Click the pictures for more info
Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition. Click the pictures for more info
Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition. 
Would You Like A Piece of $260 Billion?
Recent research by the Baymard Institute found that more than 69 percent of customers abandon their shopping cart instead of buying a product or service. From that same research Baymard Institute found that companies with an online checkout experience could see a 35% increase in conversion (read: sales) just by having a better checkout design.
That means reducing areas that can go wrong for a customer, making things easier to buy, and making the experience more streamlined.
In fact, they found that the average online checkout had around 14 fields, while they needed only 7. Amazon, of course, are doing it with just one, using their “one click buy” buttons, and reaping huge rewards as a result.
How Do You Quantify “Better Checkout Flow and Design”?
Just saying they need a better checkout flow and design is one thing, but how to you actually quantify that? How do you measure better flow or reduced complexities? How do you measure the Customer’s Experience?
The good news is there is a book called “The Lean CX Score” which combines the most customer-centric improvement system from the last century with the most important life-blood of any business – its customers. And it also contains an exact framework for measuring the usability of your customer’s experience and knowing whether they are likely to return, or likely to abandon you.
You see, without customers paying for your product or service, and returning time and time again, there is a good chance you won’t be able to pay the bills to keep the lights on, and will subsequently go bust. It’s not exactly rocket science. And as we’ve seen, by making things easy for our customer to do and easy for them to buy, we can significantly increase the number of customers and the number of times they return. More customers, more profit, means keeping and thriving in your business.
Lean CX Is The Key To The $260 Billion Door
All of which means that if you want a piece of that $260 billion, you’d better start making things easy. For the price of a couple of cups of coffee, you can get “The Lean CX Score” by David McLachlan which outlines, step-by-step, how to create disruptive products and services that are more streamlined, faster, and easier to use than your competition. And when you use it, get ready to see your business thrive and your competition bite the dust.
Lean CX Is The Key To Creating Disruptors
A disruptor is a product, service, or entire business that changes the rules of the game, so that it is seen as better, can scale and grow faster, and sell more than anything in its industry. But what people don’t realise is that disruptors are most commonly created in fields that are already existing – selling products or services that already exist and we know that customers want anyway. The disruptive business just finds ways to streamline the process of creating and delivering what the customer wants. As the Baymard Institute research showed, that can start with an increase of 27% to your online sales channel, but as you continue to use the Lean CX framework to improve and if you ultimately become a disruptor, history has shown us that the sky is the limit.
Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition. Your Complicated Process Is Driving Customers Away
Have you ever tried to buy something online recently? With online business taking off like never before, there is a good chance that your answer is “Yes”.
And just like 69% of people, there’s also a good chance that you’ve tried to buy something online but abandoned your shopping cart before you were able to buy.
Did you know that 27 percent of those people who abandoned their online shopping cart, and who weren’t just browsing, abandoned it because the checkout was too long or complicated? That’s a lot of people leaving you at the most critical time, and the good news is “long and complicated” is actually something we can fix.
The Lean CX Score Fixes “Long and Complicated”
What would it mean to you if you had a proven, step-by-step framework for reducing that time and complexity in your checkout experience? For one (as we’ve just seen), you would have a good chance of improving the online sales to your business by up to 27% or even more, which would mean a very tidy jump in profit for you too.
The Lean CX Score is that proven framework. Revealed in the book of the same name by David McLachlan in 2017, the step-by-step framework of Lean CX combines the most important asset of your business (your customers, who pay your bills by buying your product or service, remember?), and Lean or the Toyota Production System, which is one of the most incredible customer-centric improvement methods of the last century. Lean CX has modified both in a ground breaking way to suit Customer Experience and white collar jobs, reduce time and improve ease of use.
Reducing Waste Improves Speed and Happiness
The Lean CX Score outlines five Customer Experience “wastes” – common scenarios that when you fix will have customers clamouring to buy from you. Just a few of those wastes that you need to remove are:
While reading the book will give you the full outline of those Lean CX wastes and how to remove them by using the Lean CX Score, you can get an idea of them just with the list above. Let’s take a look:
Rework, or having to redo things, can easily happen on an Online Shopping Cart experience when you have to enter your payment details more than once, or after making a mistake, or having to refresh a form that times out.
Extra Steps could be extra form fields that aren’t really necessary, or that could easily be reduced. In fact Amazon got rid of its form fields completely with its “One Click Buy”. How is that for reducing extra steps?
Excessive Hand-offs could be too many online screens to travel through, where further mistakes can be made.
Are You Ready To Improve Speed and Make Things Easy?
The Lean CX Score is the first book of its kind, that completely outlines an exact step-by-step framework for improving the speed and simplicity of your customer’s experience, helping them buy easily and buy more often.
When you’re ready to profit more, enjoy more happiness and easier work, then I highly recommend you get the book.
