Outside in, fundamentally, is about aligning the way business is done with successful customer outcomes. That may sound like a no-brainer but careful thought is required to specify what the real customer outcome is. Outside-in takes an approach that focusses on the customer experience. The part that most organisations get wrong is that their definition of the customer experience is blinkered - the way that they have run their business and approached what they think their customers want has become immobile and inflexible.
Take two contrasting examples. British Airways struggles ahead selling seats on planes. Their approach to making money is just that - bums on seats. They are stuck in the mentality that the process is simply from check-in to baggage collection. It's thinking from decades ago. They are going slowly bust because they are a dinosaur unable to be flexible enough to adapt, to learn and to align with what today's airline passengers actually want. They can cost cut 'till the cows come home - it won't save them.
Meanwhile Ryanair are steaming ahead. They've looked at the customer experience and removed the blinkers. They've used outside-in to think outside the box - to give customers what they want - to fulfill the successful customer outcomes. They don't see the process as simply check-in to baggage collection - they have seen the opportunities: e.g. online gambling, e-cigarettes and their latest innovation - removing check-in desks altogether.
So whilst traditional companies try to solve their problems by looking at their internal processes and improving them (with the misguided aim of improving their service to the customer) outside-in starts with the customer experience and builds the internal business processes to support the customer alignment.
But how do we do this I hear you scream?
Stay tuned for Outside-in Part 3: Moments of Truth.
- TPN
