Category: BPO

Are you in the shadow of a Scottish Pin Factory?

What is this?
Yes it is YOUR organization chart.

It is also a legacy from the Industrial Revolution and notably Adam Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations” (1776). Are you organizing yourself like a Scottish pin factory or more realistically for the second decade of the 21st century?

Someone who takes a sideways swipe at the ‘sub division of labor’ is Seth Godin.

Have a glance at his most excellent blog:
http://bit.ly/BPM_Org_Charts

The Secret of the 21st century leading companies
The title of the book[i] last year suggested that the ‘secret’ was a relentless focus on Outside-In thinking and practice. Let’s dig deeper and understand the essence of Outside-In, in other words let’s unfold what makes the secret so profound, practical and accessible by anyone who wishes to progress their roles and organisations to new levels of achievement.

1.     Seek – Focus on what you do want, rather than on what you don’t
Outside-In approaches such as the CEMMethod® emphasize applying attention on what you need to be doing to deliver Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO).
Clearly articulating the customer’s needs and aligning processes to achieving them delivers the Triple Crown – reduced costs, enhanced service and revenue growth. It is radically different compared to traditional improvement approaches that concentrate effort and resources to figuring out what you don’t want to be doing. There is also often the assumption with traditional approaches that the process is a given – it is there and should be fixed. Not so with Outside-In companies. If the process and all the associated activities and tasks do not contribute to the SCO then stop doing them. There is no need to optimise something that can be eradicated.
·         How are you approaching performance improvement?
·         Do you continue to search for things to stop doing?
·         Can you refocus and identify the things you should be doing? 

2.     Shape – Identify the customers and staff you require and trust them
This is a big ask for many. “How on earth can we trust our customers?” “We could never trust our staff”. Ask yourself a more pertinent question – who on earth recruited those customers and staff in the first place? What was the criteria for that and what were you thinking about?

Making customer service key to your organisation will keep your employees motivated and your customers happy.
Richard Branson


Outside-In companies believe in their people and the customer. They actively recruit customers by creating and managing customer expectations[ii]. In doing so less desirable customers can be actively managed away. Naturally you need the people within the organisation to deliver the means to the SCO and that is through the processes. If you develop trust and competency within your people they will shape the customer experience to deliver success. On the other hand if you assume your people are untrustworthy you establish a ‘checkers checking checkers’ mindset which is expensive, slow and ultimately provides a sub-optimal customer experience.
What steps could you immediately take to:
·         recruit the customers you desire, and
·         ensure your staff are motivated, engaged and trusted?
3.     Execute – Progressively align everything to Successful Customer Outcomes
If you have a choice go for the biggest current challenge within the organisation.
Within 45 days the process can be transformed to significantly reduce costs (typically 40-50%) and simultaneously improve service. In revenue generating processes turnover will begin to grow as service improves and turnaround times reduce. Train all your people in basic techniques so they can contribute directly from the ‘get-go’ (rather than exclusively rely on a cadre of colored belted statisticians). 

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase..
Martin Luther King Jr.

If your choice of starting point and actions are limited in scope do not be disheartened. Know that it is sufficient to take the first step and the staircase will unfold as you move forward. Fix the stuff you can as you do you will achieve results significantly better that traditional inside-out techniques. Within weeks you will produce the justification to move upstream and downstream from your starting point to eventually connect all processes.
Ultimately mature Outside-In companies embrace “the customer experience is the process” and the activities move beyond the boundaries of the organisation into the relationships and partnerships that deliver customer success. Working those relationships and building value through partners creates a differentiation way beyond the capabilities of traditional organisations.
As you start the journey:
·         How could you grow your capability immediately?
·         What steps can you take to begin the journey?
·         Where should you focus those immediate resources?
·         Can you take a half day for everyone to learn three simple techniques that will produce a tangible measureable deliverable immediately?
Outside-In Next Steps
Training – www.bp2010.com
Consultancy – www.towersassociates.com
Community – www.bpgroup.org and http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup (LinkedIn)
Resources – www.oibpm.com
References:

[i] Outside-In The Secret of the 21st century leading companies –
[ii] Customer Expectation Management – Success without Exception –
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/092965207X/httpwwwstevet-20

The Road to Hell is Paved with good intentions


This series of commentary is addressing the challenges faced by Certified Process Professionals® as they progress their organisations Outside-In.

