We’ve all been there. The dishwasher breaks down, you schedule a repair and take time off work. The repair tech arrives, diagnoses the problem, opens their toolkit, and then…
“Ah, I don’t have that part on the truck.” But it’s quitting time. They’ll have to come back another day. You’re frustrated, the tech feels sheepish leaving you in the lurch, and the company’s reputation—and profits—take a big hit.
That frustrating scenario was playing out daily at a major appliance repair company we worked with. They were facing declining customer satisfaction scores and rising costs. They needed to stop the bleeding, and they needed to do it fast. But how do you cut through the multitude of causes driving service ratings down and costs up?
The answer wasn’t another complex, top-down initiative or a massive investment in new technology. It was embracing the Ideas to Action foundational belief: Embrace Simplicity. It started by finding the key driver the organization needed to focus on—and then empowering the right people to fix it.
Finding the Focus: Identifying the “Big Y”
During an intensive planning session we facilitated, involving leadership and frontline supervisors, the team worked to find that crucial leverage point. After sorting through the usual suspects… a district service manager pinpointed the core issue: trips per repair. As the VP recalled:
“It was a kind of free-for-all with everyone throwing out issues… But they kept pushing us to focus. That’s when one of our district service managers cut right to the heart of it: ‘We need to focus on one thing—trips per repair—it’s the key to our customer satisfaction and cost issues.’ … We had our target. One metric that could transform everything. But we might have missed it without asking the right question.”
Identifying this “Big Y” was the first step in embracing simplicity.
Simplifying the Approach: Choosing the Right Lever
With this clear focus, the leadership team didn’t just jump into solutions. Problems often have a “long tail” of contributing factors. The Four Change-Levers Framework (a simple planning tool from Ideas to Action) provides the means to sort these different factors and choose the right lever to push for each one:
- Expert Study: For complex problems needing deep analysis before solving (e.g., analyzing replacement-part failure rates).
- Process Redesign: For complex processes needing overhaul (e.g., technician hiring and onboarding).
- Leadership Decision: For barriers only leaders hold the key to remove (e.g., changing the overtime policy).
- Frontline Execution: The sweet spot where frontline teams often hold the simplest, fastest keys to unlock specific problems within their control.
This framework prevented our appliance repair company from applying a one-size-fits-all solution and guided the leadership team to match the right problems with the right resources at the right time.
Frontline Execution: Simple Solutions, Rapid Results
The framework quickly revealed key opportunities for leveraging ideas and speeding execution through employee engagement. Two frontline teams were launched with clear, 60-day charters:
- Parts Availability Team: The company didn’t need an expensive new inventory management system. As one supervisor noted, the “local challenge was simpler; techs had no standard stocking plan.” Their solution? A stocking plan created by the techs themselves, plus an efficient parts-transfer system. Simple, fast, effective.
- Missed Appointments Team: This team of dispatchers, techs and customer service reps implemented a regimen straightforward pre-visit confirmations and address verifications, dramatically reducing wasted trips.
These focused sprints, driven by effectively empowered employees tackling problems within their control, delivered tangible results quickly.
Leadership’s Role: Clearing the Path
Crucially, leadership also used their change-lever effectively. The appointments team highlighted how the overtime policy discouraged techs from completing repairs near shift-end. As one dispatch operator noted, “Nobody wins—especially not customers” when that happens.
The VP modified the policy, removing the barrier and enabling the frontline solution.
Simplicity Wins: Finding Your Leverage
Our appliance repair company’s success stemmed from embracing simplicity: finding the key leverage point (“Big Y”), using a simple framework (the Four Change-Levers) to choose the right approach, and then empowering focused frontline teams with the right tools and authority to tackle big problems with simple, but b very effective solutions.
As Archimedes demonstrated, a simple lever applied in the right place moves the biggest boulder.
Ready to find the right levers to untangle complexity and unlock employee-powered innovation in your organization?
