How Wolves Change Rivers and how you can change your…

I just love this video.
The beautiful scenery, the inspiring story and then the call to action.
How can this have anything to do with Customer Experience and BPM I here you ask? Watch the video (enjoy) and then ask your self the question “How can I create a Trophic Cascade in my organization?”. (Trophic Cascade – watch the vid and all is revealed very quickly 🙂
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Join us for the discussion on:
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/groups/BP-Group-1062077
Facebook –  https://www.facebook.com/BPGtraining
Twitter – http://twitter.com/stowers

You have got to start with the Customer Experience and work backwards to the technology

How do Outside-In companies achieves 20-30% annually sustainable improvement across costs, revenue and service?

If there was a book of secrets featuring Outside-In one chapter would focus on Steve Jobs observation You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”
Watch the 5 minute video to get the perspective.

So what? We can really get to grip with the principle involved here with a couple of ideas. The first looks at the world which sees the organization and its resources as being the key strategic motivator. We have resources (people, systems, structure and so on) that develop products that we then approach the market with and pitch at customer segments. Hopefully gaining market share and establishing customers who buy the product. This model has really been the pervasive approach until this century. Born in the industrial age, updated and upgraded and taught in business schools globally as the way of business. We can represent that idea with this diagram – Inside-Out:

Until the explosion of information brought about by the internet this model worked OK. However with information customers have become choosey, promiscuous, fickle and have immediate and ever changing expectations. The resulting complexity – trying to sell many things to everyone – is the journey to ruin. Go ask Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster and Blackberry how they have fared faced with the prosumer of the 21st century.

On the other hand we have a view of the world which starts with the customer experience (ala Apple, Emirates, Zappos, Zara and Virgin) and literally understands and then manages the expectations of the prosumer. This idea does not seek to segment customers by circumstance, but categorizes customers on the basis of need. This picture emerges – Outside-In:

By understanding customer needs, even when they may not know themselves, and developing appropriate products for your chosen categories of customer, the world is a simpler place. Yes you do also need to be flexible and agile to preempt (and for the best create new needs) however the starting point isn’t the product and the market. It is the customer and their needs.

Creating the necessary skills and competence to achieve Outside-In and deliver consistently improving results requires this foresight and understanding. The previous approach is as obsolete as the horse and cart is to the electric car.

So how can we do this? More on that soon however as a starter you can download a complimentary copy my book “Outside-In The secret of the 21st centuries leading companies” here.

Also join us and the global community exploiting the benefits of Outside-In:

LinkedIn: BPGroup

Facebook: www.facebook.com/BPGtraining
Twitter: @stowers  @jdodkins
Website: www.bpgroup.org

More soon as we journey Outside-In.
Ciao, Steve

FREE BPM-CEM-OutsideIn course. And receive a complimentary book – Outside-In.

Outside-in approaches create a completely new reality that reshapes how we manage and organize work so much so that functional pyramidal structures become artifacts of the past. 

Born in the complexity of the 21st century Outside-In companies believe that all effort in an organization should be centered around the customer and ultimately deliver Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO).

Part of the insight of Outside-In companies is the identification of work that does NOT contribute to the SCO and accordingly may be ‘dumb stuff’ – work that can be eradicated and removed. In doing so Outside-In wins the triple crown of simultaneously reducing costs, enhancing service and growing revenues. Leading practice organizations include Apple, Southwest airlines, Google, Samsung and Zara. In our book “Outside-In – The secret of the 21st century leading companies” we review many examples and lay the foundations for systematic approaches to enable Outside-In thinking and practice by all.
To access the online course: www.processmiracle.com
To join us on the journey: www.bpgroup.org

Towers-Dodkins, April 2014.

6 Tips for Understanding Customer Needs, even when they don’t know themselves (includes video 4 mins)

Get your hands on SCO’s. What are they? How can they help?

Upcoming events with 42 techniques in Customer Experience Management Method
http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-city.html

Orlando – London – Denver – Bangalore – Dubai – Brisbane – Sydney – Singapore – Dubai – Amsterdam – Cape Town – in 2014-15


Join with me @stowers

Royal Bank of Scotland – have they finally got the leader to take them back to the top?

And the lights come on at last..

“It is about establishing one guiding principle that goes from the very top down to the smallest branch. Our employees who deal with customers every day understand their needs and do the best for them – this customer-focused DNA needs to run throughout the bank. We need to remember – and then never forget – that the customer is why we are in business. We need to change our behaviour at every level to reflect this simple truth. To move from stability to renewal, we need to first address and then clean up every aspect of how we treat customers.” The Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) CEO Ross McEwan.

He’s been at the helm of RBS, once very briefly the worlds largest bank, for 18 months. Prior to this, he was the group executive for retail banking services for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) for five years. A New Zealander is the man from down under going Outside In?

