In today’s business world, issue reporting and solution is a given. It is a basic process flow in every part of an organization. The breakthrough is how to stitch them seamlessly amongst the different parts of the company or in multi-location settings to ensure the most effective and fastest resolution turn-around time.

Effective issue resolution is important in driving brand and customer loyalty, performance quality, cost efficiency, and data insights.

Customers who are satisfied with a company’s response and closure of issues are highly likely to be a repeat customer, do a recommendation, and pay for value-add.

Effective issue resolution is the ability to productively close a problem, remove its root cause with a sound process of solution selection and risk mitigation. Each step in an issue resolution process is equally vital but the base components that stream through the path are more often overlooked or non-existent that contributes to its breakdown. Ensuring the visibility on the progress of each issue to its closure in the quickest and most efficient manner is the goal.

The 2 base components that drive the seamless progression towards each and every closure are:

• Tracking -a path that follows the issue from its onset to its closure. It is essential to have visibility in real-time on the 3 big Ws – What is happening and what is required. Who is accountable and owns the actions. When are the actions implemented and when is the target closure.The essence is not to allow information or points to get lost in the shuffle and the ability to navigate towards a solution.

• Communication – weaves through the entire process. The target is to simplify the exchange and usage of information for faster and most accurate action. This component manifests in both active and static manners. Active are real-time engagements whilst static are sources of index as in a Dashboard or a log report. The more number of users touching the path or the more complex the intersections are, require the communication platform to be robust and purposeful.

A very familiar example in today’s environment is the usage of multiple platforms in issue logging and processing. The more intuitive ways are email, text, chats, individual spreadsheets, manual checklists, etc. The path to progression with these is singular and dependent on manual interactions which are very time-consuming.

Companies that are able to adapt tools and processes that enable them to collect, consolidate, and organize their information across groups realize significant benefits in transparency and time. Action owners can view information in a unified fashion, can check the status of open cases instead of sorting through conversation threads on multiple platforms. They are able to assign tasks and track their progress and solutions. Resources spent decreases as much as 80% and productivity increased by a factor of 10x.

The strategic outcome of effective issue resolution is the power of data insights. It lays the footing for a wealth of data that can be referenced for trends, underlying causes for process improvement, recovery elements for planning, and simple learnings for best practices. This sets a good foundation for strategic planning towards higher standards of performance and output.