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On Business Process Management and Workflow Automation

Notes about legacy business process management, robotic process automation and modern workflow software. Includes diverse opinions about operations, lean, workflow management, Six Sigma and process improvement.

Customer Experience Management with Tallyfy

14 min readFeb 7, 2018

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Putting customers first

Almost every business and organization will claim that it puts customers first and that improving customer service is one of its key objectives. However, despite this, many businesses still continue to build very internally focused processes that fail to properly consider the experience customers have when they interact with the business.

Successful businesses, on the other hand, are those that see customer satisfaction as a key differentiator and enabler for success. They truly live these values rather than just going through the motions. To a large part, this has been driven by the success of online retailers such as Amazon® and DELL™ that have been totally focused on delivering high-quality service resulting in a largely excellent customer experience.

The degree to which a business really does put its customers first can be seen by looking at its business processes. The best organizations will take an “outside-in” approach; that is, they look at how their customers want to interact with them and then build business processes around these customer interactions. For many businesses, the Internet has completely changed the way customers interact with them, and keeping abreast of changing technology and shopping trends is vital to ensure top-class customer service. For instance, “click and collect” became a hugely important delivery channel in the U.K. for Christmas 2014, and a major retailer that struggled to deliver orders for collection in time for Christmas saw its sales figures drop significantly.

So in today’s world, a good process is no longer enough; it’s the customer experience that the process delivers that really counts. This white paper looks at how to design processes that deliver a good customer experience using techniques such as customer journey modeling, touchpoint analysis and Moments of Truth (MofTs). Using such approaches to improve customer satisfaction has these benefits:

  • Increased business customer focus
  • Enhanced customer loyalty
  • Increased sales
  • Reduced brand risk
  • Better measures and KPIs
  • More focused improvement projects
  • Identification of gaps, issues and opportunities

A good customer experience

Some of the key characteristics that affect a customer’s experience during a typical retail interaction include:

1) How easy was it to contact the organization?

2) Could the customer use the communication channel he wanted?

3) Was it easy to order a product or request a service?

4) Was it delivered when the customer wanted it?

5) Did the customer get what he ordered?

6) Did it work or was the service effective?

7) Was the bill correct?

8) Could the customer pay using the method he wanted?

9) Was good help and support provided?

10) If the customer had a problem, was it dealt with satisfactorily?

All of these are important to the customer, although the comparative importance of the individual elements will vary from customer to customer and for different products. What is common to all of them is that they are, to a large extent, determined by the business processes. Of course, employing good people who are well trained is vital. But people can only deliver good service, day after day, if they operate within effective and efficient processes.

Along with these specific points, good customer experience depends on the effectiveness of the complete journey the customer travels on his way to receiving goods or services. The effectiveness of the journey is partly determined by the levels of service the customer has come to expect (e.g., online ordering, personal shoppers, next-day delivery) and also by the way the customer has been conditioned by the experience provided by the best-in-class companies, such as Amazon and DELL.

So as well as thinking just about the needs of the business, it is also important to think about the needs of customer and trends in the market. These three areas can be thought of in terms of “voices” that need to be heard:

  • The voice of the customer — the customer’s needs and expectations
  • The voice of the business — the business objectives and constraints
  • The voice of the market — current trends and what competitors are doing

Once these have been taken into account to design the process, the “voice of the process” will show how the process is performing:

  • The voice of the process — measures that describe how the process performs

What is considered to be the best experience will change over time as customer expectations change, technology changes and best-in-class businesses set higher goals.

Specifying the process

Designing a process is about identifying the sequence of tasks necessary to deliver a business objective along with the resources needed to deliver those tasks and the environment in which they operate. The process design shows the important decision points and various paths the process can take. It is unlikely a design will show every possible decision and path. But a good process design should identify all of those that have a significant effect on the customer or the business.

Business scenarios

When an instance of a process is executed, then a particular set of decisions is made and specific paths (and maybe loops) are followed depending on the particular circumstances surrounding the process. Defining all the important potential process “scenarios” (i.e., the routes through the process) is an important early step to ensure that the process design is as complete as possible and to enable later process testing to ensure all the different scenarios are effectively catered to. Specific scenarios may be triggered in response to customer needs (e.g., ordering a product) or business needs (e.g., compiling a monthly sales report).

Requirements

In the past, processes were mostly developed to meet business needs, usually described by a set of “requirements” defined in collaboration with key stakeholders from many parts of the business. However, in order to deliver best-in-class customer service, it is important to put much more emphasis on customer needs and build the processes around them.

User stories

To define a customer’s needs, a less formal technique called “user stories” is often employed. User stories are expressed in the form of a statement that identifies the activity the customer wants to perform and his reason for doing it (e.g., “I want to register with a website … so that I can order products in future without having to re-enter all my details”). These user stories are compiled by the business, often by the marketing and sales departments, and in conjunction with the customer using focus groups or agile development methods.

