Seth Godin's (author of Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars) blog often has pearls of lean wisdom – even though he's a marketing guy. Check out his recent post, “Please Hold”, wondering why companies spend so much energy and money getting prospects to call, only to place them on hold.
Like processes in other parts of the enterprise, processes in sales and marketing are often broken too.
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You might think companies might optimize profit by NOT having customers wait. The choice is to have underutilized call center employees, a buffer capacity so that the customer’s order/call/request can “flow” rather than be delayed. The problem is that it’s much easier for companies to measure the cost of that un/under-utilized employee than it is to measure what’s lost by customers going away rather than waiting on hold??
Creating better answers is not simple, and the mind set change required is easy to describe and difficult to create. In our daily lives of working with companies to help them see better ways, we are inundated with cost reduction as opposed to value improvement.