Achieving Successful Customer Outcomes with BPM, CEM and Outside-In thinking and practice.
Globe trotting - certification and customer experience
Catch me if you can at:
Edmonton, Canada – w/c 7 October
Cape Town – w/c 14 October
San Francisco – w/c 4 November
Singapore – w/c 11 November
A terrific mix of in-house accreditation and audit,
consultancy and good plain old training. Government, Financial Services, Aerospace, Retail and Pharma.
Review the 2013 and
2014 Open sessions at: http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-city.html
Or drop me a line at the office (37,000 feet).
Happy Hunting
Steve
Steve Towers, Founder & CEO
steve.towers@bpgroup.org www.bpgroup.org
Cell:+44 7415 063868 Office:+44 203 3030 894 Fax:+44 20 7691 7664
Link with Steve: www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers /
LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup Twitter: http://twitter.com/stowers
BP Group, New Bond House, 124 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DX
Coaching & Professional qualifications since 1992
steve.towers@bpgroup.org www.bpgroup.org
Cell:+44 7415 063868 Office:+44 203 3030 894 Fax:+44 20 7691 7664
Link with Steve: www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers /
LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup Twitter: http://twitter.com/stowers
BP Group, New Bond House, 124 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DX
Coaching & Professional qualifications since 1992
Customer Interactions aka Moments of Truth (Part One) - develop, control, measure and manage
Customer Interactions (CI's) are taking place all the time. Are your CI's under control? Can you quantify them? and are they aligned to the Successful Customer Outcome? Some folks might think this is a mountain to climb and don't even bother to pay attention to those critical moments.
High Performance Organizations on the other hand know that engineering the CI's, designing them Outside-In and keeping them owned and controlled determines every aspect of the Customer Experience.
So let's take a journey together and start with the basics. If we look at healthcare and hospitals especially we all know the smallest things make the biggest difference. Hygiene for instance.
So what are the smallest things in your business that make that massive difference?
![]() |
| Customer Interactions - (Click photo for full size) |
High Performance Organizations on the other hand know that engineering the CI's, designing them Outside-In and keeping them owned and controlled determines every aspect of the Customer Experience.
So let's take a journey together and start with the basics. If we look at healthcare and hospitals especially we all know the smallest things make the biggest difference. Hygiene for instance.
So what are the smallest things in your business that make that massive difference?
The Process Excellence Network annual US gathering
One for your diaries - Orlando, January 2014. The Annual get together for everyone process, performance and customer orientation.
Bringing together leading practitioners, solution providers and the latest exclusive case studies.
If there is one major event in your process, lean, sigma, bpm, customer, outside in diaries for 2014 get along to this one.
Bringing together leading practitioners, solution providers and the latest exclusive case studies.
If there is one major event in your process, lean, sigma, bpm, customer, outside in diaries for 2014 get along to this one.
Successful Customer Outcomes - are you delivering (or are you part of the problem?)
Simply put everything an organization does, from the tasks and activities through to strategy should be explicitly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome.
Say you are in the Accident and Emergency at your local hospital? How much of what is actually happening is contributing to the well being of the patients? At a recent family crisis as a visitor I managed my stress by doing a time and motion study (sad I know). Over 48 hours I sampled activity and tasks, and albeit not scientific (it was hardly a controlled environment) it produced an interesting profile:
Sample size 256.
I would suggest an interesting stat in there is the time with the patient (7%).
If we assumed the objective of going through the process (the Successful Customer Outcome) is to make people better how much time is really spent doing that? How much time is spent on tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to that?
All our jobs involve us in tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to the SCO - how many of those could be released to spend more time achieving the desired outcome? It might not be 93% but it is one helluva a lot.In this example we would reduce costs, improve morale of overworked nurses and enhance the customer experience. Who wouldn't want that?
How can you do that?
Say you are in the Accident and Emergency at your local hospital? How much of what is actually happening is contributing to the well being of the patients? At a recent family crisis as a visitor I managed my stress by doing a time and motion study (sad I know). Over 48 hours I sampled activity and tasks, and albeit not scientific (it was hardly a controlled environment) it produced an interesting profile:
Sample size 256.
