What causes Bottlenecks?
Bottlenecks between people or departments are often caused by disagreements on how the process should work, unspoken expectations or missing agreements on a process. Most common between operations and sales or administration, these bottlenecks can severely impact key business metrics like production and customer service.
Internal Customers
Employees and Departments are actually internal customers to each other. The more they focus on how to deliver excellent service to each other, the smoother operations and service delivery becomes.
Here are three steps that you can take to improve internal customer service between departments:
- Identify the highest priority processes that cause the most issues and the departments involved in
those processes. - Create a task force and assign a leader to bring together representatives from each department to:
- Map how process currently flows between departments
- Identify what works well and what does not work well
- Change the work flow to address the problem
- identify or develop new tools, technology or forms to better support the new process
- Document and distribute the new process and procedures to ensure all involved understand the changes and commit to the new process. Be sure to identify roles, responsibilities and time lines.
Learn more about internal customer service and the challenge of bottlenecks between departments on page 16 of the Business Owner Guidebook to Building a Better Company.
