She flew 6,000 miles to fix a pension problem. The mistake wasn’t the problem.

Have you ever flown 6,000 miles to prove you’re not dead?

One woman had to.

Here’s why.

This week, the Guardian reported the story of a retired NHS worker living in Cape Town.

Her pension suddenly stopped.

So she called to find out why.

According to the system, she was dead.

She pointed out the fairly obvious problem with this.

‘I’m not dead’

‘Are absolutely you sure?’

‘I’m talking to you’

‘You can’t be you’re dead’

And so the call from heaven to hell continued.

She called.

She emailed.

She waited for promised callbacks.

She chased.

Eventually, she borrowed money from a friend and flew from Cape Town to Britain to try to sort it out herself.

It still wasn’t resolved.

Only after the Guardian became involved were her arrears eventually paid.

It’s tempting to see this as a story about a spectacular system error.

I don’t think it is.

Systems make mistakes.

The interesting part is what happened when a customer tried to get one corrected.

Because hiding underneath this story is an idea about how we design organisations that sounds completely sensible.

To make organisations more efficient, we specialise the work.

Routine enquiries go here.

Complex enquiries go there.

One team does this.

Another does that.

Sounds sensible.

Until the customer has a problem that doesn’t fit neatly into one of the boxes.

Then something strange happens.

The organisation divides the work.

And the customer becomes responsible for joining it back together.

Call.

Wait.

Explain.

Email.

Chase.

Escalate.

Find another department.

Explain it again.

In this case, the customer eventually got on a plane.

And that raises a rather uncomfortable question for any service organisation:

Who is actually managing the work — you or your customer?

There’s a simple way to find out.

Take one difficult case that bounced around your organisation.

Follow it from beginning to end.

But don’t measure what each department did.

Measure everything the customer had to do to keep the case moving.

Every call.

Every chase.

Every repeat.

Every handoff.

Then ask:

How much of that work should the customer ever have needed to do?

Now imagine designing the service differently.

One person owns the problem.

They navigate the organisation.

They coordinate the specialists.

They keep the customer informed.

The customer gets on with their life.

The leader gets an operation they can trust to deal with unusual problems before they become newspaper stories.

And here’s what’s weird.

Designed that way, it’s cheaper for everyone.

The customer stops spending their time managing your organisation.

And your organisation stops paying people to deal with all the calls, emails, chasing, handoffs and escalations it created.

Sometimes the expensive way to run a service is making the customer do the work.

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