Most businesses have a process that everyone agrees is important, and that nobody runs the same way twice. This article, the second in our Kiosk Studio series, explains why that happens and why Zoho argues the fix is to change the process, not the person. It is based on Zoho's Zoholics 2026 eBook, rewritten in our words, with our own comments marked.
Zoho describes a routine that will be familiar to anyone who works in business software: click, switch tab, type, copy, paste to gather the context; remember the process and decide what to do next; click, switch tab, type, copy, paste to carry it out; and repeat. When the volume of this work-around-the-work gets too high, people take shortcuts. The result shows up as inconsistent data, sloppy handoffs, patchy reviews, and missed follow-ups. That costs money, slows work down, annoys customers, and is hard to train away.
Zoho's illustration is a fulfilment analyst working through forty flagged orders in a morning. On the first, she checks the inventory system, the support desk, and the account notes, and records what she did. By the third, she has confirmed the delay in inventory and makes a sensible call, but misses that the customer escalated a ticket on Friday. She meant to run the process the same way both times. She was simply switching tabs, copying details, and holding the steps in her head, and a step slipped. One process, run to two standards, by somebody who fully intended to follow it.
Zoho's arithmetic, which it offers as an illustration, runs like this:
| Step | Figure |
|---|---|
| Cases per analyst per day | 40 |
| Executions of the process per analyst per year | About 10,000 |
| If 8 in 10 runs are perfect, imperfect runs per analyst | About 2,000 a year |
| A team of five | About 10,000 imperfect runs a year |
The 80 percent figure is an assumption, not a measurement. The point is how quickly small gaps multiply across teams and processes, and that it is more costly where the process touches revenue, such as a sales process whose inconsistent execution leaves part of the pipeline unconverted.
Zoho calls the work around the work legwork. In the analyst's morning it was finding inputs that live in several places, working out which step this particular case needs based on answers just given, and making sure the outcome reaches every place it has to. Nobody is paid to switch tabs. People are paid for the moment in the middle, when someone who knows the business looks at the assembled picture and decides to release, chase, or escalate. The same pattern appears wherever a person handles a case: a loan officer checking an application against three modules, a support agent confirming a warranty on a manufacturer's site, or a finance clerk opening a record to see what was invoiced.
Legwork and judgement draw on the same limited pool of attention. The amount of legwork a process needs is fixed by the process and the systems it runs across. The attention a person has is not fixed: it depends on their morning, their queue, yesterday's escalations, and the meeting at ten. When supply falls below demand, errors and missed handoffs follow.
Both aim at the person. Zoho's conclusion is that the only move left is to make the process ask for less. That is the purpose of a kiosk: to take the legwork on, so the person keeps only the decisions.
This section is our own suggestion. Pick one process your team runs often, and ask two people to run it while someone counts how many screens or systems they open to finish it. If the number is high, or if the two people take different routes, you have found a candidate. The next article in the series, Finding the Right Process for Your First Kiosk in Zoho CRM, shows more clues to look for.