Let the front line fix the small things

Authority parked two levels above the customer turns a five minute fix into a fortnight.

In many organisations the person closest to the problem can diagnose it in seconds and resolve nothing. They can see exactly what is wrong and exactly what would settle it, and then they must open a case, escalate, and wait for someone who has never spoken to the customer to approve a decision they could have made themselves. The cost of that arrangement is enormous and largely uncounted: the follow up contacts, the reopened case, the goodwill spent, the staff member steadily learning that judgement is not wanted here.

The usual objection is that discretion will be abused or applied inconsistently. In practice, frontline staff given a bounded allowance tend to be conservative with it, because they are the ones who have to justify their choices to colleagues and to themselves. Consistency is better served by a clear boundary and a stated principle than by a rule book that covers every case except the one in front of you.

Set the boundary explicitly. Define the value or the category of fix that can be settled on the spot without asking anyone. Say clearly that using it will not be second guessed unless there is a pattern. Then look at what people actually resolve, because that data is a free map of your defects. Every small fix granted at the front line is a record of something upstream that keeps breaking.