Three Nines

We are currently working with a client to roll out a customer service initiative, which has made me think about how we serve our clients, our vendors, and one another. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the three nines.

In computer science, the measure of availability of a system is sometimes measured in what’s called the class of nines. For example, three nines—or 99.9%—is often considered to be acceptable availability. This mean a system would be unavailable over 43 minutes a month. Statistically speaking it doesn’t seem like much, but when you think about how it would affect your own business in real time, it looms much larger.

Certainly, context is everything. If you were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and were then told you had a 99.9% chance of survival, those odds would seem pretty great. However, there are many situations in which 99.9% just isn’t good enough. Do an internet search for “Is 99.9% good enough?” and you’ll find many examples of situations such as these:

·         114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes would be shipped every year

·         2 planes would land unsafely at Chicago O’Hare every day

·         315 words in the dictionary would be misspelled

·         12 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day

·         20,000 prescriptions would be filled incorrectly every year

·         18,322 pieces of mail would be mishandled every hour

What percentage is acceptable when it comes to customer service? Keep in mind that somewhere around 68% of customers leave organizations because they feel indifferently treated. Happy customers tell an average of five people about their experience; unhappy customers tell two to three times that number of people about their bad experience.

What would happen if we all provided the best customer service 100% of the time?