The Customer Experience is the process.

Where do your processes start and end?
Procure to Pay? Enquiry to Invoice? If so you are in the wrong place.

Where does the process really start, and end. It certainly isn’t contained by our functional specialist silo’s. You have to go out to the customer need and finish with the successful delivery.

How do you define process start and end? Is that really complete?

To link process with performance we need to rethink what we mean by performance.

How do you measure performance? Is it via the task, activities and outputs your organization achieves? Think about the call center for instance. The number of calls answered, processed and dealt with. Wrong.

Performance should be measured directly by the Outcomes and Results that are achieved. Stop measuring success by number of calls dealt with in 180 seconds and instead ask yourself did we deliver a Successful Customer Outcome?

Look at the Key Performance Indicators. How many measure how much to those that measure what was achieved?

Process is just another name for the work we do.

You have to like those folks who do not understand this. Everything that takes place in the

organization is part of a process. Marketing, Strategy, IT it is all the same thing. 

Knowing this is fundamental to an organizations success.

Linking everything we do though to the Successful Customer Outcome is all that we should be doing. If it doesn’t contribute to the Successful Customer Outcome then stop doing it.

How can you share this insight with your colleagues?

We shouldn’t keep looking back at the past to define the possibilities for the future.

When great change happens new thinking is required.

When we all thought the earth was flat we didn’t build big ships (why we didn’t need them and could fallen off the ends of the world – who would have been so dumb to do that?).

 

Here we are again, mass customization, customer promiscuity, choice and high expectations. The Age of the digital consumer. Dee Hock, founder of VISA, says it is the biggest thing to happen since Renaissance Europe (about 500 years ago!)

 


Does your organization meet these new challenges with fresh thinking, or they simply extrapolating the (redundant) past.

How much do you need to know, to know you know, you know enough?

Many so called Performance Improvement approaches involve detailed analysis. In some cases

Go beyond the software prescriptions and excessive analysis.
When you know enough stop and move on.

What techniques are you using to understand (rather than analyze excessively) the nature of the work the organization does?

analysis paralysis!

Honestly though how much time should it take to understand something is broke and needs fixing?

Don’t ask the customer want they want. Determine what they need.

Do you give our children everything they say they want? Of course not. 
Then why do we spend gazillions doing that with customers? Research and Focus Groups, Customer Panels, Surveys, Voice of Customer and so on.

The answer isn’t there.
You have to figure out what the customer needs even when they don’t know it themselves.

Remember Henry Ford’s quip: If I had given the customer what they want they would have said faster horses”!

 
Have you identified Customer Needs, or do you stop short with Wants?

Moments of Truth? Eradicate! Only improve a Moment of Truth if you can not remove it.

In 1997 Steve Jobs returned to Apple*. Over a period of 3-4 years he transformed the business into the most innovative company on the planet. One of his mantras was “the customer experience is the process”. Couple that with  ”If you find a Moment of Truth you should remove or improve it”.
Simple ideas that created one of the most successful companies in the universe.
What could you do with your Moments of Truth?

* For a complete transcript and video of that AWWDC 1997 event see here.

A Moment of Truth is any interaction with the Customer.

Richard Normann* gave this to the world back in the 1970’s.

Every interaction we have with customers creates a Moment of Truth. These interactions can be

If we apply engineering to Moments of Truth we can create optimum customer experiences. In fact the Moment of Truth is the root cause all the work in our organizations.

Moments of Magic, where everything works, customers get what they need and we operate with optimized service and cost control. More often however Moments of Misery occur. Customers experience poor delivery and queries cannot be satisfied.

Do you know how many Moments of Truth there are?

*(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Normann)

You are not in the business of doing things. You are in the business of achieving Successful Customer Outcomes.

Through my time with many amazing organizations and leaders I seemed to have acquired many quotes and sayings, sometimes from the inspiration of others sometimes slipped in to make a point as firms grapple with the needs of the 21st century. If you said some of these then thanks for your inspiration. If you heard me saying them then credit where it is due!

At a recent consulting engagement one of my clients captured more than ninety such quotes in a six month period. Let’s share some (with an explanation) over the next few weeks.

You are not in the business of doing things. You are in the business of achieving Successful Customer Outcomes.

A lot of work can be busy work. Are you actually contributing to a Successful Customer Outcome, or just moving the chairs around the deck of the Titanic?

How can you know? Simply put everything an organization does, from the tasks and activities through to strategy should be explicitly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome. If it isn’t you may get very good at doing things, but you won’t be doing the right things.

Is your work directly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome?

Part 3 of 4: There are four distinctly Outside-In ways that you can rethink process and in doing so achieve Triple Crown benefits.

In the first two articles in this four part theme we reviewed ‘Understand and applying Process diagnostics‘ and the ‘Successful Customer Outcome‘ map.
We now move our attention to the third  way we can rethink process forever

Reframing process for an Outside-In world

A fundamental principle of Outside-In is the understanding of where your process starts and ends.

