I have been interested in this topic for quite some time. I guess a good start point is situational awareness and service automation.

Howdy Georges,

You do know that even robotic processes have to cope with error and non-nominal processing of repetitive customer services. There are enough examples of that in the ICT and robotics world.

So what do you think about human repetitive customer services? Can they be avoided? I think,... not.

But you can try to minimize them just like with robotics. Optimize your process. To do so, whether with humans or robots, you should implement a rigorous QA/QC program. If your QA/QC manager has done his (her) work well, you will see the number of errors go down. Mind that the most difficult exercise in QA/QC is to define the term "error" in your QA/QC scheme. For a process executed by robots, evidently it is much easier to define when the process goes in "error" mode than for humans. I would advise you to jump deep into the topic of QA/QC to get your human error minimized and your process optimized. Forget about avoiding human errors. Maybe if you can avoid errors with a robotic process during typically ten years, you might start thinking of doing the same with humans, but I fear that you won't make it with humans.

Lots of fun putting up your QA/QC program.

Frank

Thank you for your answers, I appreciate your responses. The process improvement efforts are taken care of by process improvement methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma and TOC etc.. However I am more interested at this point in the Root causes of human error.

We all seem to accept that Humans make errors, in fact we have a saying : " To Err is Human". To accept that Humans make errors and that nothing can be done about it creates complacency, which is in fact itself one of the causes of Human errors.

Frank, I like your comparison to Robotics, however I am not convinced that we need to wait to learn from Robots to get a better insight to the 'Root Causes' of Human errors.

Once we know the root causes we can do something about it...