How to Create an Entirely Different Customer Experience

Willie Krause of IQ Business in South Africa (BP Group partners) spotted a gemstone of an article on

Willie Krause,
Certified Process Professional Champion
IQ Business

the theme of Customer Experience.

-->

Leaders in telecom, utilities, and insurance are boxed in as their markets become commoditized, saturated, and regulated. 

How to break out of the box and return to growth? Reconnect creatively with customers.

Creating a unique customer experience is one of the best ways to achieve sustainable growth, particularly in industries that are stagnating. If a telco, a utility, or an insurance company can create a highly differentiated customer experience that turns dissatisfaction or indifference into delight, it will recruit an army of vocal advocates online and offline, gain market share, and generate revenue growth.

Get the full skinny from ATKearney > Customer Experience.

Leaders in telecom, utilities, and insurance are boxed in as their markets become commoditized, saturated, and regulated. How to break out of the box and return to growth? Reconnect creatively with customers.

Creating a unique customer experience is one of the best ways to achieve sustainable growth, particularly in industries that are stagnating. If a telco, a utility, or an insurance company can create a highly differentiated customer experience that turns dissatisfaction or indifference into delight, it will recruit an army of vocal advocates online and offline, gain market share, and generate revenue growth.
- See more at: http://www.atkearney.com/innovation/ideas-insights/article/-/asset_publisher/VHe1Q1yQRpCb/content/how-to-create-an-entirely-different-iated-customer-experience/10192#sthash.93FoirTg.dpuf

Leaders in telecom, utilities, and insurance are boxed in as their markets become commoditized, saturated, and regulated. How to break out of the box and return to growth? Reconnect creatively with customers.

Creating a unique customer experience is one of the best ways to achieve sustainable growth, particularly in industries that are stagnating. If a telco, a utility, or an insurance company can create a highly differentiated customer experience that turns dissatisfaction or indifference into delight, it will recruit an army of vocal advocates online and offline, gain market share, and generate revenue growth.
Sound simple? It isn't,
- See more at: http://www.atkearney.com/innovation/ideas-insights/article/-/asset_publisher/VHe1Q1yQRpCb/content/how-to-create-an-entirely-different-iated-customer-experience/10192#sthash.UR9yMkEB.dpuf

Leaders in telecom, utilities, and insurance are boxed in as their markets become commoditized, saturated, and regulated. How to break out of the box and return to growth? Reconnect creatively with customers.

Creating a unique customer experience is one of the best ways to achieve sustainable growth, particularly in industries that are stagnating. If a telco, a utility, or an insurance company can create a highly differentiated customer experience that turns dissatisfaction or indifference into delight, it will recruit an army of vocal advocates online and offline, gain market share, and generate revenue growth.
Sound simple? It isn't,
- See more at: http://www.atkearney.com/innovation/ideas-insights/article/-/asset_publisher/VHe1Q1yQRpCb/content/how-to-create-an-entirely-different-iated-customer-experience/10192#sthash.UR9yMkEB.dpuf

Outside-In and CEM books

The 2006 book Customer Expectation Management - Success without Exception, identified global leading best practices and lessons from the worlds top performing companies.
We have now harnessd these best practices into a set of practical and easy to use toolkits and education services which will help you transform the way processes work forever.

I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the book! It really helped tie together various concepts and practices I have been evolving towards over a number of years, crystallizing them into a simple but powerful framework.  Steve Melville, Director, Oracle, USA.

See the book on Amazon.

In 2010 the book Outside In The Secret galvanized global leading corporations to redefine their view of business, and in doing create clear water between themselves and their competitors. In redrawing the business map companies progressively with the Triple Crown as they simultaneously reduce costs, grow revenues and enhance customer services.
 

It is a copernican shift in the way people do business.

You will never think of business in the same way again.

See the book on Amazon.