We start with what is now a classic denial strategy and will progress over the coming weeks to review TEN (sometimes deliberate) misconceptions that seek to stop you on your journey to Successful Customer Outcomes.

‘The company has to get its own processes right first’.

In the context of Outside-In this is clearly a major mistake. As the Southwest Airlines and Apple examples demonstrate you fix the internal processes by understanding and acting on “the Customer Experience is the process”. In doing so eveything changes internally to better align to successful customer outcomes. That reduces complexity, removes costs, improves service and grows revenue.

Now if you brief is ‘in the box’ and does not yet extend to the Customer Experience the approach should be around optimisation through understanding the causes of work – moments of truth, breakpoints and business rules. Even though this is at best sub optimisation (recall the US banks Customer query process) it will take you to a much better place with significant performance improvements as you highlight and eradicate the ‘dumb stuff’.

Often times this has to be the starting point as, by definition, the way inside-out works is by the sub division of labour. You can only see the immediate walls around you and looking beyond maybe beyond your brief. Do not lose heart. Go with Optimisation (and if necessary stealth) as you introduce through existing projects the concepts of moments of truth, breakpoints and business rules. You will catch the eye of those responsible for the numbers as the changes you introduce go way beyond the traditional expectations.

Ciao, Steve

Next week… Changing the picture ‘My job doesn’t really involve the end customer. But I do have a mass of internal customers!’

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

The previous three articles in this four part theme we reviewed ‘Understand and applying Process diagnostics‘, the ‘Successful Customer Outcome‘ and ‘Reframing Process for an Outside-In world‘. Now finally we move our attention to the fourth way we can rethink process forever.

Rethinking the Business you are in.

In the Southwest airlines example reviewed earlier we referred to the different viewpoints of the ‘business’ you are in. The two views – one the organisations, regarded as inside-out reflect the activities and functions undertaken. So British Airways see themselves in the business of flying airplanes and approach the customer with that product/service in mind. They set about marketing and selling the flights and hope to pull the customers to the product through pricing, availability and placement. In a slowly changing world where customers have little choice this strategy can provide a route to success.

As we have already seen the tables have turned and the enlightened customer demands so much more.
Southwest and other Outside-In companies understand this challenge and take a customer viewpoint.
What business would you say these six companies are in: Hallmark Cards, Disney, Zara, AOL, OTIS elevators, China Mobile?  Try it from the customers perspective and you’ll arrive at a very different answer – try these, expression, joy, style and comfort, community, moving people, connectivity. Yes they are very different and will reframe the way you think of the service and products you provide. Go further and look inside your existing company.

Are you still separated into functional specialist areas providing specific outputs to other departments in the so called ‘value chain’? Do you have internal ‘service level agreements’ that specify what you’ll deliver and when? How much of our internal interaction adds ultimate value for the customer? This way of organising work imposes limitations on our ability to truly deliver successful customer outcomes. The Inside-out viewpoint is inefficient, prone to red tape, is extremely risk adverse (checkers checking checkers) and slow in delivering product and service.

Many inside-out organisations actually regard customers as an inconvenience rather than the reason why they exist.

What business are you in? Past, present, future?

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How to please all your customers all the time

This is a follow-up to ‘How to really annoy Americans’. You can join the extensive discussion to the original article at http://bit.ly/DdCLW

Let’s turn our attention instead to making people happy and for that we need a candidate organisation who know precisely how to create and manage call centres and the resulting activities. This is also derived from ARG’s research and provides useful pointers to all of us who need to intereact with customers via the phone.

Every telephone operator at Cabela’s speaks English, and a customer never speaks to a machine. “Every single call is answered by a live person,” Ron Spath, VP Customer Relations, states “We don’t have any interactive voice recorders and there are no menu’s. The feedback from our customers is very clear about how they appreciate not having to waste a lot of time to someone who speaks broken English. We realise that outsourcing these calls to india costs less but we think it is a good investment to pay more in order to save customers time.”

To cap it Cabela’s, the worlds largest outdoor retailer, even prints its telephone number on the front and every page of its website. Just imagine that, a company who actaully want to talk and learn from their customers.

This positive Outside-In approach pays on the bottom line and has seen Cabela grow to being the world leader in its market in just 50 years. You can read the story at http://bit.ly/xHYzL

So is it that hard to do. Actually let people talk to people that really understand?

