Innovation: How to Connect our Client’s Pains with Business Process Improvement?

In this post, I propose a research process to understand not only your customers’ needs, but also how their experience is created.

Over the last years, agile methodologies have taken the lead to improve customer experience. However, this current experience that we seek to improve does not come out of nowhere: it has been created and operated by people, existing processes, and systems. Are you really aware of their key role in innovation?

Throughout all the projects I have worked on at Wolox, I was able to strengthen the idea that understanding the current business operation is the key to unveiling and prioritizing where the real aspects of improvement are in order to innovate. Having said that, if we only focus on internal processes, we may end up finding improvement opportunities that do not match actual customers’ needs. Thus, they will not have a real impact on the business in the long term.

Whatever the scenario is, we need to achieve a deep understanding of both users, internal and external clients. Thanks to a simultaneous research process, we will be able to prioritize what is really relevant for the client and engage internal collaborators at the same time.

It takes two to tango

Yes, I know you’re wondering how to deal with such a complex double-focused research project. In this post, I propose a process with five steps that will lead you to understand not only your customers’ needs but also how their experience is created, which are the internal roles involved and their day-to-day operation. In this way, we will identify the quick wins that positively impact both users and the business.

For a better understanding, we will take as a case study a B2B building material supplier.

Let’s dive in!

5 steps to bridge the gap between user’s needs and internal processes

1. Map the key areas of the business and involve them in the whole process.

First of all, we need to understand which areas of the organization have a direct impact on customer experience. After this, we will involve the people responsible for each of these areas in the innovation project through all the instances: analysis, ideation, and prioritization.

Creating an interdisciplinary working team saves time since decisions are made taking into consideration the needs and potential constraints of each area. In this way, it is likely that they adopt the solution as their own, ensuring an easier and smoother implementation.

There are some useful tools to do this such as the Ecosystem Map and Stakeholder Map. The first allows us to understand what systems and areas exist in the organization and how they work together, while the second one focuses on the key roles for the success of the project, differentiating the scope and decision level of each one.

For our building material supplier case study, we are going to define the following key areas for our innovation project: Sales, Customer Service, Logistics, Technology, Production and Operations. Identify who is the core team, who you need to get involved and who needs to be informed about the project. The map should look like this:

2. Customers and internal users research

After mapping key areas and stakeholders, we will start individual interviews with both internal users and customers simultaneously.

Let’s start with customers. Our aim is to understand their needs, pains, and motivations regarding the service and the experience in general. After doing this research, we will know what is happening to them at each stage of the journey: actions, touchpoints with different business or production areas, what they think about the process, and some improvement opportunities.

For our case study, the final chart should look like this:

Now, let’s go on with internal users. In my experience, it is very useful to leverage open questions like these:

• What are the three most relevant pain points in your area?
• How is the relationship between your area and the client?
• If you could redesign the process carried out by the client to solve their needs, what would be the most relevant aspect to change? Why?

In order to visualize what we have learned in the interview process, we can create a chart. Going further with the case study, below we describe the placement, production, and delivery process. We can see and analyze what actions are carried out internally, in which systems, and who is responsible for the task.

We added post-its with a sentence that describes each stage to identify an opportunity for improvement. In our case study, there is room for improvement in production planning visibility and communication with the customer.

Finally, it is important to understand the impact of each internal improvement opportunity on the customer experience that we have already researched in order to prioritize them in the following stages.

3. Connect customer pain points with internal improvement opportunities to prioritize ideas.

After the research on customers and internal users, the next step is to connect their pains.

In the same customer journey where we described the customer’s actions and pains, we can add the internal improvement opportunities that we have detected.

In each step of the customer’s journey, we will describe:

• Customer’s actions
• Customer’s pains
• Internal tasks
• Internal improvement opportunities and pains.

By doing this, we identify the root cause of pains so we can look for solutions. The next step is to prioritize customers’ findings and pains that have to be solved. Based on our previous clients’ research, we can assess how impactful the solution will be for the business and prioritize. If we select some of the pains and opportunities shown before with these criteria our chart should look like this:

Moving forward with the case study, our main findings are:

• There is no visibility of the order status both internally at the sales level and to the customer.
• There is no proactive internal or external communication of changes at the estimated time of arrival.

4. Solutions for internal processes and for customer experience

Once the findings and pains have been prioritized, we go on by ideating solutions that could solve them. It is important that problems and challenges are bounded through Problem Statements such as: [USER] needs [TO DO] in order to [OBJECTIVE] but [CONSTRAIN].

This will allow us to create solutions by working with different ideation dynamics: how might we, analogy thinking, among others.

In our case study, these are ideas that address both customer and internal user pains:

• Integrate internal management system with the logistics system to achieve better visibility of the process.
• Automated communication by integrating the ERP to mailing automation software.
• Order tracking system for customer and sales team with a different interface for each one.
• Push notifications for both users confirming the status of the order.
• Push notifications for both users about changes in the order due to production or delivery issues.

5. Design a unified transformation roadmap

After the prioritization of ideas for new solutions, the last step is to build an experience improvement roadmap that includes solutions for both customers and internal users. Prioritizing them in the same roadmap allows us to align all the stakeholders of each area and understand what goals we can achieve stage by stage.

An example for the solutions mentioned in the previous step is the following:

6. Redesign roles and responsibilities

Finally, I’d like to highlight that in this process of improving an experience, many gaps could appear between roles and new tasks to be done. It is important to rethink those roles and outline a description of the profiles required for the new tasks.

After this, if there is a gap, an extensive training program should be designed and implemented. If people were involved in the ideation and transformation process from the start it is likely that they will feel engaged and end up as ambassadors of change. To achieve this, I recommend going over change management methodologies such as Lean Change Management or Management 3.0.

No pain, no gain

This methodology may add up more complexity to project management because it means dealing with more data in the decision-making process and a greater number of tasks to coordinate.

It may be possible that the solutions and the roadmap that integrate them are more complex and require a higher level of expertise in the implementation. Having said that, we will achieve more efficiency in the decision-making process, ultimately, saving time and energy in the future.

Executing the two research processes in parallel allows us to match and align opportunities for improvement. Thus, we arrive at the ideation stage with much more clarity about which are the key pains and opportunities of the whole business in the short and medium-term.

Please, feel free to comment and share your experience!