warning signs
Complaint = what happened
Symptom = what appears to have gone wrong
Root cause = why it happened
Warning sign = evidence that it could happen again
I remember a phrase I learnt in my earlier years: once is a one-off, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern.
When a case is managed by an individual case manager, it might not realise it is systemic or part of a bigger problem.
This kind of insight comes through in the data analysis whether it be daily, weekly, monthly etc.
A lot of the time we hide behind band-aid causes: incorrect information, known delay, poor communication and so on.
On their own, these can look like symptoms.
But when a pattern emerges the call to action on the root cause sounds stronger and louder across the stakeholders. It becomes harder to shrug away and we become accountable to those impacted.
An insights analyst should be asking:
have I seen this more than once in the last six months, or am I likely to see it again?
is there a disproportionate number of complaints coming from one area
are the complaints clustering at a particular part of the process
Behind the incorrect information could be a knowledge gap in the learning hub, the known delay could highlight a resourcing v volume challenge, the poor communication could be a language barrier or an incorrectly used template.
It goes back to my previous article about asking the hard questions, keep asking why until the ugly truth is revealed and we get from the symptoms to the diagnosis.
The symptoms are the warning signs that there is a larger issue hiding beneath the surface.
If we ask ourselves will this happen tomorrow? If the answer is yes - warning sign. If the answer is maybe - also a warning sign. If the answer is genuinely no, you have evidence for calling it isolated.
Are we using complaints to close cases, or open questions - what if the most important complaint isn’t the one with the biggest impact but the one that clustered with others that becomes the bigger problem?
