Customer Experience

“Government managers must learn from what is working in the private sector and apply these best practices to deliver services better, faster, and at lower cost.”  – Barack Obama (upon releasing Executive Order 13571--Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service)

Remember when you had to purchase your music via cd’s, records, or cassettes at brick and mortar record stores? Prior to the iPod’s arrival, there was always a delay between the intent to purchase the songs we wanted and the time when we could actually enjoy them. The delay was either the travel time to and from a store to buy the album or the time waiting for an order placed online to arrive from the post office. There definitely wasn’t instant gratification in the process. The purchasing channels were rigid – requiring us to buy in increments of albums instead of choosing the exact songs we wanted. But there wasn’t an outcry from consumers. We learned to live with the shortcomings of the process. But then came revolutionary change.

Recently there was a discussion among various BPM experts about process, outcomes, and Deming [http://bpm.com/bpm-today/in-the-forum/is-it-still-true-we-should-work-on-our-process,-not-the-outcome-of-our-processes] that has me questioning the different ways business process professionals think currently about process improvement. My position in the discussion was that focusing on process and outcome simultaneously was necessary. Further, it was my contention that the statistical process control methodology Deming advocated assumed that customer satisfaction would always increase in parallel with improvements in quality.

General Motors discovered in the 80’s with the leather seats in its Cadillac line of automobiles that increases in quality do not necessarily equate to raised levels of customer satisfaction. This discovery led to conversations about rising customer expectations, especially during the 90’s.

An increasing number of organizations are monitoring the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS metric.  While NPS can help an organization get a sense of where it stands with its customers, measuring NPS – by itself – is no guarantee of improved success in performing for customers.  However a process based approach to measuring, modeling, and improving customers’ experience can produce significant results.

We live in a fast paced world where consumers demand high quality and rapid services. When we buy an item on-line we expect a confirmation email in seconds or we start to be concerned that something has gone wrong.

The desire for rapid and meaningful response is also growing in more complex transactions such as a mortgage or insurance application, even though these often require documents to be supplied that contain the data needed to decide on the claim or application. Consumers can now take and send pictures on mobile devices or scan documents from home, and are attracted by the simplicity and availability of 24/7 e-business.

When transforming these types of business process a capture strategy is needed to enable documents to be delivered and processed in a fast and low cost means, with a consistent high level of quality.