Why Business Process Improvement Might Not Bring Customer Satisfaction

Continual improvement is central to all organizational frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Typically, data are collected through the lifecycle of a business process and analyzed asynchronously to identify long-term improvements. This position paper illustrates a limitation of this approach of continual improvement. When a support process is spawned to address a customer issue, quite often, a quick fix is provided to minimize the immediate annoyance to the customer. However, the quick fix often provides a lower quality solution than the service the customer regularly enjoys. For customers who fall into the gap between the quality of service they have come to rely on, the repair process and the quick fix may be a wholly unsatisfactory experience. As a result, even if the service provided by the main business process is improved on a long-term basis through the continual improvement mechanism, customers may still be unsatisfied. We believe that the continual improvement process should address the life cycle and level of service of the combination formed by the main support process and the quick fix.