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Writing a routine down so it survives a bad day, holding it with a checklist, reading a complaint as the step that failed, and costing what a missing step costs.
Paper packet. Every task here also exists on screen, where it is checked automatically; answers written on paper are not assessed by Nydus. When you are back at a device, enter your answers there.
You will put the steps of a job in the order they happen, write them so a stranger could follow them, and pick out the steps that belong on a checklist. You will take a complaint, name the step it points at, work out a complaint rate, and cost a repeated failure — time at the costing rate plus materials — against the check that would prevent it.
You can say what your offer promises a customer, and you know that a returning customer is buying the same result as last time. This lesson is the machinery that makes the promise come true on the day you are tired and the day somebody else is doing it — and the arithmetic that says what it costs when it does not.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Process | The steps of a job written down in the order they happen. |
| Checklist | The short list of steps that are easy to skip and expensive to skip. |
| Root cause | The step that let a failure through, not the failure itself. |
| Rework | Doing a job again because it failed: time and materials spent twice. |
| Complaint rate | Complaints divided by jobs, as a percentage. |
| Complaint log | A record of each complaint, the step it points at, and what was changed. |
Everything a business sells is sold twice: when the customer agrees, and when the work is done. A process closes the gap, and the routine worth writing down is the one that already works.
Written down, a routine survives a bad day, a busy hour, and somebody else doing the job. The test is one question — could a competent stranger follow this? Set the room up properly fails; chairs facing the board, marked paper on the table passes.
A checklist is the shorter thing: the steps that get skipped when it is busy. Nobody forgets to do the work. People forget to check the card reader and to ring the customer.
And a complaint is not an attack. It is information about which step failed, given by somebody who could have simply stopped coming.
Another way: steps
To write down one routine of your own:
Another way: table
Four steps, and where complaints land.
| Step | What the customer says |
|---|---|
| Taking the order | I said Tuesday |
| Doing the work | the button stopped working |
| Checking it | it arrived cracked |
| Telling the customer | nobody rang me |
The fifth verdict — no step failed — is for the complaints that are really about a decision.
Write the routine by doing it. Take a job you do often and do it once with a notebook, writing each step as an instruction: a verb, an object, and what is left when it is done. Label the phone with the customer's name and the job number rather than sort the phone out.
Test it on a stranger. Hand it to somebody who has never done the job and watch where they hesitate. Every question they ask is a line that needs rewriting.
Pull out the checklist. Mark the steps that are skipped when the day is busy — usually the ones at the start and the end, with no visible reward. Five to eight lines is plenty; a checklist too long to use is not a checklist.
Keep a complaint log. For every complaint: the date, what the customer said, which step it points at, and what was changed. Once a quarter, count complaints by step and work out the complaint rate.
Cost the failures. A failure costs the time to put it right at the owner's costing rate, plus materials used again, plus anything refunded. Multiplied by how often it happens, that is what the missing step costs, and it is usually more than the owner expects.
Check the process works by the log: after a step is changed, complaints about that step should fall in the next quarter. If they do not, the change was not the right one, or it is not being followed, and the log has said so.
A complaint needs two things done, and most owners do only the first.
One: put it right for that customer. Quickly, and without making them ask twice. That is the visible half, and the one that decides whether they come back.
Two: change the step that let it happen. Ask what would have made the complaint impossible. Not be more careful, which is not a change: a step, a checklist line, a different order.
Do only the first and the same complaint returns, looking by then like the kind of customers you get. Do only the second and the business is mended and the customer gone.
Owners sometimes resist checklists and checks because they take time: five minutes testing each repaired phone, two minutes reading back an order. That time is real and should be counted. So should the cost of not doing it.
The cost of a failure has three parts. Rework: the time and materials to do the job again. Refunds and goodwill: the discount given, the free extra, the customer who does not come back and the referral they do not make. Disruption: the rearranged schedule, the job bumped to fit the rework in. The first is easy to count; the other two are usually larger.
Set a check's cost against what it prevents. Two minutes of reading back an order, at 30 an hour, is a dollar a job. If it prevents one wrong-day booking in fifty, and each wrong-day booking costs forty dollars in rework and goodwill, it saves eighty dollars for every fifty dollars it costs. Most checklist lines pass that test easily, which is why the businesses that keep them tend to be both more reliable and more profitable — and why we are too busy to check usually means we are busy because we do not check.