Using the “I want … so that I can … format makes the story easy to understand and focuses attention on why the customer wants to do something, ensuring the process achieves what was desired rather than just providing a specific functionality. Scenarios are mostly used for testing processes while user stories and requirements are applied when specifying and designing the process. Stories can be defined at varying levels of detail, and a high-level user story can be decomposed into a number of lower-level user stories. User stories are similar to, but not exactly the same as, “use cases” used by software developers who may use the user stories to define their use cases.

Specifying the experience

Defining user stories ensures that the business processes achieve what the customer wants. However, by themselves, they don’t ensure that the customer will get a good experience. To ensure a good customer experience it is necessary to look at the flow of activities the customer undertakes and how the business processes respond to the customer interactions.

In practice, it is not possible to know the exact process the customer follows. The customer may interact with a number of business processes (and a number of different businesses) during the course of his activities. The customer doesn’t directly follow these business processes as he isn’t executing the processes himself but is interacting with processes carried out by the business (i.e., by people or IT systems). In most cases, the customer will have a very informal approach to achieving his aims. The customer may start an interaction and then abandon it. He may do things in a different order than the business intended, or he may take a break and then later come back to complete a task.

However, it is possible to identify the key activities the customer will want to undertake (the user stories) and the interactions the customer will have with the business to accomplish them. In addition, the steps and interactions that, by necessity, the business will have to impose can be identified. How the best-performing organizations operate can provide additional insight into how people have come to expect the journey to progress.

Customer journeys

Putting together the customer user stories with the business processes, and identifying the interactions between the customer and the business, defines the “customer journey.” A customer journey shows the flow of activities and the interactions with the business that the customer undertakes to achieve his goals. Typical journeys may include ordering a product, cancelling a subscription, checking a balance or returning a product.

Often the term “customer journey” is used to describe a visionary representation of how the business wants to interact with the customer. These types of customer journeys will normally be prepared by the marketing department or customer experience specialists. They will employ colorful graphical visualizations designed to appeal to customers and sales people. While these types of journey models are valuable for expressing the vision and setting the direction for transformation projects and IT development, they are not sufficient by themselves for ensuring a good customer experience. In order to ensure both the business processes and IT systems actually deliver the required process, it is necessary to develop customer journey models that show the customer interaction with the detail of the business processes (see page 6 — customer journey modeling).

The journey may involve interactions with several processes that the business has designed as separate processes (e.g., order handling, billing and fault handling). It is important to look at the complete end-to-end experience of the customer, not just that of a single process or small number of interactions. Customer journey modeling gives a much more realistic view of what the customer experiences than the analysis of individual processes.

Personas

Just as there are various scenarios for business processes, there are also various routes that customers can take on their journey depending on their needs and their method of interaction. It is important to consider all the most important routes in the customer journey model. Not all customers are alike; different types of people will have different approaches and objectives. By defining the different customer type groups or “persona” (e.g., small business owner, techie, homeworker or retired person), customer journey models can be created that reflect how different types of people want to interact with the business.

Touchpoints and moments of truth

The customer may have many interactions with the business, but some of these will have particular significance for the customer, or the business, or both. For instance, the point at which a customer places an order is a major interaction that signifies the customer has decided he wants the product or service; it also represents the start of a contractual agreement. The importance of this particular interaction is recognized by both the business and the customer. Interactions that involve the customer are known as “touchpoints.” An important touchpoint, where the business can make or break its relationship with the customer, is known as a “Moment of Truth” (MofT). Getting the customer experience wrong at an MofT can have a very detrimental effect on the customer’s perception of the business (and its brand), which can often lead to the customer deserting the brand. On the other hand, providing a good experience can create huge loyalty to the brand that can persist even in the face of future problems. Modeling the MofTs on the customer journey model enables the business to clearly see where it should focus process improvement efforts.

MofTs may not all be interactions that both the customer and the business recognize, but events that are only recognized by one of the parties. Probably the most important MofT for the customer is when he first uses the product and whether it works or not, but the business won’t directly have any visibility of this. Similarly, an important MofT for the business is when it receives payment.

Once MofTs have been clearly identified and evaluated, business owners should be assigned to each of them. It should be their responsibility to monitor the MofTs and drive improvement projects. Business change projects should always be evaluated based on their effect on customer experience and MofTs. If the projects can’t identify any benefit, or it is likely that customer experience may suffer, then the project should not be allowed to go ahead. It is a mistake to argue that a small drop in customer experience is acceptable in order to introduce new IT equipment or upgrade a website, for example.

KPIs

Understanding the difference between the customer’s MofTs and the business MofTs is vital to setting appropriate measures — Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — that will be used to assess customer satisfaction and business process performance (the voice of the process). It is very easy for businesses to set KPIs they believe are good measures of the process but which bear no resemblance to the customer’s experience. Businesses often have a wide range of customer experience measures, but often these are not directly linked to the process. This means it is difficult to see how to modify the process to improve these measures or predict the level of customer satisfaction of a particular process. By basing the KPIs on the customer journey model and the MofTs, a direct link between customer experience and the process is established.

