Do you feel, as a customer, like a nuisance to be endured? You are the disruption to a good days sleep in so many inside-out companies. The fact you pay their salaries is accepted under sufferance and they do the level best to avoid directly dealing with you, locking you into automated lines with interminable messages about how important service is.
These clumsy organizations even go to conferences now for advice on how to avoid dealing with customers; how to market to them in the automated lines and worst of all how to get you repeating your calls over and over. Feels wrong? Yes it should.
Our research suggest the answer is simple for progressive companies. Just answer the phone and talk with your customer.
The best Customer Experience insights should be quick to deliver and directly to the point.
This interview hosted by Adam Toporek with author Daniel Newman (CEO of MillennialCEO.com) has several interesting reflections with a few home truths in less than 5 minutes.
Outside-In is clearly the way for the worlds top companies and reflecting on the commentary by Hank Barnes in “Customer Experience Challenges: Why Maintaining an Outside-in Approach is Tougher than it Seems” the answer as to why the masses don’t get it is probably very simply the herd instinct.
For instance in 1969 astronomer J. Donal Fernie made an observation many of us will understand. In writing about the decades it took his fellow professionals to spot a fundamental error.. “the definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers has yet to be written, but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain. At a given signal from the leader we whirl about, and, with equally firm determination, thunder off in quite a different direction, still in tight parallel formation”
We of course have our own immediate examples. What about the world leading Insurance Company waiting eight days for ink to dry on parchment paper before sending out a new policy? Or the removal business that stuck with a 35 mile rule limit just in case the horse died? What about suggesting people visiting the UK from ‘abroad’ should practice driving on the left before they came if they weren’t used to it (to reduce the accidents on UK roads).
Yup there are lots of antelopes out there. Will you meet any tomorrow? And will you be running with the herd?
Customer Experience Management is about aligning everything to Successful Customer Outcomes.
After all if we do not deliver SCO’s our business will fail. Developing the skills and ambition to engineer and deliver SCO’s is a critical differentiator in the second decade of the 21st century,
“Not everything old is bad and antiquated and not everything new is shiny and good. The real secret to success is to combine the best of both.” Rene Carayol, Senior Executive & Former Board Member for Pepsi, Marks & Spencer, IPC Media & The Inland Revenue.
The world’s leading companies have come to realize that only when their customers are successful, will they be successful. In pursuit of their market leadership not only they need to spend time to look inside their business to know how things are getting done but also look outward to get deep understanding of their customers.
Process has indeed come a long way from it humble routes amidst the early industrial revolution and Adam Smiths ‘Wealth of Nations’.
One of the first people to describe process was Smith who in 1776 describes a new way for process in an English pin factory. He outlines the production methods and created one of the first objective and measurable enterprise process designs. The consequence of ‘labour division’ in Smith’s example resulted in the same number of workers making 240 times as many pins as they had been before the introduction of his innovation.
Adam Smith participated in a revolution that transformed the planet. He lived at a time when the confluence of factors, political change, emergence of the New World, industrialization and a new optimism that the world could move from the shackles of the past.
In heralding a movement that developed into Scientific Management the foundation was laid that established a way of working that has survived and thrived for 200 years.
And yet now, more than ever, is a time to perhaps take a careful glance back to the past to guide the way for not only surviving the current economic turmoil but to also prepare us to thrive in the seismic shifts of the 21st century ‘new world’ order where the customer has become central to everything we do.
Leading global corporations are now evolving their tried and tested approaches into methods suited to the changed challenges of customer promiscuity, globalization, IT innovation and the Prosumer. That is the essence of what we call Outside-In.
“The Customer Experience is the Process” Outside-In can really be summarized in the statement that “the customer experience is the process”. We can no longer just look within our organization boundary to create a sustainable competitive advantage. We have to extend our scope and embrace a broader view of optimizing process by understanding, managing and developing customer expectations and the associated experience. We need to articulate Successful Customer Outcomes and let those guide our product and service development as we move beyond the limiting scope of silo pyramidal based left to right thinking.
In 2006 BP Group Research identified the ‘Evolution of Approaches’ and how steps can be taken to grow Lean Six Sigma’s influence and success into a strategic Outside-In toolkit. In fact the last 4 years are seeing the fruition of these advances with recent Best in Class Award winners PolyOne, a dyed in the wool Lean outfit, advancing their stock price six fold in 18 months on the back of radical and innovative changes across its customer experience.
The Death knell for BPR, TQM, Lean and Six Sigma? Some see Outside-In as the death knell for approaches developed during the late 20th century. Not so as that narrow and simplistic view does not acknowledge the stepping stones available to embrace the new customer centric order. In fact the foundations of our futures are always laid on the learnings of the past with those innovators who recognize the need to evolve leading that charge.
Victory will go to the brave who seize the moment and push forward their approaches into the brave new world of Outside-In. The sector leaders have set a precedent – can you embrace the challenge?
A terrific mix of in-house accreditation and audit, consultancy and good plain old training. Government, Financial Services, Aerospace, Retail and Pharma.
You can access and download the resources that will provide an overview of the value of becoming scientific about the Customer Experience. Meanwhile Customer Experience Mapping gets a kick in the pants as we integrate ABACUS (the BPGroup toolkit) to demonstrate a generic process across several channels.