I would suggest an interesting stat in there is the time with the patient (7%). If we assumed the objective of going through the process (the Successful Customer Outcome) is to make people better how much time is really spent doing that? How much time is spent on tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to that?
All our jobs involve us in tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to the SCO - how many of those could be released to spend more time achieving the desired outcome? It might not be 93% but it is one helluva a lot.In this example we would reduce costs, improve morale of overworked nurses and enhance the customer experience. Who wouldn't want that?
How can you do that?
There is no excuse for complexity.
Complexity has developed as organizations have added new routes to market, new ways of delivering service, new enterprise IT systems and a myriad of improvement approaches. Each internal functional specialism has developed a mindset to optimize their part of the organization, sometimes at the expense of others. The unwieldy complexity that results has caused a reaction primarily aimed at the need to create order out of this chaos, as if accepting that complexity itself as a right to be. This is not so. Let us unravel the muddle of complexity once and for all.
All work in an organization is fundamentally created by the need to provide product or service to the customer. Everything else is a consequence of that need, which creates value for the shareholders and creates a livelihood for the work force. All else follows.
Furthermore all interactions in meeting the needs for customers are the cause of all work within an organization. These interactions, or Moments of Truth[i], create work in so far as we need to attend to a request internally.
In doing so we interact with our colleagues, systems and other internal processes, and create internal Moments of Truth, which can be referred to as Breakpoints[ii]. The way we deal with Moments of Truth and Breakpoints is underpinned by Business Rules[iii] which may be thought of as ‘decision points within processes’.
These three entities determine the shape of our organization, the internal landscape of how we do work. The resulting activities from Moments of Truth, Breakpoints and Business Rules create the very processes themselves. In fact process is simply an effect caused by the way we choose to interact and guide the customer to obtain our products or service.
Think about that – process is an effect. If that is the reality then the vast range of tools and techniques created in the last century, and sometimes before, are fixing an effect. It is like taking painkillers for discomfort and nothing more. If we are not getting to grips with the causes of the pain it will surely get worse and as we discover, stronger pain killers are then required.
That’s the rub. We have been systematically fixing the wrong things and is it any wonder that change doesn’t stick? Have you ever had that feeling that this is the same project challenge as before, just dusted off and here we go again? It is because we are not fixing the causes of work, and while we continue to ignore the causes the complexity worsens, costs increase and service suffers.
Einstein put it well when he said
“We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”
CPP Masters Advance release of 2014 program (book now at EARLY BIRD prices)
Professional advancement?2014 program released Oct 1 |
||
Amsterdam BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
27-Jan-14 |
|
Orlando BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
3-Mar-14 |
|
London BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
7-Apr-14 |
|
Bangalore BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
26-May-14 |
|
Dubai BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
1-Jun-14 |
|
Brisbane BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
14-Jul-14 |
|
Cape Town BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
21-Jul-14 |
|
Denver BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
11-Aug-14 |
|
London BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
15-Sep-14 |
|
Sydney BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
27-Oct-14 |
|
Singapore BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
10-Nov-14 |
|
Dubai BP Group CPP Professional®, Masters® |
7-Dec-14 |
INFOGRAPHIC: Process Excellence State of the Industry 2013-2014 (from PEX)
- Where are the hot new areas for process excellence?
- What tools and approaches are companies using?
- How can you maximize the results from your process excellence program?
We may be in San Francisco this week at the BPM Summit however our minds are turning to the Annual PEX Florida event in January in Orlando. As ever the PEX network are keeping their finger on the pulse and have produced this enormously useful Infographic.
Every two years, PEX Network undertakes a State of the Industry research project to better understand general trends in how companies are approaching operational excellence. This infographic summarizes the results of our 2013-2014 benchmarking survey.
Download this infographic to find out key trends in approaches, projects, budgets, and investment plans in
process excellence for the year ahead.
And don't forget
to stay tuned for the release of our
State of the Industry report in the coming weeks!