A complaint log is a page with five columns: the date, what the customer said in their own words, which step it points at, what was done for the customer, and what was changed in the routine. The last column is the one that matters, and an empty cell in it is a complaint that will come back.
Write the customer's words, not a summary. Nobody rang me and you lost my phone may both be written up as communication problem, but they point at different steps, and the summary hides which. The words also show patterns a category would not: three customers in a month saying I didn't know it was ready is one missing step, however each complaint was phrased.
Most dissatisfied customers never complain; they simply do not come back. So the log undercounts, and a few habits help it catch more. Ask at the end of the job: was there anything we could have done better? invites the small complaint that would otherwise leave quietly. Watch the return share from the last lesson: a fall in returners with no rise in complaints means people are leaving without saying why. Read the reviews customers leave elsewhere, and log them the same way.
Once a quarter, count the log by step, work out the complaint rate, and cost the commonest failure. That half hour usually points at one change worth more than any new product or channel, because it keeps customers the business has already paid to win.
Share the log with anyone who helps in the business. A helper who sees that nobody rang me has been logged four times understands why the new line on the checklist matters, and follows it on the busy day when it would be easiest to skip — which is the only day a checklist line is really for. A process that only the owner understands is still a process that depends on the owner being there, every day, without a single day off.
A small dental practice finds that about 8 percent of appointments are missed without notice: roughly 60 a month out of 750. Each empty slot costs the practice about 70 dollars of contribution, because the dentist and the room are paid for whether a patient comes or not — around 4,200 a month.
The practice's process for booking ends when the appointment is written in the schedule. There is no step for reminding the patient. The owner adds two lines: a text two days before, and a phone call the day before for any patient who has missed before. The texts are automatic; the calls take the receptionist about three hours a week, costed at 22 an hour — roughly 290 a month.
Three months later, missed appointments have fallen to 3 percent, about 22 a month. The practice recovers 38 slots a month, worth about 2,660, for a cost of 290 plus the text service. Nothing about the dentistry changed. A step that was missing from the written process was added, costed, and checked against the log — which is the whole of this lesson in one practice.
Hospitals and airlines use short checklists for exactly the steps experts skip under pressure: confirming the patient and the site before surgery, setting the flaps before take-off. Studies of surgical checklists have found fewer complications where they are used well. The steps are ones every professional knows; the checklist is for the day knowing is not enough.
A checklist means you do not know the job. The steps it carries are the ones you could recite in your sleep, which is why nobody notices the day one of them did not happen.
Writing down what you do is enough. Writing down what a stranger could follow is enough. Check everything is fine describes a feeling, not an action.
Fixing the customer is fixing the problem. The refund closes the conversation and leaves the step where it was.
Blaming the person. A repeated failure is usually a step that makes the failure easy, not a person who does not care.
Counting only the rework. Lost customers and a disrupted schedule usually cost more than the redo itself.
Writing the process once. The routine that survives is the one changed each time something goes wrong.
Quality is a matter of care, not method. Careful people still forget steps on a busy day; a written process is what makes care repeatable.
Write what happened on a wet Tuesday.
$\text{float never counted}$
One step, skipped because it was busy.
Find what it cost that evening.
$\text{takings } 40 \text{ short, or not: impossible to tell}$
Without the float, the count means nothing.
Write the routine in order.
$\text{float} \to \text{frame} \to \text{fruit} \to \text{prices} \to \text{card reader}$
The order is part of the instruction.
Mark the checklist lines.
$\text{float; card reader}$
The dull steps with no visible reward.
Check it on a stranger: her nephew opens on Saturday.
$\text{one question: where is the float kept?}$
Add the answer to the first line.
Put the first complaint right.
$\text{apology, no charge}$
The customer is repaired.
Log the second, three weeks later.
$\text{same complaint: nobody rang}$
The step was never touched.
Find the step.
$\text{routine ends at labeling the phone}$
Nothing says who tells the customer, or when.
Cost the failure: 20 minutes of calls at 28 an hour, and a 10-dollar discount.
$\tfrac{1}{3} \times 28 + 10 \approx 19.33$
Each time it happens.
Add the line.
$\text{message the customer when the job is finished}$
Change the step, and write it down.
Check next quarter's log.
$\text{complaints about telling: } 4 \to 0$
The change held.
Count the quarter's complaints by step.
$\text{order } 2, \ \text{work } 1, \ \text{checking } 6, \ \text{telling } 0$
The log sorts them.
Find the complaint rate over 1800 boxes.
