Stuck in a Queue of One

It was Thursday, around 9:30 am and I’ve been at the MSI-ECS offices since 8:45 am. It’s been a daily routine since Monday :  I’d arrive, wait for someone to notice me, ask for help, get told to wait, I do so, for an average of 30 minutes, and then told to go back the next day.

It all started when I accidentally short circuited my laptop’s keyboard last Sunday. It wasn’t my fault really. I mean, how was I supposed to know that water/juice/tea/coffee could do that to electronics? That kind of thing should me on the manual. Anyway, bgecause I was gbetting tired of typinhgb like thnis, I decided to have it fixed as soon as possible. A quick Google search revealed that MSI-ECS was the nearest authorized service center to me.

So I brought my laptop there on Monday thinking they’ll just need to do a routine cleaning of the keyboard’s innards and that will be that. Upon arriving there, I quickly noticed how different it was from other service centers I’ve been in. There wasn’t a reception area for customers, a queueing system, or a cashier. What they had was a mess of cubicles, all with computer parts placed haphazardly across the desks. And once in a while, you could see a human being over the debris.  This is what clued me in that this operation was not designed with the end user in mind; plus the fact that I appeared to be the only one there to have something repaired.

Not seeing an apparent process in this system, I approached the nearest person I could find and asked if they could repair my laptop. After being referred to at least three different people, I found someone who could help me.

What I initially thought would take an hour or so had actually taken four days to be resolved. The crux of the matter mainly stemmed from the fact that every hardware necessary to fix my laptop was located just a few feet from me. Only we couldn’t get it because we needed the purchase order from the finance department; which for all intents and purposes existed in a different time zone as opposed to just being in the next room.

Great idea for a shirt, actually

To say that it was a long and frustrating process is to say that the Sun is warm.

But for all the inefficiencies displayed by the people, I really couldn’t blame them. They were helpful and accommodating half of the time, and apologetic for the rest. It’s the structure of the whole operation which is at fault here.

Yes you can argue that since end users are not their main target market, you can’t expect them to model their business to cater to me. But I say they’re missing out on a significant part of the market by neglecting our demographic. While there, I tweeted that I could think of a hundred different ways by which they can improve their operations.

I’m just going to mention a few:

All my time there allowed me to scrutinize how they run things. I saw that each department was highly specialized to focus on one task and one task only, and all these people with the same specializations were all group together, somewhat isolated from the other specialists.

While there is merit in such a structure, it prevents them from responding quickly to a variety of scenarios. The key is in creating just a couple of lean breakaway teams, each made up of people of different expertise. Also, if they could place a couple of people from the finance department, the inventory manager, and maybe a cashier in the receiving area, they could cut the average waiting time by 80%.

That’s just off the top of my head. There are still other changes I could talk about that will help their operations, but a big mug of hot tea has mysteriously appeared dangerously close to the laptop, and I don’t want to take any chances.