I was recently asked to put together a 1 page document to provide a brief explanation of the CEM Method (Customer Experience Management Method).
This is my attempt at it - I hope it provides a handly intro for those of us out there trying to provide some clarity on what the CEM Method does and why it's different.
Cheers,
TPN
I live my life in a constant state of battle. It's a battle against blandness, it's a battle against the kind of people who Billy Connolly would describe as "the beigeists" - the brown cardigan brigade. When it comes to process we often battle against "the beigeists" who are scared of change, who say "that's the way we do it around here", who say "no, it can't be done".
It can be a tiring battle, but it's a battle, which, as process people we need to fight - it's our job. It's our job to challenge when no-one else dares. It's our job to push change when everyone else is scared. It's our job to innovate where others prefer the status quo. It's our job to take risks when others are afraid to fail.
If we choose not to do these things, we end up creating processes in brown cardigans - bland, boring, stagnant, ineffective.
I'll end this post with a comment from Theodore Roosevelt, who put it much better than I will ever be able to:
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
'Till next time, keep daring to do mighty things...
- TPN
When I was a student one of my favourite pastimes was browsing through CD shops. I would spend many a spare hour doing so. Fast forward 15 years and CD shops are now almost complete a relic of a former age. But despite the fact that they're gone I don't miss them at all.
I now buy all my music via itunes and I can sit in the comfort of my own home, browsing my ipad, listening to samples of the music then purchasing and downloading the music instantly. The outcome of the process essentially remains the same over 15 years - buy music. But the process itself has become simpler, faster and more enjoyable. Technology has acted as an enabler, but this also required some customer centric thinking to get the mix right.
Soon we'll see the demise of bookshops (iPads and kindles will take care of that), Retail & Rental DVD shops (itunes and netflix will cream that) as well as post offices (dwindling postage numbers & prepaid options will kill them). And I won't miss those either. Sure we might all end up couch potatoes that don't have any need to move, but it will also free up all that wasted time traveling to retail stores so that we can do some exercise!
So what are the lessons from a process point of view?
The outcome may remain the same, but if we focus on the customer experience of the process, the customer gets what they really need, not what we think they want - or as Henry Ford once put it...
"If I'd asked people what they wanted they'd have said a faster horse".
Cheers,
TPN
A tomato is a tomato, right? They are predominantly red, round and some are tastier than others. If we take a traditional process approach to growing tomatoes we aim for a tasty tomato that looks good and which we can grow in large quantities to sell to our retailers.
Yes, that's true, if you think inside-out. But what if you think outside-in, from a customer experience point of view?
Tomato manufacturers started to do this many years ago and finally they have now developed a "non-leaking tomato" ideal for preventing soggy sandwiches (see photo of my tomato!)
If we had taken a traditional approach we'd simply have more of the same, but by looking at the customer experience and the way tomatoes are used leads to a new innovation and a competitive advantage! Will it change our lives significantly? Probably not. But one thing's for sure, my sandwich won't be soggy today and I won't have blobs of runny tomato on my shirt...that is certainly good for my customer experience.
- TPN
I struggle to think of a worse process than the one I'm about to discuss. It's a worldwide process - active in almost every country in the world, if not all. Wars are fought over it, businesses built on it and from my point of view it's inefficient and unnecessary in this day and age. What is it? It's cash.
Yes, those little coins that swim around in your pocket and which you throw into fountains to make your wishes with - they have been with us for thousands of years and I now believe the time is right to get rid of them forever. Let's think about a world without cash - a cashless society.
Cash transactions represent an highly inefficient process and one which adds little value from a customer experience point of view. It's a legacy thousands of years old that has come to be accepted, but which should not be tolerated any more. It's time we eradicated its use and made our lives simpler. And as for the fountains, well, they'll find something else to throw in them...
- TPN
I was lucky enough to attend the Pega Process Symposium 2010 yesterday, and even more lucky to see the presentation by Pega System's genius CEO Alan Trefler.
