Red Tapism in Service

The front line of any business is often faced with choosing a point on an autonomy spectrum that spans between complete freedom and red-tapism. Policy level decisions, implementation effectiveness of desired policies and incentive structures dictate the choice of the point on the ground. While one end of the spectrum often results in recklessness, exposes the business to increased regulatory,legal and reputation-loss risks therefore increasing overhead costs of monitoring (think TBTF banks) the repercussions of choosing the other end are more immediate and more often than not result in loss of customer satisfaction.

As a customer I find red-tapism to be very prevalent in our country. I find two reasons for this red-tapism. 

Reason one is lazy people. They are allowed to face the customer. They don't care two hoots about the customer or their needs and probably feel stuck in what they perceive to be a shitty job. as a business, it's usually easy to spot these chaps. Terminating actions should be swift for habitual offenders. Assistants at most clothes shops fall into this category.

Reason two are shoulder shruggers. They dont know why a rule is in place. It starts from the guy on the front line. But the ilk of the shoulder shrugger may run deep, sometimes extending beyond middle management. This happens because people don't question their assumptions about the needs of the business - especially in times of success. The response that trickles down to the frontline person is "This is the way it is and always has been. Dont ask questions." Unfortunately this does nothing to help the frontline guy answer the customer and hence the shoulder shrugging accompanied by the "I'm afraid it's company policy sir".  

This is not always bad. At times, you WANT to limit customer options because you have taken a strategic call to do so. And if you hold the upper hand in the transaction with the customer it's in your interest to train your people to shrug shoulders appropriately. One good example I observed was the Sangam breakfast buffet in Trichy which limited the number of eggs one could have ever since students from NIT Trichy found that it was a good deal. After a couple of months of frenzied young adults turning up at their door each having a dozen eggs cooked to order, they decided that their cooks' time and satisfaction of the other customers was probably more valuable than the marginal loss in value that would be perceived by the students who gave them volumes. 

But when one is at the mercy of the customer, or the cost of future losses due to reduced customer satisfaction or the cost of overhead in shrugging of shoulders is greater than the cost of the outcome that would entail in the absence of the rule, it is advisable to look for alternate solutions which reduce instances of shoulder shrugging. An example is the Tapri guy who stood arguing with me as to why he could not sell me a bowl of milk for my cat while other customers were waiting in line to either order or receive the order they had already placed. All this while, one valuable resource was stuck explaining why the fine that had been imposed due to upturned vessels was too much for them to bear. then came a call which I made and he had to listen to the Mess representative explain the rule to him and finally he  ended acquiescing to my request. All in all a colossal waste of time, resources and an increase in customer irritation over red tapism. This needs to be changed institutionally.

1) Train your people to understand why something is done

2) encourage them to challenge the assumptions and make them come up with data to back their sayings. This leads to fresh data from markets.

3) Empower our employee to implement changes that he/she has proved there is a need for.

4) Keep self-examining and examining your assumptions.