Is it people or processes destroying your brand?

When customer satisfaction scores decline, organisations typically respond in one of two ways: they retrain their staff, or they redesign their processes. The problem is that if you choose the wrong intervention, you waste time and money—and the underlying issue persists.

Corrective plans cannot really focus on more than one issue at a time. Before you can fix the problem, you need to know what kind of problem it is. Is it a people problem—a matter of attitude, training, or individual performance? Or is it a process problem—a system that makes it structurally difficult to deliver good service regardless of who is doing the job?

Getting to that answer requires mapping your employee structure in relation to customer experience touchpoints before measuring anything. Using a vehicle purchase as an example: the quality of the salesperson's interaction and the efficiency of the finance application process are both part of the customer journey, but they require completely different interventions if something goes wrong.

The recommended approach involves creating questionnaires divided into meaningful indexes, conducting sophisticated statistical analysis to identify weak links, and then distinguishing clearly between problematic processes and underperforming employees.

Once you have that distinction, the path forward is clear. If it is a process issue, fix the system. If it is a people issue, learn from your high-performing staff and apply those practices across the team. Either way, you are solving the actual problem—not the symptom.