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Would you like to create better customer experience for your organization’s customers by changing your business processes? Here are seven ideas what you could do to take your customer experience to the next level:

Make a connection with your customers: A personal connection with customers creates an emotional bond, regardless of the channel the customer is using. For example, many organizations have instructed their employees to greet customers within 15 seconds and engage those who would like to have a dialog about their interests. But be careful not to fall into that classical dialog trap: “Good day, sir! How may I help you?” … “Hi, no thanks, I am just looking around.”. How can you make your customers truly welcome?

Get rid of stupid rules: Get rid of any processes that hurt customers. “Getting rid of one or more of these rules can quickly and cost-efficiently increase satisfaction”, the Customer Expectation Management (CEM) professionals say. For example, using CEM Method hundreds of organizations have been able to get rid of useless rules that hurting the business.

Inject the unexpected into service or product:“Adding some small cool things to give service a twist is a simple and inexpensive way to give your customer experience a positive vibe”, suggests CEO of a retail company in Finland. She says that an imaginatively differentiated product or service can be an engaging element of the customer experience and can encourage recommendations. One hotel chain has greeting card under each bed, which says: “Yes, we clean here, too!”

Use online communities for your benefit: You can get really good insight through online communities and forums. Your customers will Google you, so why don’t you also? It is important to listen to customers’ conversations in social media to gain a better understanding of customers’ behaviors, needs, and preferences.

Find passion internally: You should search your organization internally for customer champions rather than only relying on outside experts. The best data and the insights that you need to carry out customer experience activities are right within your own organization. You should appoint  a customer experience leader and designate her/him to form and lead a centralized customer experience team.

Reuse the buzz that customers are creating for you: Nowadays many organizations  are realizing that when it comes to the Internet, social media, and online technology, they should take an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach and go where customers already are. This way, customer discussions across multiple social networks are centralized in a single searchable space. In practice, this means that a comment or an article submitted by a customer on your Facebook page or Twitter feed becomes available to your website and other places, too.

In the business process management (BPM) world the ability to simultaneously grow revenues, reduce costs and improve service is called a Triple Crown. It is a direct consequence of implementing advanced process management.
A 21st century company shifts attention from ‘doing things right’ to ‘doing the right things’ and as a consequence, much of the work taking place within a company becomes ‘dumb stuff’ when tested against the KPIs based on the previously mentioned Triple Crown. This ‘dumb stuff’ can be eliminated and typically will result in cost reductions of 40-70% within three to six months after implementation across traditional business processes.

A large slice of reduction is in the potential effort to run a process – the people. It also includes considerable swathes of information technology, now no longer required to manage the significantly simplified ‘Outside-In’ processes.  Saves are also available across the enterprise from reducing the need for ‘outsourcing’ that does not explicitly contribute to the delivery of successful outcomes. Progressive 21st century companies such as IBM, Google, Apple, Gilead Sciences and Southwest Airlines actively redeploy staff to the benefit of the bottom line – making more with less. Service improves and revenues grow.

“BPM wins the ‘triple crown’ of saving money, saving time and adding value. BPM is delivering both short-term return on investment (ROI) and long-term value. One example is an insurance company that was able to reduce its claims processing cost by more than 20 percent. We are currently seeing uptake in BPM use and benefits in government, banking, health-care, transportation and travel industries” said Janelle Hill, research vice-president at Gartner. 

There are many Customer Expectation Management methods available that are easy to implement, as well as very inspiring tools for meaningfully aligning your revenues, costs and service strategies quickly. For example, the CEM Method offers effective tools for analyzing the successful customer outcomes (what your customers really need), moment of truths (customer interactions), breakpoints (internal hand-overs) and business rules. That information is put together and observed through the Outside-In lens, which reveals all the pain points in business processes and customer experience of the organization. After that, innovation tools are used to redesign those processes to meet the customer needs and organization’s strategy, which will lead to getting BPM’s Triple Crown.

Get Janne Ohtonen's latest BPM book for free at http://addvalueto.me/download-a-free-process-leadership-book/

The innovation management process has become an important part of the operations of many businesses, as the recognition of the importance of initiatives towards innovation has become much more common.
That said, while many companies do attempt to have a solid approach to creativity and innovation, too few actually focus on it as a single function. Instead, they seem to hold many separate activities in isolation, such as brainstorming sessions, pilot projects and campaigns, and vague communication with the market, and simply keep fingers crossed that it will come together in the end. While this has worked for some in the past, it is far from the ideal way of performing this important task. Instead, the best way to accomplish this is to have a set innovation activities which integrates the activity into the regular cycle of your business. The list below shows the phases in innovation management process, which will help your organization to put it all together as one process.

Setting the goals for the process

Innovation always begins with a goal in mind. It is many times based on finding the solution to a problem. Once you have this goal, it should be discussed among everyone in the problem solving team. This team may consist of you and another person, a group of people, or may even be all of your organization’s employees. It may involve others such as your customers (who can provide suggestions and feedback based on their own experience with your product or service) or other stakeholders in the business. When you establish the team for this process, make sure that you have someone representing all the parts of the process from start to the end.