In the 20th century many techniques and approaches developed to better understand and create processes. In its earliest form pioneering work undertaken by the United States Airforce created modelling approaches based on the Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT) that produced iDEF (Integrate DEFinition Methods). iDEF became recognised as a global standard as a method designed to model the decisions, actions, and activities of an organization or system[1].  iDEF as a method has now reached iDEF14 [i] and embraces a wide range of process based modelling ideas. Concurrent with the development of iDEF technology providers created proprietary modelling approaches, and subsequently developed into modelling language standards, used by many organisations to represent their systems and ways of working. The convergence of business process modelling and business process management (BPM) has now produced a rich set of tools and techniques
able to model and ideally manage an organisation. In fact one of the more accepted definitions of BPM (based on the British Journal of Management[ii]): “Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organisation with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach”

Until a few years ago process management approaches looked within the boundaries of the organisation and the combination of modelling and management approaches were adequate to understand the enterprise. The impact of process management in improving organisation performance has been profound however we now face a different reality driven by the customer.

As a consequence both disciplines now present a series of problems that include

(a)    understanding the beginning and end of the process,

(b)   the techniques used to model process are inadequate and focused  on the wrong things

Strangely customer involvement in a process often appears as an afterthought and the actual representation systems (left to right, top to bottom) create an illusion that fosters the belief that “the customer isn’t my job”.

Let’s deal with each in turn by example:
a.     The beginning and end of process

To aid the discussion let’s look at two airlines, British Airways and Southwest, and we’ll review how they ‘think’ about their business through the eyes of process. If you sit down with British Airways executives and asked the question “where does your process start and end?” the response reflects the main source of revenue, seat sales.

So the answer “the process is from the ticket purchase to the collecting the bags off the carousel” is no great surprise. In fact that is the way we have mostly thought about process in that it starts when it crosses into organisation, and finishes when it leaves. We can easily model that, identify efficiency improvements, improve throughput and optimise apparent value add.

As far as British Airways is concerned what you do outside of that process is no concern of theirs, after all they are an airline and that’s what they do. Now let’s change our perspective and visit Love Field in Texas and meet the executive team of Southwest. Ask the guys the same question “where does your process start and end?” and the answer is a whole different viewpoint.

The process begins when the potential customer thinks of the need for a flight, and only ends when they are back at home following the journey. The scope of this process is defined by the phrase “the customer experience is the process”. That’s an Outside-In perspective and creates opportunities across the whole customer experience.

More than that it raises the prospect of additional revenue streams, spreads the risk associated with a dependency on seat sales, reinforces the customer relationship and develops an entirely different way of doing business.  So let’s ask another question of our friends at Southwest “guys, what business are you in?”, and the answer changes everything you ever thought about airlines forever “we’re in the business of moving people”.

Downstream Southwest may well turn the industry further on its head as they move from being the low cost airline to the ‘no cost airline’ and give their seats free of charge. What would that do to your business model if 95% of your revenues, as with British Airways, comes from seat sales?

The business challenge for Southwest becomes one of controlling the process to benefit and maximise the customer experience. That involves partnering, sharing information and doing all necessary to make customers lives easier, simpler and more successful.

Now how do you model that?

b.     The techniques used to model process are inadequate and focused on the wrong things

We have reviewed the ultimate cause of work for all organisations is the customer. Organisations exist to serve the customer though the provision of products and services and in this way develops revenue that goes to the profit and onward distribution to the stockholders.

In other organisations without the profit motivation, for instance the public sector, then the effective delivery of services is measured by citizens and stakeholders.  Accordingly it stands to reason that everything happening within the organisation should be organised and aligned to deliver customer success and anything that isn’t is potentially ‘dumb stuff’. The techniques we use to ‘capture’ process are however not suitable to understanding the causes of work and focus attention instead on the visible tasks and activities that are perceived to create value for customers. In the context of the enlightened customer[iii] this is at best misleading and at its worst actually part of the broader problem. In Outside-In companies the focus has shifted to understanding the causes of work, and then engineering those causes to minimize negative effects.

Once more to go Outside-In we need a perspective shift and we can achieve this by identifying those three causes of work and then set out to reveal them and their negative impact.

How big is the size of the prize? Efficiency and productivity gains of 30% to 60% are common. Cost reduction of services by 50% is not unusual.

Cause elimination is a seek and destroy mission. It’s the challenge to weed out the “dumb stuff” in our organizations.

By truly fixing the Causes of Work, rather than messing around with the Effects (a bit like moving the chairs on the deck of the Titanic) we will all find our customers and employees life simpler, easier and more successful. Are you ready to challenge your assumptions and start eliminating those causes of work? Fix the Cause, remove the effect.

[1] http://www.idef.com/IDEF0.htm

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF

[ii] Understanding Business Process Management: implications for theory and practice, British Journal of Management (2008) (Smart, P.A, Maddern, H. & Maull, R. S.)

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