James Dodkins new eBook launched in December 2014, “Foundations for Customer Centricity.” explores the basis of what makes a great CustomerExperience.
The book delivers a pragmatic and executable plan that provides the means for organizations to deliver on the promise of Customer Centricity in terms of cost, revenue and service.
Certified Process Professional Masters (CPP-Master) Program
Orlando USA March 16-20, Denver USA March 23-27, Dubai UAE Apr 12-16http://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 130 times, in 52 cities with delegates from 105 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Become a qualified CPP-Master and demonstrate your professionalismhttp://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
Certified Process Professional Masters (CPP-Master) Program
Orlando USA March 16-20, Denver USA March 23-27, Dubai UAE Apr 12-16http://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 130 times, in 52 cities with delegates from 105 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Become a qualified CPP-Master and demonstrate your professionalismhttp://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
HELP! Book cover choices down to the last 2, Please help us choose. Fav for ‘Face’ cover RT for ‘Red Square’ cover 🙂 pic.twitter.com/gVrgdX18LL — James Dodkins (@JDodkins) December 29, 2014 #foundations
Certified Process Professional Masters (CPP-Master) Program
Orlando USA March 16-20, Denver USA March 23-27, Dubai UAE Apr 12-16http://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
An internationally recognized program with proven track record delivered by been there and done it coaches more than 130 times, in 52 cities with delegates from 105 countries. The program, now in its tenth year, utilizes the BP Groups approaches and framework to help you and your organization win the triple crown – simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance service. Producing Immediate and sustainable business results across any industry and sector.
Become a qualified CPP-Master and demonstrate your professionalismhttp://www.bpgroup.org/book-class.html
BPM helping in healthcare: We continue our occasional series on how different industry sectors are supported through the deployment of BPM – both as a technology, way of working and sustainable means of delivering the Triple Crown (lower costs, higher revenues and enhanced service).
Ottawa hospital won best project category at the annual PEX event in Orlando earlier this year. It is an annual forum sharing and exchanging information in and around BPM, Process Excellence and Customer Experience Management.
If you haven’t noticed already, your customers have so much more power at their disposal. They’re well informed. They can easily compare your prices with those of your competitors. And they’re vocal when things don’t go well. So what does this mean for process professionals?
“The focus of projects and the people inside organizations and enterprises is changing,” explains Steve Towers, CEO and founder of the BP Group. “The dialogue is less about how skilled you are at a particular technique but how is what you’re doing really going to contribute to achieving those deliverables which are going to move the metric on the customer satisfaction Net Promoter Score?” In this PEX Network interview, Towers explains why he sees customer-orientation as a growing trend within process excellence and the skills and capabilities required to achieve it.
Everything should be oriented towards your customer!
PEX Network: What do you see as some of the key trends that emerging this year within Process Excellence?
Steve Towers: The focus in the enterprise is now more customer-oriented. There’s much more information out there now, so organizations are doing things like Net Promoter Score and using more advanced ideas arising from Net Promoter Score. This means that the focus of projects and the people inside organizations and enterprises is changing. The dialogue is less about how skilled you are at a particular technique but how is what you’re doing really going to contribute to achieving those deliverables which are going to move the metric on the customer satisfaction Net Promoter Score? That’s a big trend.
The way I see that playing out, is that if, for instance, you bumped into the CEO and you have that 30 second elevator test. He or she is less interested now in how you’ve come in on time, to budget and achieved the deliverables. Instead, they’re much more interested in how is what you’re doing going to contribute to our public delivery? And, more particularly, some of the challenges that they’re facing and being beaten up about, how’s that going to resonate out in the market, generally – how’s it going to move the marker for us?
PEX Network: Is there also an element of technology becoming much more important within the Process Excellence community?
Steve Towers: Being around as long as I have, you’ve seen technology dealt with in many different ways. What we’re seeing now is less discussion about technology, and more discussion about capability. We’ve all seen on the internet that picture of the three-month-old child playing with the iPad, and I think the technology has moved in that direction: it’s less about educating people in the use of technology, and more what can technology provide?
As a consequence, some of the things that organizations are doing now, like embracing mobile platforms, are not about massive infrastructure investment. Instead, they’re about the utilization of the existing things that we’ve already got, in combination with the smart phone idea, so that people can access the systems.
That means they can become much more self-service oriented; they can do much more for themselves, as consumers who have much more information than they ever had before. So, the technology dialogue isn’t so much about: how do we build a massive enterprise system, it’s much more about: how do we provide the capability at the point of customer contact?
PEX Network: Now, going back to that focus on customer outcomes and improving customer satisfaction, what do you think is really driving that trend?
Steve Towers: I think that, at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game: you’re only as good as your last customer interaction. We all know the negative side effects of Twitter, and how something can explode.
However, in the same sort of way, good news travels just as fast as bad news. So people who are really performing well create an expectation. We can see that, for instance, in the airline industry, where progressive organizations very much know that the last interaction you had on the airline is going to dictate how many people you tell about that, but not only how many people you tell about, who you share that with in family and friends and where you’re going to put your business in the future.
The customer outcome is very important, and, of course, that’s very much allied with this digital capability as being able to provide at the point of contact.
