Phones were leaving the store before their financing was approved. It cost a retailer $800K a year.

The company I worked for made retail software that was more than 20 years old. Over those years, the software had been connected to many carriers and partners, one integration at a time. Nobody at the company could say who had designed the way the software handled this carrier's financing, or when.

When a customer bought a phone and paid for the device on a payment plan, the sales rep first completed the activation on the carrier's site, which started the financing review. The review could take anywhere from an hour to a day, so the customer often left and came back later. When they returned, the rep looked up the sale in the software, which imported the whole sale from the carrier so the rep could check the customer out.

By the time the customer came back, the carrier had a financing status: still pending, approved or declined. In some cases, a rep could check the customer out while financing was still pending. It was rare, but when that financing was later declined, the customer had already left with the phone. The retailer put the cost at over $800K a year.

The retailer's first idea was a new screen that would force every rep through one fixed way of making a sale. Reps in over 600 stores would have had to relearn their work, the change could have caused new problems, and nobody yet knew why these sales were getting through.

The software's data couldn't show what was going wrong. The system has so many settings, workflow options and customizations that the same sale can be made in many different ways. I needed to see what the reps were doing.

I worked with the client manager, the integrations lead and the product manager for the connection between the carrier's system and the company's software. A tech lead walked me through what happened behind the scenes at every step. The tech team tried to isolate where the problem could be, and I interviewed the back office team who had reported it.

The back office usually keeps sales reps away from outside companies like the one I worked for. I kept pushing, and I convinced the company's contact in the back office that watching reps work would show what the reports couldn't. The reps then showed me exactly how they made these sales.

I mapped the whole journey, every step in each system, and went through it with the tech lead and the integrations team, and together we found the problem. The software should have checked the financing status every time it imported a sale, but it only checked some of the time, so in some cases a rep could complete the sale while financing was still pending.

Reps are paid once a sale is complete, not while it's pending, so they look for ways to get sales through. Nobody knew whether reps used this gap on purpose, but it was the source of the loss.

The company I worked for added a required financing check at the moment a rep looks up the sale, when the carrier's information is most accurate. The software now runs the check itself, so there is nothing for a rep to get around. If financing is approved, the rep carries on to checkout. If it's still under review or declined, the sale can't go any further.

Reps kept the screens and steps they already knew, so nobody had to learn a new way to sell.

I would talk to the sales reps sooner. For too long, the team heard about the problem only from the back office staff. The reps were the ones who could show the gap, and going to them first would have found it faster.