The Low Effort glossary

What is avoidable contact?

Avoidable contact is any call, email or visit that would not happen if the service had worked as intended the first time.

Chasers, "where is my repair?" calls and repeat complaints are the usual examples. They take the same staff time as useful work but add nothing for the customer.

Related: failure demand, next issue avoidance

What is a backlog?

A backlog is work that has been received but not yet finished. Aged work in progress is the part of it that has passed its target time.

A backlog is rarely a capacity problem alone. Much of it is often the same cases coming back, which is why adding staff tends to slow its growth rather than clear it.

Related: constraint, failure demand

What is a constraint?

A constraint is the one step in a process that limits how much work the whole system can finish.

The idea comes from Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Improving any other step does not raise output; improving the constraint does. Finding it is the first step in the Low Effort method.

Related: end-to-end time

What is customer effort?

Customer effort is the work a customer has to do to get something resolved: repeating information, chasing, waiting, switching channels.

Research on customer service has long found that reducing effort does more for loyalty than trying to delight customers. Effort is also cost for the organisation, because every extra step on the customer's side usually creates one on the inside too.

Related: Low Effort Score

What is end-to-end time?

End-to-end time is the time from a customer's first request to the moment the matter is fully resolved, as the customer experiences it.

Internal targets often measure only one step, such as time to first response. End-to-end time shows the wait the customer actually lives through, including every handoff and return.

What is failure demand?

Failure demand is demand caused by a failure to do something, or to do something right, for the customer.

The term was coined by John Seddon. Its opposite is value demand, the demand the service exists to meet. In many service organisations a large share of incoming work is failure demand, and removing it frees capacity without extra staff.

Related: value demand, right first time

What is the Low Effort Score?

The Low Effort Score is a free fifteen-question assessment that rates how much avoidable effort a service creates, out of 100.

It also gives five readings, Knowing Demand, Failure Demand, Capacity, Flow and The End-to-End Clock, so you can see where the effort comes from and what to work on first.

Related: full explanation

What is next issue avoidance?

Next issue avoidance means answering the question a customer is going to ask next before they have to ask it.

If most tenants call two days after a repair is booked to ask when the operative will arrive, telling them at booking removes that call.

What does right first time mean?

Right first time means a job is completed fully at the first visit or contact, with no return, follow-up or chaser needed.

In housing repairs the reported rate needs care. Once a job can be split into a first visit that counts as fixed and a follow-on that counts as a new job, almost every landlord passes. Count it on the whole repair, with no splitting into follow-on jobs, and read it beside the time from the tenant's report to a home that is right.

What are Tenant Satisfaction Measures?

Tenant Satisfaction Measures are a standard set of performance measures that social landlords in England collect and report to the Regulator of Social Housing.

They combine tenant survey results with management information such as repairs completed within target. Low scores on repairs and complaints usually point to effort the tenant should not have to make.

Related: right first time

What is value demand?

Value demand is the demand a service exists to meet: the request the customer actually wanted to make.

A first request for a repair or a pension transfer is value demand. A call to ask where it has got to is failure demand.

What is void turnaround?

Void turnaround is the time a social rented home stands empty between one tenancy ending and the next one starting.

Each extra day means lost rent and a household still waiting for a home. Delays usually come from handoffs between inspection, repairs and lettings rather than from the work itself.