Systemic issues of unethical business practices?

I have been working on how my organization can surface and solve customer issues fast and efficiently. Do you have any best practices that are applicable to big B2B business such as GE?

• Answer:

  First: there is no silver bullet to the best way to surface these issues. One way to start is to try to understand the magnitude of the problem, then classify the problems, then humanize them in an easy to digest fashion. Understanding the magnitude means knowing how often something "bad" happens relative to the baseline. So if you have 10,000 transactions, are you getting 2 problem reports, 20, or 200 (or even 2,000)? How do you know you have a problem and have you communicated it to other folks on the team? If you start with an email alias (e.g. Problem@) and let people send whatever they want, this is a rough way to understand the magnitude. Classifying the problem is trickier. I suggest making a list of the 5-7 buckets you'd like to know about, and then driving people to a form where they are forced to pick one of the buckets to continue. Add a space for them to tell you what they mean in their own words and you will get some calibration for why they picked the idsa they did. Finally, you need to humanize your answer by sharing the real words people use to describe the problem with a group that can actually solve the problem. I recommend sharing the top 5-10 quotes that - taken out of context - are understandable customer problems. As a bonus when you are describing these products, add a space for the respondent to let you know how they would solve the issue.