This interview hosted by Adam Toporek with author Daniel Newman (CEO of MillennialCEO.com) has several interesting reflections with a few home truths in less than 5 minutes.
The full video interview can be reviewed at http://youtu.be/DkwwPSjadyA
“The focus of projects and the people inside organizations and enterprises is changing,” explains Steve Towers, CEO and founder of the BP Group. “The dialogue is less about how skilled you are at a particular technique but how is what you’re doing really going to contribute to achieving those deliverables which are going to move the metric on the customer satisfaction Net Promoter Score?”
In this PEX Network interview, Towers explains why he sees customer-orientation as a growing trend within process excellence and the skills and capabilities required to achieve it.
Everything should be oriented towards your customer!
PEX Network: What do you see as some of the key trends that emerging this year within Process Excellence?
Steve Towers: The focus in the enterprise is now more customer-oriented. There’s much more information out there now, so organizations are doing things like Net Promoter Score and using more advanced ideas arising from Net Promoter Score.
This means that the focus of projects and the people inside organizations and enterprises is changing. The dialogue is less about how skilled you are at a particular technique but how is what you’re doing really going to contribute to achieving those deliverables which are going to move the metric on the customer satisfaction Net Promoter Score? That’s a big trend.
The way I see that playing out, is that if, for instance, you bumped into the CEO and you have that 30 second elevator test. He or she is less interested now in how you’ve come in on time, to budget and achieved the deliverables.
Instead, they’re much more interested in how is what you’re doing going to contribute to our public delivery? And, more particularly, some of the challenges that they’re facing and being beaten up about, how’s that going to resonate out in the market, generally – how’s it going to move the marker for us?
PEX Network: Is there also an element of technology becoming much more important within the Process Excellence community?
Steve Towers: Being around as long as I have, you’ve seen technology dealt with in many different ways. What we’re seeing now is less discussion about technology, and more discussion about capability.
We’ve all seen on the internet that picture of the three-month-old child playing with the iPad, and I think the technology has moved in that direction: it’s less about educating people in the use of technology, and more what can technology provide?
As a consequence, some of the things that organizations are doing now, like embracing mobile platforms, are not about massive infrastructure investment. Instead, they’re about the utilization of the existing things that we’ve already got, in combination with the smart phone idea, so that people can access the systems.
That means they can become much more self-service oriented; they can do much more for themselves, as consumers who have much more information than they ever had before. So, the technology dialogue isn’t so much about: how do we build a massive enterprise system, it’s much more about: how do we provide the capability at the point of customer contact?
PEX Network: Now, going back to that focus on customer outcomes and improving customer satisfaction, what do you think is really driving that trend?
Steve Towers: I think that, at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game: you’re only as good as your last customer interaction. We all know the negative side effects of Twitter, and how something can explode.
However, in the same sort of way, good news travels just as fast as bad news. So people who are really performing well create an expectation. We can see that, for instance, in the airline industry, where progressive organizations very much know that the last interaction you had on the airline is going to dictate how many people you tell about that, but not only how many people you tell about, who you share that with in family and friends and where you’re going to put your business in the future.
The customer outcome is very important, and, of course, that’s very much allied with this digital capability as being able to provide at the point of contact.
There are some horror stories, though. For instance, I was hearing a story the other day about one particular US airline who were saying they’d done a customer survey, and the customer survey said people didn’t want in-seat films in four, five-hour flights across the US. Well, who on earth did they ask that question? Who said that’s what they wanted?
Whereas the smart organizations, which are much more focused around customer outcomes, actually go and figure out what the customers need, even when customers don’t know they need it themselves. For instance, when you sit down on, say, a WestJet flight, it’s a, really, quite different experience from some of those older, more classic, organizations that are still asking, what do you want?
PEX Network: How, in Process Excellence, then, do we need to shift our thinking in order to respond to those new emerging trends?
Steve Towers: I think there’s a big mind-shift underway, and we can very ably see that with those people who are involved with the Process Excellence community who embrace this idea of customer outcomes. They’re aligning their work to deliver customer outcomes, as opposed to those people who are still saying, well, what we did in the past in terms of our approach – whether it’s Six Sigma Lean, or BPM – we just need to try harder.
Trying harder isn’t the solution anymore, it’s about getting smart at what we do. You don’t need to embrace every aspect of the training that goes with process excellence, but instead the specific things that are related to your organization and the customer outcomes you’re trying to deliver.
For process excellence professionals, the challenge is to no longer be looking at the past and learning what people did, but more trying to anticipate the future, and get themselves in a position where they can really help their organizations at a day to day, tactical level, but more importantly, contribute those tactical-level approaches towards a strategic delivery – which is better successful customer outcomes.
PEX Network: Looking towards that future that you just mentioned, what are some of the skills and capabilities that you think process practitioners will have to have in order to make that a reality?
Steve Towers: We’ve always thought that we’ve got a list of techniques, and if we learn those techniques, we get a tick in the box and we’re qualified. That’s just a question of how many techniques you have acquired that essentially predicates your role. However the people who are really successful with Process Excellence at the moment are individuals in their organizations who have a capability which can embrace both a strategic level of thinking – where is the organization going, and how are we going to get there – and, in a day to day context, how the projects that we’re working on contribute to that higher level objective.
So this means connecting the dots between the day to day tactical things that we’re doing to improve business and project delivery, to the actual strategic outcome of the organization.
