In last week’s blog, I shared with you the first component of problem prioritization, consisting of three qualitative questions. The second and last component of problem prioritization consists of five quantitative questions. In this blog, I’m going to share with you three of them.
Each of the five quantitative questions is going to be rated from one to five. 5, meaning the best, and 1, meaning the least valuable.
1st Question: How easily can this problem be solved with your existing staff capacity?
Ask how easily your problem can be solved with your existing staff capacity, considering time. If this is a big, audacious problem and the person who knows how to solve it is about to go on leave or is busy with another priority, does he or she have the capacity to solve the problem?
You may have five people on your team who have the skills, but a couple of them don’t have the time. You want to be really conscious of time and capacity. Sometimes what we find here that is more positive is how easily this problem can be solved with existing staff. That’s a 5 out of 5.
There are a lot of process problems that we just need to sit down and have a conversation about for them to be solved since they’re not complex. Those are the problems we love.
2nd Question: How does this problem rank in terms of its impact on either NPS or CSAT?
For those who aren’t familiar with NPS, it means Net Promoter Score. CSAT is a customer satisfaction rating. If your company doesn’t have this, you can just remove this question, so instead of the total being 25, you rate it out of 20.
Essentially, you are asking how much value solving this problem can increase your score in either of these surveys. For instance, you’re improving onboarding calls. If the NPS goes out after onboarding, is it going to have any big impact on your NPS score?
But if your NPS score survey only goes out after contract signing, then your onboarding survey or call is not going to have a huge impact on NPS. We’re thinking deliberately about impact. Will this improve NPS or CSAT on a scale of one to five?
3rd Question: What is the impact on the customer?
There are some things we do in our processes that impact us. They make our jobs easier or mitigate risk in the organization. But it doesn’t affect the customer at all. Your customer has no idea it exists, which is why we rank it as a minimum one.
Whereas, for example, improving your discovery process in order to improve your pitch is going to highly affect the customer, so we rank it five out of five. And then you have everything in between that indirectly affects the customer.
The main thing to understand is that processes sometimes affect internal operations, sometimes they affect external operations and customer-facing experiences, and then sometimes both. But they’re not all the same and equal.
Stay tuned for next week’s blog for the fourth and fifth quantitative questions to ask in problem prioritization. We will wrap up how you can focus your efforts on solving problems that drive the most ROI in the shortest amount of time.
In love and respect,
Hilary Corna