Customer Experience Management is

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 21^st century,

The Road to Hell is Paved with good intentions

We start with what is now a classic denial strategy and will progress over the coming weeks to review misconceptions that seek to stop you on yourjourney 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 everything 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 optimization through understanding the causes of work ­ moments of truth, breakpoints and business rules. Even though this is at best sub optimization (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 labor. You can only see theimmediate walls around you and looking beyond maybe beyond your brief. Do not lose heart. Go with Optimization (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.


From the desk of James Dodkins.

Customer Experience (CX) is all about Engineering

Customer Experience is all about engineering everything an organization does to ensure that all interactions lead to Successful Customer Outcomes. 

Achieving consistent Successful Customer Outcomes improves customer affinity, reduces costs and directly grows revenues.

Everything old is bad and antiquated and not everything new is shiny and good.

From the desk of James Dodkins...

“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?

Are you doing Needs of Customer. or sadly its previous now mostly defunct Voice of Customer?

Listening to what customers say they want and then developing it is the height of enterprise stupidity. Go ask Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster how their VOC programs helped them decline and become history.

Alternatively seek advice from Disney, Samsung, Virgin and Apple who work out the NOC even when the customer doesn’t know it themselves.

Do you have a viable and effective Needs of Customer method?
Review: www.cemmethod.com 

You get what you measure - how do you know you are not just doing busy work?

Measure dumb stuff and don’t be surprised when you get poor results.

Too many people focus their attention on measuring and fixing what already happens. Often times what happens doesn’t need to and you should stop doing it.

Make sure your measures contribute to the achievement of a Successful Customer Outcome.

Watch – Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO) http://bit.ly/1flfSmm

Three Steps to Process and Customer Nirvana

Three things to focus on with immediate benefits:

1.     Define a Successful Customer Outcome for the processes you are involved with.
Watch – What is a Successful Customer Outcome (SCO) http://bit.ly/1flfSmm
Watch – Step by step guide to creating a SCO.

2.     Identify all the customer[1] touchpoints (aka Moments of Truth - MOT) in your process
Watch – What is a Moment of Truth (MOT) http://bit.ly/1fxHO8T

3.     Evaluate all the MOT’s and classify them as (a) aligned to the SCO, or (b) not aligned. For the latter identify actions to remove or improve the MOT.

These three easy and quick to do steps will lead to reductions in cost and complexity, improvements to service and delivery, and for revenue generating processes growth in income.

---

[1] Customer as defined within your SCO map.
Note customers can be
(a) Primary – the ones providing the revenue and paying our salaries. (b) Secondary – those folks interested in our process but not directly involved e.g. Regulators. (c) Internal – other departments/functions or across the value chain partners,

How do you start the journey to Enterprise BPM/Outside-In?

James Dodkins (far right) is the
BP Groups Chief Customer Officer

From the desk of James Dodkins

If I scan the fifteen or so new OI initiatives in large corporations I have worked closely with (in the last three years) I would say 80% of that work is through what you can think of is a 1-2-3 project cycle.

1. Start where you are - deploy, for instance the CEMMethod techniques, especially the Moments of Truth, Breakpoints and Business Rules, in whatever is your remit. Just get going.

2. On the back of that success move upstream and downstream in the particular process. You will have internal advocates at this stage who understand how to do this stuff. At this point the fun and the wildfire starts :-)

3. Take the 'boil the ocean' proposition to the top team. Ask for the biggest current organization wide challenge and relate the internal benefits (Project 1&2, the external case studies, the videos of the CEO's, the HBR articles, the Business week case studies blah blah) They will love the talk of results - reducing costs, improving revenue, enhancing service.
Whenever have you talked to a top team and somebody has turned round and said those elements were not part of this years agenda eh?

Bingo - six months in and you're on the organization wide Outside-In transformation.

Points of Failure - How to remove and improve (3 minute video)

Upcoming events? http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-city.html
Amsterdam - Cape Town - Orlando - London - Bangalore - Dubai - Brisbane - Denver - Sydney - Singapore - Dubai in 2014