Get "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition. 
This is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score." Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition. Good Customer Experience Engages Your Team by More Than 25%
Good customer experience also engages your team, and increases retention and productivity of your team members by a significant amount.
Now you might be thinking, “Surely that can’t be true.” After all, it’s easy to see how CX can affect the end customer, but improving our team engagement and retention too? It certainly can. If anyone you provide a service to is your “customer”, then that means the people you work with all have experiences that can be improved too.
Here’s a quick example. One of the key steps in the Lean CX Score, as you will soon see, is “Check and Stop”. Check and Stop means we get feedback quickly and we use it just as fast. One report by the Gallup Business Journal found that a key factor of highly engaged team-mates was receiving feedback at least once a week *12.
It helped them to know if what they were doing was working; they could adjust where necessary, and it made them want to stay and do a good job.
Compare this with team members where there was no regular check-in. The research showed they were 97% more likely to be disengaged in their work *13.
Increasing your team’s engagement doesn’t just benefit you if you’re a leader. Having engaged team-mates has been a huge focus of powerhouses like Google over the past few years because engaged team-mates are happier, have more workplace friends, generally enjoy their lives more and also perform way better than teams that aren’t engaged.
You may have heard the study from Gallup International that found 70% of employees are disengaged at work *14. But what you may not have heard is that disengaged team members are at least six times more likely to leave their job than team members who are engaged in their work *15. If you think it’s expensive to acquire customers, it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff. It’s much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.
Engaged team members will also make you more money. A separate study by the firm Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees achieved twice the annual net revenue on average than businesses with lower engagement scores *16. That’s a 100% difference in percentage terms of revenue.
All of this comes from just one step in the Lean CX Score. Can you imagine what will happen when you put them all together?
More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:
This is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score." Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition. 
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. Use Kaizen and Kaizen Events to Help Stakeholder Buy-In
The term “Kaizen” is Japanese for improvement, or continuous improvement.
A Kaizen Event, therefore, means an “improvement meeting”. It often involves a few front-line staff from the process involved, a few people who are not familiar with the process to get an outside perspective, and sometimes a few people from the leadership team. Your team use any of the tools they need to from this book, to reveal problems, discover opportunities and make a solid case for change.
If everyone is already familiar with the concepts (and with a book like this in everyone’s hands, they should be), then it is much easier to get everything down on paper quickly. It could be started over a cup of coffee with someone involved in the process, or integrated into an existing regular weekly meeting with a team of front-line staff.
Ensuring front-line team-mates and leaders are involved with your Kaizen events will also help you get one of the most important and often the most elusive things: stakeholder buy-in. The more input someone has into something, the more likely they are to support it. As you take them through the steps, you are not only building their skill-set, but helping them be a real part of the solution.
This is why Steve was so insistent on Lisa getting her team-mates involved when starting with her current state map.
By itself, Kaizen or continuous improvement should be a regular part of your week, including “every person, every day” in stopping when there are problems (4.2), defining them using the customer driven metrics (1.2), getting to the real cause of the problem (3.3), and checking ideas to fix them. Even small ideas that warrant a “just do it” test (easily done using Agile, 5.3) to quickly see if they work, can get things underway.
Figure 2: A Lean practitioner leading a Kaizen Event, involving people who do the process every day.
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:
Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:
How a C Student Passed the ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt Exam
I nearly failed mathematics at school. In fact, I was so bad at maths that the teacher “politely suggested” to my parents that I move to the other maths class – the one where all the below average kids go.
And I did. Not thinking that I could do any better, I moved to the basic maths class and I still only just scraped by with a C (a D is a fail, in Australia). It was a long time before I would ever look at a maths book again.
Fast forward a few years, and I am now a person who has passed the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Certified Black Belt exam, a marathon at four hours long and heavy on the math.
How did I go from a struggling, failing maths student who didn’t know how to study, to passing one of the most notoriously difficult examination combinations of statistics and project management in the world? Well, there are a few things I did, and I’ll pass them all on here so you can use them for yourself if you want to.
First, I Got The Quality Council of Indiana Black Belt Primer
The Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Primer is the tome of knowledge that has most, if not all of the Black Belt Body of Knowledge (BOK). You can get it from the Quality Council of Indiana, which is also affiliated with ASQ I believe. After going through this book every night for four or more months, I can tell you there is a LOT of great stuff in here. Not just statistics, but project management, process leadership, team building techniques, and design as well.
I also got the “Black Belt Memory Jogger” – a small book that is associated with the other major Six Sigma organisation – Six Sigma Academy. This rounded out some gaps with Gage R&R, and was also an easy read on the Bus to work.