Not all people can have that skill set – some people are very good at the tactics, others are good at strategy. But the really good Process Excellence people, those people who get qualified, understand it’s about being able to connect the dots.
Outside-In is clearly the way for the worlds top companies and reflecting on the commentary by Hank Barnes in “Customer Experience Challenges: Why Maintaining an Outside-in Approach is Tougher than it Seems” the answer as to why the masses don’t get it is probably very simply the herd instinct.
For instance in 1969 astronomer J. Donal Fernie made an observation many of us will understand. In writing about the decades it took his fellow
professionals to spot a fundamental error.. “the definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers has yet to be written, but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction
across the plain. At a given signal from the leader we whirl about, and, with equally firm determination, thunder off in quite a different direction, still in tight parallel formation”
We of course have our own immediate examples. What about the world leading
Insurance Company waiting eight days for ink to dry on parchment paper
before sending out a new policy? Or the removal business that stuck with a
35 mile rule limit just in case the horse died? What about suggesting people
visiting the UK from ‘abroad’ should practice driving on the left before
they came if they weren’t used to it (to reduce the accidents on UK roads).
Yup there are lots of antelopes out there.
Will you meet any tomorrow? And will you be running with the herd?
“Not everything old is bad and antiquated and not everything new is shiny and good. The real secret to success is to combine the best of both.” Rene Carayol, Senior Executive & Former Board Member for Pepsi, Marks & Spencer, IPC Media & The Inland Revenue.
The world’s leading companies have come to realize that only when their customers are successful, will they be successful. In pursuit of their market leadership not only they need to spend time to look inside their business to know how things are getting done but also look outward to get deep understanding of their customers.
Process has indeed come a long way from it humble routes amidst the early industrial revolution and Adam Smiths ‘Wealth of Nations’.
One of the first people to describe process was Smith who in 1776 describes a new way for process in an English pin factory. He outlines the production methods and created one of the first objective and measurable enterprise process designs. The consequence of ‘labour division’ in Smith’s example resulted in the same number of workers making 240 times as many pins as they had been before the introduction of his innovation.
Adam Smith participated in a revolution that transformed the planet. He lived at a time when the confluence of factors, political change, emergence of the New World, industrialization and a new optimism that the world could move from the shackles of the past.
In heralding a movement that developed into Scientific Management the foundation was laid that established a way of working that has survived and thrived for 200 years.
And yet now, more than ever, is a time to perhaps take a careful glance back to the past to guide the way for not only surviving the current economic turmoil but to also prepare us to thrive in the seismic shifts of the 21st century ‘new world’ order where the customer has become central to everything we do.
Leading global corporations are now evolving their tried and tested approaches into methods suited to the changed challenges of customer promiscuity, globalization, IT innovation and the Prosumer. That is the essence of what we call Outside-In.
“The Customer Experience is the Process”
Outside-In can really be summarized in the statement that “the customer experience is the process”. We can no longer just look within our organization boundary to create a sustainable competitive advantage. We have to extend our scope and embrace a broader view of optimizing process by understanding, managing and developing customer expectations and the associated experience. We need to articulate Successful Customer Outcomes and let those guide our product and service development as we move beyond the limiting scope of silo pyramidal based left to right thinking.
In 2006 BP Group Research identified the ‘Evolution of Approaches’ and how steps can be taken to grow Lean Six Sigma’s influence and success into a strategic Outside-In toolkit. In fact the last 4 years are seeing the fruition of these advances with recent Best in Class Award winners PolyOne, a dyed in the wool Lean outfit, advancing their stock price six fold in 18 months on the back of radical and innovative changes across its customer experience.
The Death knell for BPR, TQM, Lean and Six Sigma?
Some see Outside-In as the death knell for approaches developed during the late 20th century. Not so as that narrow and simplistic view does not acknowledge the stepping stones available to embrace the new customer centric order. In fact the foundations of our futures are always laid on the learnings of the past with those innovators who recognize the need to evolve leading that charge.
Victory will go to the brave who seize the moment and push forward their approaches into the brave new world of Outside-In.
The sector leaders have set a precedent – can you embrace the challenge?
You can access and download the resources that will provide an overview of the value of becoming scientific about the Customer Experience. Meanwhile Customer Experience Mapping gets a kick in the pants as we integrate ABACUS (the BPGroup toolkit) to demonstrate a generic process across several channels.
Customers have become sophisticated, promiscuous, rebellious, choosey and have access to more information than ever before. In fact they know more about your products and services than you do!
Make real the mantra “the customer experience is the process” and let’s get scientific about CX. Join with us as we explore this virgin territory on the way to gaining a true and real understanding of CX across all walks of life. Beyond process and performance we will seek collaboration and turn thoughts into leadership, dreams into action and learning into experience.
To join our tribe and follow us as we launch CX scientifically 🙂 <Enter your email on the left>
Do you measure people with ‘dumb’ metrics – activities and outputs, or with Outside In measures of results and outcomes? If Balanced Scorecards (BSC) and Strategy Maps fail it is largely as a consequence of having dumb metrics in there – activities and outputs.
So how can we measure the right things and encourage success? Instead of people rushing to deal with a call (because all calls must be less than 2 minutes) how do we measure the meeting of a customer need – effective resolution of a query? Using the appropriate process and performance metrics within an articulated Enterprise Architecture is a good starting point. This presentation leads us to the how of that. Enjoy.