Cooperation

The innovation team should work together so that instead of trying to come up with an idea separately, they can bounce ideas off one another and create a collaborative solution. This can include the use of online tools, attendance of events such as trade shows that can be inspiring and informative, or simply consist of brainstorming sessions. You might  consider having a trained business coach facilitating the discussions. There are many online tools available for real-time document sharing that might help teams that are geographically separated to still have intense cooperation.

Combination of ideas

Once the ideas are in, choose the best ones and then consider whether they can be combined to create an even greater idea. Often, strong ideas will be complementary to one another and will join well to create an even better result. As you know, the whole result can be bigger than its individual parts. And for this combination to work well, you need representatives of all parties involved in the process, because they for sure have ideas that people from other departments could not come up with. Business coaches may be useful here for making sure that all the angles of innovative aspect are covered.

Evaluation of innovation

This is an important and yet all too frequently overlooked aspect of the innovation management process. When the best ideas have been combined, fine-tuned, and polished, it is time to subject them to evaluation based on peer reviews. This helps to ensure that any ideas that have a promising veneer but that are poorly thought out will be identified before resources, funding and time have been poured into them. It also helps to select the ideas with the greatest potential from among several that appear equally capable of being successful. It is cheap to change your innovation at this stage compared to later stages. Each step you take forward will cost you more…

Testing the ideas

Once the ideas with the greatest potential have been identified, they can be tested so that they can be better developed. One of the most common means of testing a product or service idea is to create a prototype or test group. This allows the team, as well as customers and investors to have a better look at how the product will function and what changes can be made to it so that it will be even further improved. Make sure that the product or service not only raises interest but is able to generate orders also. If people say that they are interested in it, then ask them if they give you the order right away.

Execution of innovation implementation

The ideas that survive the testing process can be further developed and altered until they are ready to be executed as a part of the business offerings. The execution of implementation is a step that is unique to your business and, unless your new product causes you to have to drastically alter the typical way that your go-to-market strategy functions, then this part of the innovation management process should be relatively commonplace in your organization. It should be easier for you to move from testing to execution if you were able to generate orders already in testing phase.

Assessment of innovation life-cycle

After the execution of an idea, its implementation needs to be carefully monitored and assessed in terms of a number of milestones that should be set. Should a milestone not be reached, then changes will need to be made or the idea will need to be shut down. Remember to keep always customer in your mind also in execution phase and design your measuring systems so that they measure added value for the customer (you get what you measure and customers weight you based on that!).

The next step in the process is simply to start again, always finding new needs, inspiration, solutions and taking them through the cycle until they can be offered by your company. Here are some reflective questions that you can use to evaluate innovation management process in your organization:

Change strategies are not a new discussion topic, but still they keep people talking about what are the most effective change strategies available and how are they best deployed.  Thurley and Wirdenius identified some key advantages and disadvantages of change management already in 1973, which was summarized by Lockitt and 3T Productions Ltd. (2004) as follows:

Directive change strategy. This strategy highlights the manager’s right to manage change and the use of authority to impose change with little or no involvement of other people. This approach may lead to valuable information and ideas being missed and there is usually strong resentment from staff when changes are imposed rather than discussed and agreed.

Expert change strategy. This approach sees the management of change as a problem solving process that needs to be resolved by an ‘expert’. This approach is mainly applied to more technical problems and will normally be led by a specialist project team or senior manager. There is likely to be little involvement with those affected by the change.

Negotiated change strategy. This approach highlights the willingness on the part of senior managers to negotiate and bargain in order to effect change. Senior managers must also accept that adjustments and concessions may need to be made in order to implement change. This approach acknowledges that those affected by change have the right to have a say in what changes are made, how they are implemented and the expected outcomes.

Educative change strategy. This approach involves changing people’s values and beliefs in order for them to fully support the changes being made and move toward the development of a shared set of organizational values that individuals are willing, and able to support. A mixture of activities will be used: education, persuasion, training and selection, led by consultants, specialists and in-house experts.

Participative change strategy. This strategy stresses the full involvement of all of those involved, and affected by, the anticipated changes. Although driven by senior managers the process will be less management dominated and driven more by groups or individuals within the organization. The views of all will be taken into account before changes are made. Outside consultants and experts can be used to facilitate the process but they will not make any decisions as to the outcomes.

Which one is the best and how is that change strategy deployed?

Well, you might want to ask yourself, which advantages and disadvantages do you want to have? It is quite clear that in this imperfect world there is no perfect change strategy available. However, the participative change strategy seems quite compelling especially because some of the disadvantages found by Thurley and Wirdenius can be overcome with recent methods such as the CEM Method. The benefits of this approach are that any changes made are more likely to be supported due to the involvement of all those affected, the commitment of individuals and groups within the organization will increase as those individuals and groups feel ownership over the changes being implemented. The organization and individuals also have the opportunity to learn from this experience and will know more about the organization and how it functions, thus increasing their skills, knowledge and effectiveness to the organization.

Get Janne Ohtonen's latest BPM book for free at http://addvalueto.me/download-a-free-process-leadership-book/