Waiting for a company that can not plan
Today, I am at home waiting for TDC – Denmark’s national phone company – to stop by and connect an ADSL connection. They indicated that they would be here between 7:30 and 16:00. When I asked them if they could be a bit more precise they said they were unable to do so.
It surprises me that this company is running an operation that is focused on doing routine jobs at client’s home addresses is unable to plan those visits better and thereby increase the customer satisfaction rate. However, I doubt whether they are unable to do so or simply not willing to do this.
Wouldn’t you assume that since the company is private capital owned (KKR among others), the owners would campaign for efficiency also in this operation? I assume that they visit the clients that they promised to visit during a day. In my view you can do this in two different ways:
- There are large margins in a service professional’s daily schedule so that he/she has little problems fulfilling the assigned jobs during a day and he does not have worry about the optimal route from client A to client B. In other words, the system is highly inefficient.
- The system is efficient and the service professional’s daily schedule is tightly planned.
I assume that the second scenario is the case, but why they cannot inform their customers better is a question that remains to be answered. I believe that they are simply not willing to; behavior you see more often with former monopolists.
I had the same problem in Barcelona. The explanation there was that install jobs are outsourced to a third party, and the telecom has no visibility into the subcontractors’ schedule. I agree with you, a lamentable state of affairs in the 21st century!
J Fernando
October 4, 2011 at 8:09 pm