21/06/28 8~9p

p.8

The effort to reduce call volume at Expedia was a successful upstream intervention. Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening. You can answer a customer’s call and address her complaint about a missing itinerary (downstream), or you can render that call unnecessary by ensuring that she receives her itinerary up front (upstream).

 

p.8

Notice what was missing: It was no group’s job to ensure that customers didn’t need to call for support. In fact, no team really stood to gain if customers stopped calling. It wasn’t what they were measured on.

 

p.8

In some ways, the goals of the groups actually encouraged more calls. For the product group, whose goal was to maximize bookings, the best move was to ask for a customer’s email only once, because asking her to type it a second time would add friction. They might lose 1 person in 100 who’d be annoyed enough to abandon the transaction.

 

p.9

So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?