Second, I Got the Quality Council of Indiana Black Belt Practice Exam CD
The Practice exam, also from the Quality Council of Indiana, was worth every penny of the $70 or so it cost. It has 1000 questions, and you can see the answer, with working, if you get it wrong. You can do practice exams in 10, 25, 50, 100, or 150 question lots, and choose which chapters you want to test for. This exam really helped me find my best way to study, which brings me to my last note:
Third, I Learned an Easy Way to Study That Suited Me
It wasn’t until I had been struggling with the thousand page tome of information for two months, that I realised in my life that: “I never actually learned how to study”. I had simply breezed through High School, and studied things afterwards that didn’t require much effort. This exam was completely different – with no knowledge of stats, or the crazy symbols they come with, or even basic mathematics, I had a huge gap to fill.
My beautiful wife gave me some suggestions on how to study, and I modified them to suit my needs. Below is the outcome of what I did.
Now I had a means for “building” my knowledge, instead of simply reading something and forgetting it by the next day. Everything I learned, I added under the appropriate section of my Excel sheet.
In the last four weeks leading up to the exam, I would do a full practice exam (150 questions) on each day of the weekend. This was quite exhausting, but turned out to be worth it in the end. The real exam was still a mental marathon.
Doing the Actual Black Belt Exam
Doing the Black Belt exam in Australia requires someone to oversee it – a “proctor”. Luckily, we had a spare room to sit the exam and a current Black Belt to act as the proctor, overseeing our exam.
Doing each question for the exam took longer than the practice CD, and I still had five questions out of the 150 to go at the end that I had to fill in on instinct. I remember for the last hour I had to go to the bathroom so badly that I thought I was going to burst. But there was no time to spare for a toilet break.
When it was over (and had been to the bathroom, thank goodness), I was slightly numb. I had a bad feeling about the test – as though I had messed it up and would have to sit it again. I went home angry with myself that I had wasted so much time, and questioned why I ever tried to do a project management exam with maths and statistics in it in the first place. Even a glass of whiskey that night couldn’t take the edge off.
After that, it was a nervous two week wait. Every day I would ask my colleagues if they had their results, and every day they would say no. When they finally did come by email, I checked the result. It said:
“Congratulations: You Have Passed!”
The Journey is Just Beginning
Using the things I’ve learned by becoming an ASQ Certified Black Belt will be a great reward in itself – now I have a lens I can see any business dealings through to reveal opportunities that others can’t often see. I will have these skills for life. And recertifying is much easier, if I have applied what I’ve been taught.
But the real lesson is: if I can do it, then anyone can do it. When I started I didn’t have even the basic skills. Now I can make control charts, design experiments, test distributions and much, much more.
Keep at it, study hard, and you can succeed too.
Yours in change,
David McLachlan
Get the Leadership Card Deck or the Five Minute Lean Book:
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting
Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.
You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
The Philippines is a beautiful place, with beautiful, friendly people. It has clear waters that are just made for sailing, peppered with idyllic islands to visit. Perfect for a holiday? You bet.
For better or worse, it is also a place with comparatively cheap labour and an English speaking population, which has resulted in many companies off-shoring their call centres or service departments there. I say for better or for worse, because of the following story:
Dodo mobile and Internet, in Australia, was one of these very companies. They used the Philippines for their call centre staff, and instead of making things simpler, they received a fine in 2008 from the ACMA for breaching the Privacy act. So I was not looking forward to calling them, even when I found out I was paying too much for my internet service. I thought that perhaps it would just be easier to keep paying the $10 extra a month and be done with it.
But then something wonderful happened. It started with a visit to their website.
On their “Contact Us” page, there was something I’d never seen before. It was the current call wait time – displayed plainly for all to see – right next to the number to call. It also showed the historical average. Both times were lower than the average call centre, at around 1 minute.
I thought – “Oh my God. This is Visual Management!” In a call centre, on a website! And it’s actually information that is extremely useful to me! Based on the wait time displayed, I called the number. They picked up in less than a minute. This alone would have been worth the price of admission, but the Lean experience didn’t stop there.
The staff member was friendly, polite, and did exactly what I needed. But it was what they did next that nearly made me the happiest man on the planet. The staff member asked if she had met my requirements for the call – I said “yes”, and she then reminded me to stay on the line so I could rate her service. When she hung up, I was automatically put through – this is perfect one piece flow – no additional steps required. The message that played asked me to rate a “Five” if she had completed my requirement for the call, and a “Four or below” if she had not.
And I thought “Oh my God” again. This is Jidoka. It’s the principle of “Stop and Notify” if something is wrong. If I selected a four or below, they said, it would put me through immediately to a senior staff member to get more information about why the call was bad. In other words – they would stop immediately, swarm around the problem using their senior staff and try and get an immediate fix. While I didn’t get to see it as I rated her a hearty “five”, I imagine that they log the reasons for their “Four or belows”, so they can fix those for the future as well. They would have to – their service certainly reflects it.