CBA have certainly transformed and regularly outperform their peers. One of our favoured measures of ongoing success, the triple crown (simultaneously reducing costs, improving service and growing revenues) suggests he has what it takes. 18 months in and we should start to see the results. He can talk the talk, now can he really deliver for RBS. We will let you know next month 🙂

Ross McEwan Profile and video 

 

Will you Fail?

From the desk of James Dodkins
We can probably reasonably observe, without fear of understatement, that the
customer has changed forever. The reason our organisations exist, the people
who pay our wages, the cause of all the work we do has evolved beyond
recognition.
And yet has your organisation changed in response to this evolution?
Do we do our work in a different way from the last century?
Is work still flowing top to bottom and left to right?
Are we thinking about how our processes connect with customer success?
In the BP Groups research and experience with the leading companies of the
21st century the answer is … YES, some in fact do understand and act on
this new imperative. However the majority, including some previously
prestigious names are not getting it. Look at the troubles of Nokia, Kodak,
Sony, British Airways, Air India, United… the list is extensive and
disturbing.
For our examples of successful transformation and realignment we can include
Emirates, Zappos, Zara, Apple, Indigo, Hallmark and BMW. A wide selection
from different industries, cultures and operating models. We will get to
specifics later, for now let’s review the reason for their successful
adoption of Advanced BPM, otherwise known as Outside-In. The customer!
If things are changing faster Outside than in you will fail
The accepted business wisdom until the end of the last century was the
adoption and exploration of ideas originally described by Adam Smith in theWealth of Nations, published in 1776. This seminal work introduced the world to the concept of the sub division of labour.
Written during the advent of the industrial revolution the ‘Wealth of Nations’ created a framework for organising manufactories and people into similar skills and disciplines. In fact the original work in a Scottish pin factory demonstrated 20 fold improvements to productivity and as such became a template for achieving industrial and commercial success.
Two and a half centuries later the model is still taught in business schools and academia as the way to structure and organise work. After all it worked for 200+ years?
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them (Einstein)
And there is the rub. The challenges we face in the 21st century are very different to those being addressed by Adam Smith and the industrialists of the Napoleonic era.
Let’s get to grips with some of the shifts…
Kindest Regards
James Dodkins
Chief Customer Officer
BP Group

Twitter – @JDodkins

Six steps to winning with the Customer Experience

1. Start by identifying the Moments of Truth (customer interactions)that exist across all of your customer experiences (you can create more specific experience maps later).


2. Make a list of all the Moments of Truth (MOT).For each MOT write a description, method of interaction, and customer expectation.
We use the Diagnostics dashboard to make sure we turn the MOTs into 15 quantifiable and actionable metrics.

There are three ways to collect and collate this information:

  • Workshops of all interested people.
    That includes customers, advisors, employees and management.
  • Recording of actual experiences.
    Yes, record the experiences and evaluate afterwards. We use a video technique that identified Moments of Truth with red flashes, Internal Interactions with blue and decision points as green.
  • Analysis of customer feedback.
    Review the letters, calls and social network commentary and capture the experiences to gain insights and a better understanding.

3. Document the learning and produce a visual illustration(process activity maps).


4. Use the maps to identify areas working well and those that need improvement.Focus on the critical MOTs — those crucial interactions that determine whether the experience you are creating delivers the optimum encounter, expectation and emotion.


5. Build a Action Plan to engineer the ABACUS of the customer experience.
At each stage identify the relevant MOTs that cover off these elements
:

  • Awareness
    When and How does the customer become aware of the process, product or service you offer?
  • Buy-In
    How and Where does the customer ‘get it’ and become an advocate for the experience?
  • Acquisition
    How is the purchase made. Not just a product buy but the actual commitment.
  • Care
    Why should the customer care? How do you ensure the trust and commitment is reciprocal and reinforced?
  • Use
    How does the product, service work. Has it been designed from the customers perspective (Outside-In)? Ease of use goes beyond efficiency and focuses directly on the actual customer experience.
  • Share
    In our always-on world how does Share happen? Is that understood and optimized? Recall the fantastic tale from Canada – Westjet Christmas story[1] with more than 35 million hits on youtube in 3 months. By the way that is more than the population of Canada! That’s good news, but what about capturing the bad news before it becomes a crisis – recall the United Breaks guitar[2] story?


6. Engage the entire organization to undertake the journey to Customer Experience Management.We use the structured CEMMethod™, derived from the work of companies such as Virgin, Disney, Southwest Airlines, Emirate, BMW, Bentley, Zara and many more truly Outside-In enterprises. Whoever and where-ever you are it is directly and immediately useful.

If you are serious about engineering the Customer Experience then let us know (below). We will provide immediate links to videos, resources and an expert community doing this stuff as a way of life.




[1] Westjet Christmas – a terrific example of sharing your values and ethos – http://bit.ly/1habsP2

[2] United Breaks Guitars – how a bad experience turns into a corporate crisis – http://bit.ly/1dmOKaW