Instructions. Who needs them?

At the office I work sits one of the most fearsome devices known to human kind. Well, me anyway. The automatic coffee machine.

You would think getting a coffee is a fairly easy thing to achieve.  Yet it has taken me more than two years to finally get the coffee I want. And it was, and I am sure you’re ahead of me at this point, all my own fault. I kept saying to myself, ‘how difficult can it be to get the right coffee?’

Well actually very difficult.

The coffee machine has a number of buttons. At first glance (and for the next 300) it looks simple; if you push the top button you get decaffeinated coffee and if you push the second one down you get regular coffee. It all seems simple so far except that when you push the top button nothing happens. Push the second button and you get a hot cup of something that smells and looks a little like coffee. But not something I want to drink.

The trouble is I want decaffeinated. And over the two years that I have pleaded with and begged this machine,  it failed to deliver what I wanted.

Last week I went through my usual ritual and nothing happened. I pushed the decaf button and nothing, zip, nada, nowt (that’s a North of England term – see even my blog is globally educational). I stabbed the button again in the hope that somehow it was all in the timing of the button press but nothing happened.

At this point, spying the maintenance man, I did something that men typically find very difficult to do. I asked for help.

‘Read the instructions on the front’ was the reply. Well if it was that simple I would have sorted it out a long time ago so really what use was that? Except it was very useful indeed; standing back from the machine I took a look. And there in front of me were instructions on how to get the coffee I want – press the top button followed by the second button. Sure enough two presses later I had a cup of decaffeinated coffee. Almost two years to the day and after asking for help,  reading the instructions, and pressing the buttons in the correct order, I finally had what I wanted.

And a thought struck me – how many times do we do things in a way that is more complicated than necessary (or just give up) simply because we have never asked for help, or read the instructions? I recall that during my time as a COO I was always struck by the fact that the same process, for example issuing an insurance policy, could vary between 20 minutes in one office and two days in another. People would blame the process when in fact it was more about the lack of training, a refusal to ask for help, or lack of clarity around the instructions.

So what?

If you’re responsible for a customer service, whether its a coffee machine or an insurance policy, spend as much time on making sure instructions are clear and on training your people correctly, as you do on developing the product you sell. And, whatever your role in an organization, take responsibility for training yourself. Shout loud and long when there is a lack of support or training. You might be surprised when people actually listen.

While my lack of decaffeinated coffee didn’t impact customers it probably impacted my colleagues – my having three cups of regular coffee is not going to make their lives any eaiser!

So I can now get the coffee I want. Shame I haven’t yet mastered my laptop with its 500 page instruction manual, all on-line and in most parts completely unintelligible.

And thats a story for another blog.

Anyone else out there ever gone against their natural tendencies and asked for help? What was the result?