Look Ma, No Order Form

A mid-size national company prided itself on customer service. The company was willing to do things for its customers that larger competitors wouldn't do. They believed that their willingness to bend over backwards was the key to their success, and this was probably true. But it was also clear, based on employee suggestions, and very clear when looking in from the outside, that their almost religious commitment to being flexible was actually making their service worse in ways that management wasn't able to see.

As part of being flexible and offering good customer service, management refused to provide an order form for use by their customers. In this company, orders were received at a centralized sales center from customers all across the country. This company, with one hundred million dollars annual sales, prided itself on accepting orders in whatever format the customers wanted to send them. So, their customers would place orders by phone, fax, email or online, in free-form text, with whatever information they wanted to include, differing from order to order and from customer to customer. There were no guidelines, no attempts at standardization. When asked about the possibility of providing an order form to help streamline the order process, management's response was "There's no way we'd do that to our customers. We believe in good customer service!"

So, some orders would list specific product codes, others would describe a product in words, others would say "same as last order", despite the fact that six different people from that customer site might order product and it was rarely clear which "last order" they were referring to. Some orders might include desired shipping dates and delivery methods, others would not. Some orders might include a purchase order or payment method, others would not. Many would have incomplete addresses or contact information, or would miss some other key pieces of information that were necessary to process the order.

So, on many, many orders, the Service Agents would have to call back, clarify, guess, interpret, assume, look up information, and fill in the gaps that customers left when submitting their orders. Fully one quarter of each Service Agent's day was taken up with trying to complete and clarify missing and required information on incoming orders. They would inevitably have to involve the customer in this process, often repeatedly, in order to resolve all the issues.

How much easier would it have been for the customers, and for the Service Agents, if the customers knew up front what information was necessary when placing an order; if they had a simple, straightforward order form to guide them? Customer service would have been much smoother, with less telephone tag and back-and-forth communication.

This company was certainly successful, but they could have been so much more successful, with a lot less stress and busywork. In their mind, good customer service meant "doing whatever it took to rework the customers' orders and fill in all the required information." This approach just ended up creating more work for both customers and Service Agents.

How much wasted effort could have been avoided with even a little bit of standardization?