What does a completed SCO Map look like? Here is one example:
If you understand SCO Maps in their original 2006 form you will also notice the improvedcapacity for iteration. In fact mature Outside In organizations will have undertaken two or perhaps three cycles of analysis to arrive at a completed understanding of customer needs.
In this example the one liner is “Improving Quality of Life”.
So circle back and prepare your own SCO Map (we also call the iterative diagram a SCO Revolution to explain the need for further refinement beyond the first cut).
Test it with colleagues and don’t be surprised if you find your understanding of customers needs is totally transformed for the better.
5. And now we are ready to establish the real Successful Customer Outcome (SCO) as a set of statements of intent with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) objectives. There is no room for management weasel words such as fast, efficient, effective, timely and the like. Here we get specific and develop metrics that will tell us how well we are delivering the SCO. Having identified the Statements of Intent and the associated measures we are ready to summarize the complete SCO Map.
What is the one liner that describes this SCO?
6. The one liner may even sometimes be summarized as one word. Also we are now bordering on the territory of Strategy as the articulation of the SCO Map should link directly with the organization Mission and Vision. In mature Outside In organizations the SCO Maps link with customer categories and we develop a clear line of sight from every single task and activity right through to the organization objectives. That line of sight is a tangible and objective linkage that confirms everything we are doing is aligned with corporate goals and objectives.
So you have the customer and their expectations understood. What about the process the customer thinks they are involved with?
3. What Process does the Customer think they are involved with? Challenge yourself with this one. It isn’t the process we, as an organisation, think the customer is involved with. You need to look at this Outside In.
If you, as a customer have twanged your car it isn’t the claims process, the assessment process or the evaluation process. It is much more likely to be “getting back on the road as soon as possible”. How much of what you are doing contributes to that? Are you busy processing claims, counting them, improving the efficiency of processing claims and minimizing the risk. Honestly the customer doesn’t give a stuff about that. They just want to be back on the road.
4. What do we do that Impacts Customer Success? All the stuff we do as organizations in ensuring has been developed over time to minimize risk, improve effectiveness and delivery the required service at the lowest cost.Along the way we have introduced rules and controls to ensure we deliver those objectives. Thinks about it in your company. Do you have checkers checking checkers? Are the unwieldy procedure manuals, written tot the latest so called Service Level Agreement standards? In our likelihood you will have things that directly impact customer success. Dumb rules, procedures from the past and checks and balances no longer required.
So how can we construct a Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO)? Download the flashcard at the end of this review.
There are six questions we should ask ourselves, stakeholders and customers.
At the most fundamental level:
1. Who is the customer?
Yes, as an organization, we have to make the choice. We can’t sit back and wait for customers to find us we need to find them. Who are they? What value can they add to our business? Do we actually have customers we do not want? It is an interesting discussion which should put us in charge of the choice. After all these days not everyone can be our customer!
2. What is the Customers Current Expectation?
Not a small question. Have you created an expectation – either consciously or worse, inadvertently. How can you find out? Ask the customer!
Now the qualification to this when the customer answers is… did you know that?
How much of what you are currently doing aligns with the customer expectation?
Tomorrow we will explore the Process the Customer thinks they are involved with?
At the height of the Industrial Age we didn’t have to do the right things, we just needed to do things. Commercial success resulted for many who were able to organize a business and produce goods.
As the Industrial Age gave way in the 1960’s to the Information Age competition started increasing. It was no longer good enough to do things, we had to do things right. This was the genesis of the management approaches (Industrial Engineering, TQM, Porter’s Value Chain, Management by Objective, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, Lean, etc.) in wide practice today.
However you won’t find these approaches at the heart of most successful companies in the 21st Century because we’ve now moved past these inside-out management techniques.
We are now in a Customer-Driven Economy and the only way to excel here is through outside-in techniques that lead with the customer. Succeeding in the Customer-Driven Economy comes from doing the right things, and those right things are in fact Successful Customer Outcomes.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” ― Isaac Newton,
We should all have mentors. People who have taught us the fundamental values of life, its meaning and its ways. Of course many of us will look directly to our parents and siblings for they give us the very structure and meaning to our early learning. Beyond that we all come into contact, sometimes without knowing, of great minds and inspirational folks.
Steve Andreas and Steve Towers, Colorado 2005
I have been privileged in my life to meet and spend time with truly extraordinary (and to me mind blowing people) in many walks of life, personal, business, family and trusted friends.
Today I want to link you with and share the thoughts of someone who I read, watched and subsequently met. An unsung hero to many he inspires us daily and I would say he his responsible for many of my thoughts and teachings on Successful Customer Outcomes and Outside In.
If you are looking for that extra insight, that thing that can move your soul I can heartily recommend Steve’s work. You will find personal and spiritual guidance that hopefully, like me, provides you with a constant source of ah-ah moments and helps you with others. Enjoy.
This is lifted directly from Steve’s blog – you can link to the full article here and after the introduction.
Oh, and PS. – for client read also organization!
Client Intervention Planning Exercise
Many approaches to therapy are purely, or mostly, reactive. The classic example is Freud’s analytic method of sitting behind the couch out of sight of the client, quietly listening, and only occasionally making interpretations about what the client says. Carl Rogers listened and reflected back the words and feelings that clients expressed, in what was called “non-directive listening,” or “active listening.” In many other current approaches, the therapist allows the client to talk freely, and responds to what they say. These approaches usually result in a wandering dialogue that may have little relevance to the client’s outcome — what Fritz Perls often called “free dissociation.”
However, master therapists such as Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir were very, very active in interrupting the client’s problem trance state. And they used injunctive language — “Do this,” “Try this” — to elicit alternate states and understandings that were more useful. Erickson used overt hypnosis to create alternate realities, while Satir used her personal expressiveness and role-plays to achieve similar effects without overt hypnosis — and she didn’t like hypnosis. However, an instruction such as, “Get down on your knees to show that you are little,” was a pretty explicit instruction for age regression, a classic hypnotic method. Perls used the “empty chair” to embody troublesome people and events from the client’s past, evoking not only age regression, but what is supposedly one of the most difficult of hypnotic phenomena, positive hallucination, simply by saying, “Put your mother in the chair; what would she say?”
These therapists also deliberately planned the sequence of what they expected to do in a session to reach the client’s outcome, while at the same time respecting, utilizing, and responding to whatever the client did in the session.
In this article I want to present a description of what a client presented to a therapist, ask you to pause to consider what you might do, and make a “treatment plan” outline of what you would do with him. In a recent article in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine, “Living with the Devil You Know,” (January/February 2013) you can link to the full article here
I never cease to be amazed by the self-styled experts in Business Process Management (BPM) who want to tell me what we really meant.
And depending on whether you are a vendor of software, a consultant or just somebody trying to get on with improving processes determines how you describe BPM. Back during the genesis we stated “BPM is a new management philosophy to reorganize the work of a business to better achieve successful outcomes” (BP Groups 3rd Annual Conference, Edinburgh in 1990’s). Some of you will recognize a certain Derek Miers (left, now with Forrester) who chaired that conference.
Needless to say that description of BPM holds true. In fact technology can be regarded just as the 21st C. pen and paper, and while it contributes to BPM it doesn’t of itself create success. As part of the ongoing series of Certified Process Professional program we have created a series of short videos, the one here is Business Process Management – an Overview. Enjoy.
