Operations work is often filled with tasks, requests, and decisions happening at the same time. It’s not always obvious which parts are working well and which parts need improvement. These ten questions help you understand how your team actually functions so you can make clear, practical changes.
1. Where does work take longer than expected?
Every team has steps in their processes that consistently move slower than they should. These are specific tasks or actions that repeatedly create delays.
Common examples include:
- Tasks sitting in queues without progress
- Requests waiting for someone to review or approve
- Work that changes hands multiple times without ownership
- Tasks that depend on information that is often missing
- Steps that require people to stop and ask for clarification
To identify these areas, talk directly to the people who handle the work. Ask them:
- “Which tasks slow you down the most?”
- “Which requests are hard to complete on time?”
- “What do you regularly have to wait for?”
You don’t need complex analysis, but rather understand where time is lost and why it happens. Once you know that, you can simplify the step, reassign ownership, add missing information, or remove unnecessary waiting.
2. How can we reduce the number of tools our customer service team needs to use for one task?
Customer service teams often move between several systems to solve a single case. This creates more work, increases errors, and slows down response times.
Look closely at what your team actually does during a case:
- How many tools do they open?
- Which tools are used only for one small piece of information?
- What data do they have to look up manually?
- What information needs to be copied from one system to another?
- What could appear automatically through an integration but currently doesn’t?
Once you see the pattern, you’ll notice that many tools are used only because the team has no alternative. Often the improvement is:
- Moving key data into the main support tool
- Adding a simple integration
- Creating clearer instructions
- Standardizing where information should live
- Eliminating tools that duplicate function
Reducing tool switching saves time and reduces frustration for the team.
3. Why do people keep asking the same questions internally, and how can we prevent that?
A large percentage of internal messages happen because the process is unclear or the information people need is hard to find.
Typical signs of this problem include:
- Team members asking the same question several times per week
- People requesting status updates because progress is invisible
- Cross-team questions about ownership or next steps
- Meetings held only to share information that could be written
- Frequent reminders because no system tracks deadlines
To fix this, look at the topics people ask about most often. Those topics usually need:
- Clearer documentation
- A single, reliable source of information
- More visibility into progress
- Defined owners for each step
When the process and information are clear, the number of internal messages drops naturally.
4. Which manual tasks are repeated every day and should be automated first?
Automation is most useful when it removes repetitive work that does not require judgment or decision-making.
Start by listing tasks that meet these criteria:
- The task happens many times per day or per week
- Several people across the team perform the same task
- The task follows the same steps every time
- Errors occur often because the task is repetitive
- The task requires copying or moving data
Examples include:
- Updating ticket statuses
- Sending internal notifications
- Assigning cases based on rules
- Creating follow-up tasks
- Pulling data from one tool into another
To choose where to start, estimate how much time each task consumes monthly. Automate the tasks with the highest time cost first. Small automations can save valuable hours from the workload over a month.
5. How long does each of our common tasks actually take from start to finish?
Most teams do not have accurate numbers for how long standard work takes. Without this information, it is difficult to plan capacity or identify the true cause of delays.
Useful things to measure include:
- Average time to respond to a customer request
- Total time from receiving a request to completing it
- Time spent waiting for data
- Time between steps in a workflow
- Time lost due to unclear instructions or missing details
You don’t need advanced reporting software. Even basic tracking inside existing tools helps you understand your reality. When you know the actual times, you can see:
- Which steps add the most delay
- Where expectations are unrealistic
- Where responsibilities are unclear
- Where work queues are too large
With real numbers, decisions become far easier.
6. Which steps in our processes don’t add value anymore and can be removed?
Some processes have extra steps that don’t add value anymore. These steps may have been added long ago for a specific reason, but nobody questioned whether they were still needed.
Examples of unnecessary steps include:
- Approvals that almost never reject anything
- Data fields that nobody uses
- Duplicate checks performed by different people
- Tasks that exist “because we’ve always done it this way”
- Requirements created after one past incident that rarely matters today
Go through each process and ask:
- Is this step required?
- Who uses the output of this step?
- What happens if we remove it?
- How often does this step actually change the outcome?
Removing unnecessary steps often solves problems faster than adding new ones.
7. Which tasks depend on only one person, and how can we make them shared?
Many teams depend heavily on one or two individuals. This creates risk for the team and pressure for those people.
Check for areas where:
- Only one person knows the process
- One person is the only one with access to a tool
- One person is the decision-maker for too many tasks
- Work waits because a specific person must review it
To reduce dependency, create:
- Clear documentation
- Shared access
- Secondary owners
- A simple way for people to understand the process without asking someone
This does not eliminate responsibility—it spreads it so work continues even when someone is unavailable.
8. What are the most common errors we deal with, and why do they happen?
If the same issue happens again and again, it means the underlying cause has not been addressed. Fixing the symptom each time only consumes time without improving anything.
Look for patterns such as:
- Repeated customer complaints about the same issue
- Frequent internal questions about the same step
- Regular errors from a specific part of the process
- Tasks that frequently require rework
Document each occurrence and then look for the similarities. Most recurring issues have a single cause:
- Missing information
- Unclear instructions
- A tool limitation
- A rule that is interpreted differently by different people
- A step that no one owns
Fixing the cause eliminates the repeated effort.
9. Do people understand what is expected from them in their daily work?
People perform better when expectations are clear. Many issues in operations happen because different people have different interpretations of what “good” means.
Clarify expectations around:
- Response times
- Accuracy requirements
- What information must be included in a task
- When to escalate and to whom
- How communication should be handled
- The quality standards for completed work
Write these expectations down. Share them. Review them with new team members. When everyone knows what the standard is, work becomes more consistent and easier to manage.
10. What tasks take time but don’t bring any value anymore?
Teams often continue doing tasks that no longer provide value.
Look for:
- Reports that no one reads
- Steps that exist only because they were required years ago
- Approval processes that don’t influence the outcome
- Data that is collected but never used
- Tools that duplicate functionality in other tools
Instead of adding more tools or more rules, start by removing tasks that no longer matter. This often produces faster improvements than any new workflow.
These ten questions help you see where your processes slow down, where work becomes unclear, and where your team spends time on tasks that could be simplified or removed. You don’t need big changes to improve operations, small fixes in the right places make a large difference.
This is also what Claimlane helps with. Many teams deal with claims, returns, and follow-up tasks that involve several systems, repeated questions, and a lot of manual work. Claimlane puts everything in one place, reduces tool switching, removes unnecessary steps, and makes it easy for customer service and operations teams to handle claims without confusion.
When your workflows are clear and simple, your team works faster and makes fewer mistakes. Claimlane supports that by giving you one organised system instead of scattered tasks and information.