For more information about PEX Week 2014 or to book your place please get in touch
in one of of the following ways:
Visit: www.pexweek.com,
Call: +1 646 378 6026/ +44 (0) 207 036
1300
Email: enquire@pexnetwork.com
BPM Celebrities in San Francisco next week
PEX BPM Summit USA San Francisco
Global Top BPM Speakers
BPM Practice Leader
KEDARit
Download the Agenda
An Overview of CXMapping using the ABACUS toolkit from the BPGroup
And now we have the PDF (much better than the video)
The Science of the Customer Experience
The new site featuring Customer Experience has gone live: http://www.cxrating.com
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.
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.
Let's talk Successful Customer Outcomes...
![]() |
| James Dodkins - Chief Customer Officer BP Group |
Well as it is so often said, it isn’t rocket science. In fact it has to be one of the simplest concepts available in business today – and yet so often missed. It is often so simple it is elegant, so let’s review what Disneys SCO might just be...
Most of us have been there. A car full of screaming kids eager to start their Disney vacation, however trouble is you’ve driven six hours (or flown ten) and frankly the last thing you want to do is fight the car lot. Much better find that quiet hotel room and bar and chill until tomorrow? Not so. This is the kids vacation and they’re going to squeeze every minute out of the long awaited trip to the Magic Kingdom. So what say Disney in this situation? Do they leave you to fight the crowds, get incredibly irritated and leave you with a pile of now prickly family? Well no - they have been there too after all and it is real easy to see it from the customers point of view.
Perhaps the SCO is ‘simply magic’? Not some weird business jargon Mission/Vision but something that talks and causes everyone in the Disney business to ensure they are aligned and delivering to that promise. So how would the SCO ‘simply magic’ work? Let’s review where we are – on the way to the busiest car lot this side of the LA freeway. It is the hottest day this summer the question ¨are we there yet?¨ echoes around yourself, partner and three kids in the car (that’s the average party size to arrive at Disney – five). And yes you are! So you find a spot disembark the kids, look around to size your location and... shut the car doors.

In the ‘rush to the fun’ process Disney discovered that many people lock their keys in the car so right at the start they have on-hand a team of professional locksmiths. They drive through the lot looking for distressed families and unlock their cars – free of charge. Simply Magic. Then there’s the walk to the gates – but wait. Driving through the crowds are golf carts and helpers to steer you towards the nearest ‘magic bus’ with color coded location tags! You probably get the picture and that’s one of the things that makes the Disney performance truly outstanding. The belief that if everything gets itself aligned to the SCO we reduce cost (how much effort do you currently apply to fixing stuff that goes wrong that results in queries and non value added activity?), drive up revenue (how many people would you tell?) and improves customer satisfaction (would you be pleased?).
To coin a phrase, the SCO is a gift that just keeps on giving.
Kindest Regards
James Dodkins
Chief Customer Officer
BP Group
Twitter - @JDodkins
Newspapers aren't dying and Jeff Bezos isn't crazy
The genius that is Jeff Bezos (see the previous article here) sees a great future for publishing in all its forms.
While some are bailing from (news)papers Bezos sees considerable opportunity. What is he seeing that others aren't? http://bit.ly/17UVk0w
While some are bailing from (news)papers Bezos sees considerable opportunity. What is he seeing that others aren't? http://bit.ly/17UVk0w
Great illustraton of Outside-In thinking and practice. Jeff Bezos provides his viewpoint..
"I
would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most
customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers.
Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work
forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and
this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here
is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need."
That really describes the difference between inside-out thinking (examine your capabilities and figure out how to optimize them) to Outside-In - (figure out the Customer needs and align everything to deliver the Successful Customer Outcome) http://bit.ly/AmazonOutsideIn
That really describes the difference between inside-out thinking (examine your capabilities and figure out how to optimize them) to Outside-In - (figure out the Customer needs and align everything to deliver the Successful Customer Outcome) http://bit.ly/AmazonOutsideIn
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)