$9 \div 1800 = 0.5\%$
Low, but not evenly spread.
Find checking's share of the complaints.
$6 \div 9 \approx 67\%$
Two thirds point at one step.
Read what they say.
$\text{missing sides in boxes}$
Boxes left the counter without being looked at.
Cost one: a free box at 5 and a remade side at 1.
$6 \times (5 + 1) = 36 \text{ a quarter}$
Plus customers who did not complain and did not return.
Add a check: lid off, count the compartments, lid on.
$3 \text{ seconds a box} \times 1800 = 90 \text{ minutes}$
About 30 dollars of time a quarter.
Compare the check with what it prevents.
$30 < 36 + \text{lost customers}$
The check pays for itself before counting the customers kept.
Put it right for this customer.
$\text{go back and do the floor, no charge}$
Quickly, and without argument.
Find the step that let it through.
$\text{checking it}$
The work list existed; nobody checked it before packing up.
Cost the return visit: 40 minutes at 24 an hour.
Four lines from four checklists. Match each one to the thing it stops happening.
| A morning of sales that cannot be taken | Work done carefully to the wrong instructions | A shortfall nobody can trace to a day | Food kept past the point where anybody can tell | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Check the card reader takes a test payment before the first customer | ||||
| Read the job sheet back to the customer before touching anything | ||||
| Count the drawer against the register before locking up | ||||
| Write the date on everything that goes into the fridge |
Complete the worked solution: over 100 jobs last quarter, the complaint log shows $1$ complaints about taking the order, $2$ about doing the work, and $6$ about telling the customer. Read the log.
Add the complaints.
$1 + 2 + 6 =$ t
The quarter's total.
Find the complaint rate.
$(\text{total}) \div 100 \times 100 =$ r $\%$
Complaints over jobs.
Count the complaints about the other two steps together.
$(\text{total}) - 6 =$ k
Telling the customer draws more complaints than the other two steps together, so a change there is worth most.
Name the step to change.
$\text{add: message the customer when the job is done}$
A step, not be more careful.
Say how to check the change worked.
$\text{count again next quarter}$
The log shows whether the step now holds.
At Northside Repairs, a phone that fails its final check has to be opened again. Putting it right takes $45$ minutes of the owner's time, costed at $24$ dollars an hour, and $7$ dollars of adhesive and parts. It happens about $7$ times a month. What does this failure cost the business in a month, in dollars?
Answer:
Neighborhood Kitchen has written down its routine for closing the kitchen. The five steps are here in the wrong order. Put them back in the order they have to happen.
Number the steps in order (write the number in the box):
Bright Home Cleaning did $40$ cleans last month and logged $5$ complaints. What was the complaint rate, in percent?
Answer:
Monica's stall used to open without counting the float, and about $6$ times a month the evening count could not be reconciled, costing her roughly $36$ dollars each time in money she could not account for. Since *count the float* went at the top of her opening checklist, it happens about $2$ times a month. How many dollars a month does the checklist line save?
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Monthly cost before the checklist line, dollars | |
| Monthly cost after it, dollars | |
| Saved each month, dollars |
A tutor's written process had no line saying *book the room the week before*. Over a term, $5$ sessions had to be rescheduled because the room was taken, and each reschedule cost $30$ minutes of messages and rearranging, at her costing rate of $28$ dollars an hour. What did the missing line cost her in the term, in dollars?
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Cost of one reschedule, dollars | |
| Cost of the term's reschedules, dollars |
Lesson test: one question per skill, one attempt each, no hints. Your answers are checked when you submit.
Five complaints, from five different weeks. A complaint is information about which step failed. For each one, say which step it points at — and one of them points at no step at all.
| Which step failed? | |
|---|---|
| I said Tuesday on the phone, and the job sheet on the box says Thursday. | |
| The new screen is fitted, and now the button underneath it does not work. | |
| One of the four mugs was already cracked when I unwrapped it — somebody packed it that way. | |
| It was finished on Wednesday and nobody told me. I rang on Friday to find out. | |
| You are shut on Sundays, and Sunday is the only day I am free. |
You can write a routine a stranger could follow, read a complaint as information about which step failed, and put a monthly cost on a missing step. Tell someone why fixing it for the customer who complained is only half the repair. Next: the ceiling on how much of that work a week can actually hold.
15. Your turn: a customer says the clean was finished but the kitchen floor was missed, step 3
$\tfrac{2}{3} \times 24 = 16$
What the skipped check cost this time.