There are some horror stories, though. For instance, I was hearing a story the other day about one particular US airline who were saying they’d done a customer survey, and the customer survey said people didn’t want in-seat films in four, five-hour flights across the US. Well, who on earth did they ask that question? Who said that’s what they wanted? Whereas the smart organizations, which are much more focused around customer outcomes, actually go and figure out what the customers need, even when customers don’t know they need it themselves. For instance, when you sit down on, say, a WestJet flight, it’s a, really, quite different experience from some of those older, more classic, organizations that are still asking, what do you want? PEX Network: How, in Process Excellence, then, do we need to shift our thinking in order to respond to those new emerging trends?
Steve Towers: I think there’s a big mind-shift underway, and we can very ably see that with those people who are involved with the Process Excellence community who embrace this idea of customer outcomes. They’re aligning their work to deliver customer outcomes, as opposed to those people who are still saying, well, what we did in the past in terms of our approach – whether it’s Six Sigma Lean, or BPM – we just need to try harder.
Trying harder isn’t the solution anymore, it’s about getting smart at what we do. You don’t need to embrace every aspect of the training that goes with process excellence, but instead the specific things that are related to your organization and the customer outcomes you’re trying to deliver.
For process excellence professionals, the challenge is to no longer be looking at the past and learning what people did, but more trying to anticipate the future, and get themselves in a position where they can really help their organizations at a day to day, tactical level, but more importantly, contribute those tactical-level approaches towards a strategic delivery – which is better successful customer outcomes.
PEX Network: Looking towards that future that you just mentioned, what are some of the skills and capabilities that you think process practitioners will have to have in order to make that a reality?
Steve Towers: We’ve always thought that we’ve got a list of techniques, and if we learn those techniques, we get a tick in the box and we’re qualified. That’s just a question of how many techniques you have acquired that essentially predicates your role. However the people who are really successful with Process Excellence at the moment are individuals in their organizations who have a capability which can embrace both a strategic level of thinking – where is the organization going, and how are we going to get there – and, in a day to day context, how the projects that we’re working on contribute to that higher level objective.
So this means connecting the dots between the day to day tactical things that we’re doing to improve business and project delivery, to the actual strategic outcome of the organization.
Not all people can have that skill set – some people are very good at the tactics, others are good at strategy. But the really good Process Excellence people, those people who get qualified, understand it’s about being able to connect the dots.
Customers are deciding how they want to do business. With more choices and information at their finger tips they have become rebellious and promiscuous. Successful enterprises are adopting an Outside-In approach to their customers, understanding and creating needs and managing expectations proactively.
1.Educate and engage every level of the organization in customer centric thinking. Undertake seminars and establish an awareness campaign amongst your senior executives. Establish and qualify new roles for process professionals and customer experience people through certification and accreditation. Make the transition to Outside-In a burning platform issue as otherwise your customers will rapidly become someone else’s.
2.Develop a practical delivery focused approach that produces wins and encourages adoption. The top team will become advocates as they see results achieved quickly. Winning hearts and minds will enable the organisation to develop rapidly and mature into a true Outside-In focused enterprise.
These first steps will begin a journey that will reward your customers, your employees and your shareholders.
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 business¹ you are in. The two views one the organizations, 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 you¹ll 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 chain¹? Do you have internal service level agreements¹ that specify what you¹ll deliver and when? How much of our internal interaction adds ultimate value for the customer?
This way of organizing 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 organizations actually regard customers as an inconvenience rather than the reason why they exist.
What is a global process and what business benefit does it provide?
Companies with a worldwide presence face many challenges such asglobalization, regional trading agreements and the uncertainty of the economic markets. These challenges require a coordinated approach which maximizes the benefits of a world-wide presence and at the same time provide a local focus. Global processes are the way to achieve this balance and include front end activities like customer acquisition or new business processing, support processes like information systems right the way through to back end customer retention and financial management.
How does a company create, implement, and manage global processes? Co-ordination. Teams need to develop a common process approach which regardless of culture speaks the same language i.e. what is the successful customer outcome (SCO)? Figuring out how work gets done and achieves the SCO is key to global process success. Implementation needs a pragmatic approach which acknowledges cultural perspectives.
Bringing a strategic multi disciplinary team together led by qualified process leaders familiar with cultural and economic challenge is a starting point.
Rolling out that discipline and process approach through geographic teams provides a means to learn and exchange and grow key processes to maturity.
What are the most common challenges associated with global processes? Getting everyone on the same page. Even the way we think and speak of processes is different and so developing a common way of looking at work is critical to a successful operation. For instance the collecting the money process¹ has a very specific objective however each location may have different custom and practice how do you ensure a uniform and yet different approach? The underpinning technology that supports a global process can be common, however the business rules that we operate to make sure our endeavor is successful often need to be different.
What is the relationship between global processes and performance improvement? The relationship is absolute. In the 20th century we may have talked about standardization and conformity. Performance is now much more driven by the capability to act in the moment e.g. a US insurance company has the slogan think global, act local¹ which provides both a degree of uniformity and empowers the people locally to act in the best interests of the business there and then.
Why should the average employee care about global processes? It is the understanding that there is a framework and common structure torunning the business successfully that provides assurance that senior management knows what they are doing and are operating as a team. Process is the way we get work done. It is the way we deliver value to our customers.
It¹s the way we create profits for our shareholders. This can then be encapsulated in our rewards systems and provide a framework for success, both in process, people, systems and global strategy.