Pega are a heartening success story - from their origins in 1983 when Alan borrowed money from his mother to finance the start up of the company in his bedroom to today where they are a multi-million dollar company. Pega have grown due to their unique approach to BPM - the removal of complex coding to enable process agility via business rules (that the business can change rather than the IT nerds). It has proven to be a winning formula that has the "bone collectors" like IBM and Oracle choking on their dust. But more than this, their focus on serving their customers (including Citi who have been a client since the beginning in 1983) is unique - providing support to all versions of their product since inception.
In Alan's presentation he highlighted the fact that although there has been a 10,000x increase in the innovation in computers there had been no innovation in the way we have applied them to business problems. However, Alan's view was that "BPM threatens to change all of that". To enable this to occur Alan detailed three key factors that needed to occur:
Not surprisingly pega has done all three. It now stands as a unique proposition as a BPM product with a built-in development environment, something that Alan describes as a "enormous competitive differentiator".
Pega's focus on simplicity and agility is highly commendable, but for me what sets them apart is their commitment to their customers, whose lives they are making easier, simpler and more successful.
- TPN
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
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
Six Sigma and Lean's bodies lie smouldering and decomposing in the ashes of the 20th century. A revolution is upon us. Some are wise enough to have seen it coming, some have only recently found it and the others, well, they'll soon adapt or die.
What I am talking about is an approach that is so radically different from the ways that we have traditionally approached process improvement that it forces you to totally alter your current mindset. It is an approach that is the secret weapon of some of the world's greatest companies such as Google, Apple and Virgin.
It's called Outside-in.
On paper outside-in sounds like a "no brainer" - it's about looking at process from the customer's experience. I'm sure you think you already do that, but if you aren't using outside-in already I can categorically tell you that you aren't. Outside-in uses a method to systematically look at the customer's experience from end to end, rather than looking at improving the customer's experience by altering internal processses - this is inside-out thinking. Whereas inside-out thinking puts a bandage on the effect, it doesn't eliminate the cause - the wound still bleeds.
As organisations we have become crippled by our internal processes. We've become so entwined in what we do day to day we've forgotten why we exist - to serve our customer - to give them what they need, to give them what they want and sometimes to give them what they don't know they need yet! The customer is our reason for being, without them we cease to exist, yet through our bureaucracy and our bulk we become a bloated beast of burden - unable to move rapidly to meet the needs of the lightning fast pace of life around us. In the end, we sink and die whilst the nimble climb higher and higher.
When we use Outside-in to optimise process we achieve three things simultaneously - We reduce costs, improve the customer experience and as a result improve revenue. This we call "the triple crown".
Sounds to good to be true? Well, it's not. And here's why:
What do these victors have in common? They all use Outside-in to achieve the "triple crown".
So, do you think Lean and Six Sigma will help you to achieve all that? Thought not.
Welcome to the revolution.
- TPN
Twitter - love it or hate it, it's the big thing at the moment. I use it myself, but only as much as I can stand to and only for business purposes.
But recently I've noticed that all I'm getting through these days is what I call "twitter spam" - "followers" whose only updates are the same as those crappy spam e-mails we're all now so used to. Twitter is in danger of becoming the new spam. And what about cybersitting? At the moment I can (and as a test I have) registered twitter names of major corporations that don't quite get it yet (shame on them!) - how long before someone invents a little piece of software that starts registering thousands of twitter names and then puts them up for sale?
I see twitter as being like one of those kids who grew up in a commune like River Phoenix or something - a brilliant genius, but not quite living in the real world - full of innovation and creative spleandor, but not able to live with normal society. Twitter's free and easy lifestyle is about to end, I fear. With innovation comes responsibility- twitter has triumphed, but now some rules have to be put in place to protect it's users and to protect it's end goal.
Dare I say it, it's time for process.
- TPN
Craig Reid is known throughout the business world as "The Process Ninja". He is a passionate advocate of business process management.
