Now here's a few things you already know before the lights go dim: 1. There's going to be a normal teenager and 2. That person is going to get bit by a spider, an action that will bestow upon them all the positive aspects of spiders and none of the negative ones (they won't, for instance, capture people in a web and eat them, you hope).
How do you know that there will be a spider bite? Because that's how the process of becoming a spider-based meta-human begins. The origin story is already ingrained in the minds of people coming to see the movie, and the shared familiarity of the story can lead to more efficient story telling.
To begin an honest assessment of your current business process, you must first focus on the origin. How do customers find you. When they go looking for your product, what are the most likely avenues they will take? You can't always control these factors, but the ones you can control, you should, and this starts with the ringing of the phone, or the submission from the website. The experience the customer has when looking to engage your company will be a lasting impression, so don't mess it up.
A few business principles come immediately into play here:
1. Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers.
The more times you pass the baton, the higher the chance that some one is going to drop it. Eliminate transferring of calls from person to person, waiting on hold, waiting for a callback. Always work to shorten the 'hops' from customer and his destination. In this you'll be optimizing their experience without them even knowing it!
2. Merge your swim lanes
Make sure your call center, web submissions and walk ups all get funneled into the same optimized workflow.
3. Simplify the steps
If you take the "0 for operator" off of your incoming phone system, your customers and vendors may secretly hate you.
There are many more we can apply to this step, but we'll cut it short here for the sake of readability. The takeaway is that you need to nail down your entry process first, because in a 'move data upstream' world, you'll be helping every process that needs to occur after.
