We're Not Perfect

We’re not perfect (that is, not flawless). Monk has thousands of transactions each day through retail stores and two warehouses. Almost 100% of these are flawless.

If we break this down further, the 10 stores and the stationery warehouse account for most of these transactions and, again, almost 100% of these are flawless.

You may have noticed I excluded furniture above. Compared to office products and technology, we do relatively few furniture transactions (100’s, not 1000’s) and yet we have an inordinate number of problems.

Some recent examples are scratching a floor, shipping product to the wrong address (next door in the same building), shipping product to the wrong city, leaving an internal delivery site untidy, taking much longer to install than estimated. I don’t mean to be negative, but these things actually happened, and all in one week, right after the month of March when we were crazy busy and there were very few, if any, issues in the whole month. Is this really the “hangover” effect after March?

Monk Office has processes. Monk Office has standards for service delivery. Monk Office supports staff in the delivery of an extraordinary customer experience. How does this all go off the rails? We had a debriefing after the busy month of March and saw how well the month had gone. Now it’s slipped. Extra efforts for March? Old habits (lower expectations?) for April?

I read Richard Branson’s book, Business Stripped Bare, and as many of you are aware, the Virgin group is at least partly about giving their staff the power to do whatever it takes to wow the customer. He also says there needs to be systems and processes in place so that it is clear what needs to be done and how to do it.

We have all that at Monk Office. It is in the Execution.