Operational Capability- The Spark That Ignites Everything Else

Operational Capability- The Spark That Ignites Everything Else

In earlier articles, I highlighted an example of a strategy we developed and touched on the fact that results-driven customer support comes from a connection across intentional business strategy, highly functioning operational capabilities, and solid organizational leadership.

With a strategy in place, operational capability and management becomes a key enabler for execution.?It sounds easy enough, but those of you who have done it know that planning, organizing, managing and running operations is anything but easy.?There are an infinite mix of variables to the inputs, people, processes, tools, business and environment that all affect capacity, throughput, quality, and outputs.?

The trick is finding the right levers to move the right things in a dynamic environment – and- being able to quickly adapt as any of the variables change.

If you call pull it off, as my brilliant colleague Josh puts it – “the result is truly greater than the sum of the parts”.


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My first on-campus job as a college freshman was as a dishwasher in a dining hall.?At first blush it seemed pretty straightforward, but when meal rush hit, it could easily become chaos.?Such was the case when I took solo breakfast shift in one of the smaller dining rooms.?There was one dishwashing station with a machine, with one drop line, thus, one operator (being me).?When used dishes came in at a slow and predictable pace, it worked pretty well.?Except that nearly every student in the 3 residence halls the dining room served had- you guessed it- morning classes, which all started at either 8 or 9am, and all of those students wanted….breakfast beforehand.?So for the breakfast shift, there was rarely any slow or predicable anything.?For an hour peak, while the single machine took 5 or 6 minutes to run a load of about 5 tables of dishes, the trays, plates cups and utensils came in from 10 or 12 tables a minute, and if I didn’t keep up, the whole line backed up, things started landing everywhere and the problem quickly spiraled.?I quickly realized that the normal process wasn’t tenable, and it became about how- and where- to collect and stack the inflow for post-peak handling.?

I also moved to a job at the salad bar station as soon as one opened up.

What I’ve consistently found since that first hands-on foray in operational processes (in addition to an extreme empathy for all work in foodservice) is that in complex systems with a lot of moving parts and variables, there is rarely a single silver bullet that can move the needle on operational outcomes. ?Most often there are a lot of different levers that can be used together to deliver impactful and lasting results.

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And perhaps more importantly, my teams and I have learned to continually seek operational opportunities as a continuous way of working.?



Over time, I’ve compiled three general competencies that fuel the ability to flex, pivot and adjust as a continual business cadence.


Encourage, empower and reward trying new things, anywhere and everywhere.

Habits can become ruts, and ruts are unexamined blindspots that can sap agility and erode important operational outcomes. For example, we found that customer requests that came in via web support channels often had long lags between activity, and discovered that when a live callback to work on an issue was required, doing so by email or web ticket took multiple replies to agree on an available time.


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This alone burned several days while the customer issue remained open and active. ?In response, we implemented an automated scheduling link for customers to see, select and schedule a time with the analyst to work with them, and immediately saw reductions in incident resolution times, while customers loved the flexibility of one-click support scheduling.


Act decisively to identify and unblock information and collaboration pinchpoints.

Information flow and collaboration are critical throughout an operational organization, and enabling every person to do whatever is needed to identify and unblock ?bottlenecks as soon as they see them and to make quick decisions in how to do so is a critical organizational muscle. ?My teams have often implemented simple solutions such as issue templates for consolidating technical information; targeted triaging for emerging issues; flexible issue reviews from several perspectives- tools, training, and workflow adherence- and real-time technical mentoring and subject matter expert assists.?These have been quick and direct actions to close gaps, and have been very effective.


Be rigorous in reviewing the efficacy of longer term strategies and investments so you can pivot or adjust quickly when it’s needed.

Plans and strategies, as they get landed, become the day to day framework for resources, actions and outcomes, so regularly investing time to assess and position well for the future is vitally important. If something is working really well, we obviously want to double down - do more of it or leverage it more broadly; if it’s not working as expected, we want to know as soon as possible so we can adjust, pivot or retrench.?

In my college cafeteria work, adding dish room capacity for peak demand would have been a great idea.?With my recent teams, Problem Management and Release Readiness are two areas that have driven good outcomes for our teams, but at some point they each needed some review and optimization over time. With this, we've also focused on new strategies around incident quality management, training, and KCS (Knowledge Centered Support), each with improvements for incident handle times, resolution delivery and customer satisfaction.


Energizing and enabling strategy

Are your operational capabilities connected with your strategy? Whatever the strategy may be, good and effective operational functions that are aligned to it via people, process, tools and agility become a powerful means to execute and drive consistent and supportive outcomes.

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About me:?I am a results driven customer support executive who is?passionate about customer experience and customer support as core to the product value proposition, who builds and leads high performance support organizations for new products/channels, scales organizational capabilities for in-place teams, and innovates support strategy for growing products and companies.

[email protected] ?|??www.dhirubhai.net/in/robarmstrongpm/

#customerservice ?#customerexperience ?#customersupport ?#customersuccess ?#customercare ?#opentowork ?#opentoconnect

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