I was in a meeting with an executive who said he didn’t want any customer to wait longer than 20 seconds in queue. He thought that no caller on any day or during any time of day should wait longer than 20 seconds for an agent. So we told him we would put together a financial model to help him understand his initial investment. Guess what. When we ran the model for his 50-seat call center, we found that he needed an initial investment of more than $5 million. We told him, “The difference between your peak and average-hour call volume indicates we would need to triple capacity to make certain we got close to making this happen.” After he recovered, we asked him why he wanted to do this. He said he thought it would look good in a marketing brochure.

We talked about what was important to his customers. He didn’t know whether the current wait time was an issue. We conducted a customer survey and discovered that 20 percent of his orders were shipped with missing or incorrect items. The customers really wanted him to invest in fixing the shipping problems!

When he did remedy the shipping issues, guess what happened to his call volume and his wait times?

Right. They fell because irate customers weren’t calling about incorrect orders anymore.

This is a perfect example of gaps and waste. It would have been a waste of money to invest in the 20-second wait time. The real gap, in the customers’ minds, was getting the orders right. Investing in fixing this gap would give the executive far greater return.

Be careful about gaps and waste. Gaps occur when we aren’t meeting a need and waste occurs when we are providing something no one values. Investing in what is of value is a smart use of our precious resources.