlining and standardising your processes, it can be hard to know where to start. Thankfully, though, that’s where we come in.
With our mobile forms and reporting applications, we can make everybody’s lives within your company easier – whether that be technicians out in the field or admin teams back in the office.
We design bespoke software for you that makes your business more efficient, more compliant and more accurate. What’s not to like?
How Does it Work?
Typically, we’ll start with our Faster Fieldwork 28 Day Sprint. This is where we guarantee to take one of your processes, and have a fully-fledged mobile reporting application up and running for it within 28 days, or you get your form built entirely for free, and your setup fee refunded. It’s a simple journey. You tell us which process you want us to tackle first, and walk us through your current reporting system so we know what needs digitising.
The Journey to Digitisation
There’s so much more to digitisation than simply creating an electronic version of a paper form, and it takes a lot of work. It’s about optimising the process so that everything becomes as streamlined as possible, and much more so than it was in the previous paper version. Making buttons large, building in mandatory fields and the ability to take before and after photos as part of the form, are just three ways in which your technicians’ lives become easier as a result of reporting digitisation.
Then, we get to work creating the application. We’ll get an initial version across to you so that an Early Adopter User (someone in your company who’s either technologically-minded or, on the other end of the spectrum, not great with technology at all) can put it through its paces.
Following that initial use in the field, we’ll ask for feedback on the application and make any changes as needed. After that, once you’ve approved the app, you’re ready to roll it out within your company. We then offer updates and tweaks as time goes on (implementing changes based on compliance updates, for instance), as well as ongoing technical support from our UK-based team.
That’s Just the Start!
Here at Rugged Data, we’re looking to become your long-term technological partners, and not just a one-off interaction. Once your first process is up and running, we’ll help you with as many of your reporting processes as you want to digitise and improve.
If you’re not happy with that initial reporting process after 90 days, however, then as part of our 90 Day Step Away Guarantee, we will refund absolutely everything. And if that’s not a statement of absolute belief in our products and services? Well, then we don’t know what is.
So, if you want to start standardising your processes, to start implementing greater consistency within your company than ever before, and all with a minimum of effort on your part, then get in touch with Rugged Data, today.