Where in BPM is the Customer?

This is something scribed three years ago just after the launch of the book ‘Customer Expectation Management – Success without Exception’.
Has anything changed? Well yes and no – however you be the judge.

The application of Business Process Management (BPM) is known to have multiple benefits that produce a hard return on investment (ROI). Automation, quality, compliance, management, and optimization of activities represented by business processes are the areas most often cited in this regard. Yet generally the focus of BPM started – and remains – as an “inside-out” perspective, placing hard limits on the benefits BPM can achieve.

At a time where customer satisfaction and loyalty have reached historic lows, and competition has reached its historical peak, the question must be asked, “where in BPM is the customer?” Yes, the customer is a missing piece in the vast majority of BPM practices and products. Management principles have traditionally approached business success from the inside-out perspective, concentrating on margin-based improvements. That made a lot of since during the time when internal activities suffered from substantial bloat and competition was limited by geography and time to market.

Yet over the years we have dipped into that well many times, and the well is about to run dry. Some statistics suggest as we continue to try to achieve the same percentage of gain through each improvement cycle, each iteration produces significantly less tangible value to the organization. It’s a funnel affect that just gets narrower and narrower through every cycle, leaving less and less real benefit for the business.

Meanwhile what is really driving business success? The answer, of course, is the customer. In the 21st Century Value Chain. It is the number of customers and the lifecycle of the business-customer relationship that determines business success.

Known as Customer Expectation Management, the setting of customer expectations and the delivery of those expectations without exception is the “secret sauce” behind the success of market-leading companies such as Virgin, Fedex, Zara, Best Buy, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

Many of these market leaders are not competing on price. Sure, their prices are competitive but that is not where their success lies. In many cases they are even able to charge a premium for their products because they are setting and managing customer expectations with a vengeance. They are telling customers what to expect, making their customers’ lives simpler and easier while delivering on these expectations with consistency.

Meanwhile, price competitors are stuck in a no-holds barred dogfight for the worst customer any business can have, the customer who buys predominately by price. There is no place where customers are less loyal and more demanding than in the arena of lowest-price decision buying.

Taking Customers to Heart
Yet BPM by-in-large doesn’t include the customer except as an adjunct to inside-out activities. Improving quality and streamlining processes can help reduce really poor customer experiences or align a business with the market expectation a competitor has set. But these are only secondary effects to the goals of reducing internal costs, increasing worker productivity and so on.

In an age verging on unlimited choice, global competition, and customers often livid with dissatisfaction, the only way to be a market leader is to be a customer leader. We all know that our businesses must have customers and we have all had our share of unsatisfactory customer experiences. In spite of this, why is it so difficult for us to quit viewing our business from the inside-out? Habit and tradition is all that is holding us back. Will we allow our history to determine our future? It’s our choice.

Is there a way to know if the customer is really part of the BPM practice?
Absolutely. Take a look at your business processes. All business processes have an outcome, right? So how many of your business processes have a customer outcome? What about the concept of a successful customer outcome (SCO)?

To fulfill its destiny of being the Next-Generation Business Enabler that its proponents want it to be, BPM must realign its focus to the customer. Business processes must focus on the customer, minimize potential points of failure (such as Moments of Truth, which yield either Moments of Magic or Moments of Misery), and produce successful customer outcomes at all points where the customer touches the business.

That’s the essence behind Customer Expectation Management. It is the critical element in the drive to increase growth and profitability. Traditional inside-out process improvement leverages customer success by maximizing the net positive effect to the organization’s bottom line but it won’t create success by itself.

The only reason we are here is to serve our customers and by serving our customers, making their lives simpler and easier, and helping them be successful we will make our businesses successful. It’s simple and straightforward. Focusing on the customer from the customer’s point of view is our opportunity to achieve the success we all want. It’s the experience we all want when we are in the role of the customer. It should be at the heart of everything we do and should be woven into the fabric of every application and system we use.

Will BPM be a cornerstone in the creation of success for your business?
It could be, but the question you should be asking yourself is far simpler:
Is the customer at the heart of your BPM plan?

The principles above are derived from direct experience and research within world leading companies. Prospective Certified Process Professionals gain full exposure to the techniques, tools and CEMMethod(tm) in the Business Professional programme