Designing for good customer experience

A vital part of designing a good business process is to consider the customer journey that the process (or a combination of processes) creates for the customer. Of course, the customer’s perception of the journey will not just depend on objective judgments about the effectiveness and efficiency of the process (normal process measures or KPIs). It will also depend on much softer issues around what the customer is thinking and feeling, his perception of the organization’s brand, and previous experiences (especially problems) and issues outside of the organization’s control, such as the speed of his Internet connection.

To a large extent, the customer’s expectation of what he needs to do to obtain a product or service (his “mental model” of the process) will have been set by the best-in-class companies. If the customer encounters an organization that provides him with a very different approach then, unless it is clearly better than what’s been encountered before, the customer is likely to be frustrated and rate the experience as poor. A business that wants to introduce a new innovative process will need to make sure it really does work well and also consider how to introduce customers to this new approach.

To design a process with a good customer experience, it is necessary to design, model, simulate and test the associated customer journey, in addition to designing, modeling, simulating and testing the process. These should not be done independently; they are integrally related.

The key steps in designing for good customer experience are (see Figure 1):

• Capture business requirements

• Capture customer user stories

• Design the target customer journey

• Define target MofTs and KPIs

• Identify business scenarios

• Design the business processes

• Model process data flows

• Test process scenarios

• Evaluate the actual customer journey

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In practice, these steps will be carried out iteratively. For instance, some MofTs may be defined at the outset and then refined and augmented when the customer journey model is created. When starting to design processes for good customer experience, it is important to make sure that value is delivered quickly and the business can see the benefit. Avoid setting up a program to create large numbers of customer journey models. Instead, concentrate on a few key areas where there are new products being launched, new opportunities, customer issues, poor measurements in place or other problems. It is important to involve a wide range of business stakeholders in the modeling (e.g., sales, marketing, customer experience teams and process designers) as well as customers to ensure the model is representative of the true experience.

It is also important to consider the data used by the business processes and the information supplied by and sent to the customer. Often apparently well-designed processes fail because the designers have not considered the flow of data through process. A big source of customer dissatisfaction is when the customer is asked for data at inappropriate times or repeatedly asked for the same data. An example of an annoying data request is when an airline flight booking system asks for personal details of all the passengers before showing the cost of the tickets. The key data items for each touchpoint and MofT should be identified and included in the customer journey model. There may be other important data collections not associated with customer touchpoints (e.g., automated or third-party requests) that are also valuable to include on the customer journey model.

Keeping the customer informed

An important way to improve customer satisfaction is keeping the customer informed about the progress of the process, which is delivering the product or service he ordered. This is normally done by sending Keep the Customer Informed (KCI) messages at key points in the process (e.g., order received or order dispatched). An enhancement to a basic-message KCI is to allow the customer to respond, for instance, to change the delivery date or time.

Done well, sending KCI messages can result in a high level of customer satisfaction even when things go wrong or delays are experienced. However, sending too many messages or incorrect information can annoy customers and reduce their satisfaction level. Similarly, these days, it seems every website wants the customer to fill in satisfaction surveys or post reviews for even the most trivial tasks. It is important to capture satisfaction data for the entire customer experience and not just isolated tasks, such as using a Web page.

Modeling the KCI and review points as part of the customer journey models is a good way of ensuring they are effective and appropriate.

Testing the customer experience

The customer journey model and the touchpoint analysis diagram can be used to test how the business processes perform and what the customer’s experience of them will be. Even for many mature process organizations, testing the customer experience is an unfamiliar activity. Organizations may be used in defining a customer experience vision, evaluating processes and doing customer satisfaction surveys after a new product or process is launched. But ensuring that the customer will have a good experience before launch is much more valuable. Early failures and poor customer experience can have a significant and long-term detrimental effect on customer perception and loyalty.

Ideally, the business measures of process effectiveness (the voice of the process) should be the same as the customer’s measures (the voice of the customer), albeit the customer’s measures are informal measures. As mentioned, customers will have perceptions about how well their journeys went as well as judge the experiences based on the outcomes. The voice of the customer should include perception measures as well as outcome and process measures, although it is important to be aware that perceptions do not always correlate with the actual facts.

Because it is not possible to have direct insight into the customer’s process, other ways are needed to get feedback from customers. This might be using customer surveys or more direct routes, such as detecting when customers first activate the product or when the carrier delivers the item. It is important to make the effort to obtain these customer-focused measures because only then is it possible to truly understand the customer journey and be able to assess the customer’s satisfaction.

It is important to make all of the information and insight gained from customer journey models, MofTs and touchpoint analysis diagrams available to the business. A good approach is to create performance dashboards that use a summary of the models and MofTs along with important business KPIs. This brings customer experience to life for key executives.

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On Business Process Management and Workflow Automation
On Business Process Management and Workflow Automation

Published in On Business Process Management and Workflow Automation

Notes about legacy business process management, robotic process automation and modern workflow software. Includes diverse opinions about operations, lean, workflow management, Six Sigma and process improvement.

Frank J. Wyatt
Frank J. Wyatt

Written by Frank J. Wyatt

Tallyfy is beautiful, cloud-native workflow software that enables anyone to track business processes within 60 seconds. I work as a consultant there.

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