It was absolutely brilliant. And it was obviously paying dividends – the staff were very good at their job, and were keenly aware that their process was good, fast and effective, but also that they would be rated every single time. In Lean, we fix our Process, and we build up our people.
But here is the kicker – the payoff isn’t just happy customers. The payoff is financial, pure and simple. Happy customers mean sales, and more sales create a booming business.
M2 Group, who owns Dodo, has a share price that has almost doubled in the last year. Not many companies can say that. And yes, at the time of writing, I happen to own some 🙂
Yours in change,
David McLachlan
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, David McLachlan owns shares in M2 Group.
Get the Leadership Card Deck or the Five Minute Lean Book:
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting
Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.
You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Everything Has a Honeymoon Period
When companies begin a Lean transformation, there is often an air of excitement that surrounds it. After all, you already know (and if you don’t a quick Google search will reveal) the huge benefits a business can gain from going through Lean process improvement, namely:
The potential can seem so great, that anything touched by the hand of Lean during the honeymoon period can seem to do no wrong. But what happens when Lean has been a part of your company for two years? Five years? What about 10 years? Employees know lip-service when they see an idea with a distinct lack of follow up, and it doesn’t take long for them to brand your potential improvements as “just another fad”. When this happens, it can be very very hard to bring back your improvement initiative from the brink.
And here’s the real kicker: it’s not your fault. You had the best of intentions. You thought you were doing all the right things. You read the books, you hired the “gurus”, you attended the seminars. But you didn’t know about the one deadly trap that you absolutely must avoid during your Lean transformation.
The Deadly Trap: Educate To The Lowest Level Of Your Company Or You Will Fail
The simple fact is you need to teach Lean from the very top to the very bottom of your organisation, or your initiative will fail. You need management to be well versed and on board, otherwise projects will find it hard to get off the ground. You also need front line staff – team-mates from the Gemba – to know the improvement methods so they can use it to improve their job and your business every day. This is extremely powerful stuff.
Teaching it company-wide gives you passionate business-improvers at all levels of a company. You now have people working in the Gemba who know how to map and improve their process as part of their job.
You see, the power of Lean is in its simplicity. Yes, there are things to learn and yes you will need to think differently, but in the end the message is simple: Map your process, reduce wasteful steps, use a Pull system, build in quality or error proofing and experiment in a controlled space until you win. This means that:
And that is the power of Five Minute Lean. A simple message with a simple “toolbox” of improvement techniques that fit seamlessly together.
We Want Momentum, Not Inertia
Teaching Lean to all levels of a company also helps us build momentum for our change initiative. Momentum has a habit of growing, like a snowball rolling down a hill gathering speed.
On the flip side, for every person who doesn’t understand Lean properly, you can consider each one an anchor thrown over the side of your boat, slowing you down until you are forced to stop all together. They will either passively or actively dismiss your Lean transformation, and both are extremely dangerous.
Find A Way To Teach Others Easily
If you can find a quick, simple, waste-free way to teach and get your team-mates involved on your Lean journey, you will win. In fact, everyone will win, as processes become easier, faster and less burdensome. A great place to start is my book – Five Minute Lean – where the chapter titles double as a standard process checklist that anyone can use and learn from. Having this in the hands of each of your team-mates can do amazing things.
Yours in change,
David McLachlan
Get the Leadership Card Deck or the Five Minute Lean Book:
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting
Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.
You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Many companies, when first embarking on their Lean journey, will employ a handful of Lean tools around the business in an effort to make it look as though they are doing something.
I call this “busy work”, instead of “smart work”. It looks as though things are getting done, after all – people are busy, right? But really, nothing is getting done, or rather, nothing that truly matters.
The Lean Pharmacy
These tools of Lean are like a pharmacy. You can go and choose which tool you want. There are many to choose from, some quick and painless, others more involved.
The trouble with a pharmacy is, you still need the expertise of a Doctor to ensure you are picking up the right things. A doctor is there so you don’t accidentally buy a chemical cocktail that ends up being more dangerous than if you had done nothing at all.
The Lean Doctor
The Lean Doctor is the person with the expertise of Lean. Typically at least five transformations or projects under their belt, the Lean doctor is both familiar with the tools, and knows when to use them.
She might prescribe a certain way of problem solving, utilising the methods she deems best, and in the process can stop a team from making things worse. In fact, she can instead improve the situation with her guidance, often by more than 100 percent.
Use the Doctor, and the Pharmacy
So when you are implementing Lean, use the Doctor, and the Pharmacy. Teach the tools to your team-mates – after all, the Lean tools and methods are how they learn to frame problems in the Lean way.
But keep a “Doctor” on hand – someone who can prescribe the right mix of tools for you to use so as to keep yourself out of trouble.
Yours in change,
David McLachlan
Get the Leadership Card Deck or the Five Minute Lean Book:
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting
Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.
You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
