So I've talked about what outside-in has achieved and about successful customer outcomes - by how do we practically implement outside-in?
Outside-in is fundamentally about aligning processes with successful customer outcomes. Through workshops with little more than than sticky-notes, brown paper and the front line staff in the room we can start to radically change our thinking of organisational processes.
When we look at the customer experience we are looking for three key items within the process:
Moments of Truth – any interaction with the customer – this could be a customer to person interaction, for example or a customer to system interaction. These moments represent an opportunity in time to delight the customer or to fail!
Break points – any hand-off in the process – these represent potential points where the process can break down.
Business Rules – any decision point in the process. These can add complexity, increase effort and be a potential failure point.
When we map out the process we start to identify where these three factors occur for each step in the process. We then use these to calculate the point of failure factor for our process. This point of failure factor gives us an idea of how optimised (or not optimised!) our processes are from a customer point of view. The point of failure factor has been proven to directly correlate to customer satisfaction – so a high level of potential failure will equal a propensity for customers to be dissatisfied (I wonder why?!)
Thinking about our process with all its moments of truth, break points and business rules for a moment it is easy to see how customer dissatisfaction can occur. You may think that having lots of moments of truth (i.e customer interaction) might be a good thing, but think of it this way: if you had to call up a company to get some information but each time you received the information it was inaccurate and had to call again, how long would it take to irk your dissatisfaction? And what if instead the company had not only given you the information, but had given you extra information that had helped you further?
So once the point of failure factor has been identified we seek to improve our processes. But how to we do this? We need to:
1. Eliminate
2. Improve
Each moment of truth, break point or business rule represents an opportunity, but the more of them we have the greater our chance of failure occurring. So to reduce our point of failure factor we seek to eliminate as many as we can. Obviously we can’t practically get rid of all of them, but we need to ensure that the ones that we leave in place are improved as much as possible and that they are aligned to successful customer outcomes.
This is a very high level overview of how outside-in works. If you’d like to find out more or to become trained in the technique I’d recommend you visit the following links:
BP Group - http://www.bpgroup.org/
BP Group on Linkedin - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1062077&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr
Steve Tower's Blog (World Outside-in Guru) - http://successfuloutcomes.blogspot.com/
Remember, The Process Revolution Starts Here...
- TPN
