I just love this video. The beautiful scenery, the inspiring story and then the call to action. How can this have anything to do with Customer Experience and BPM I here you ask? Watch the video (enjoy) and then ask your self the question “How can I create a Trophic Cascade in my organization?”. (Trophic Cascade – watch the vid and all is revealed very quickly 🙂 *
How do Outside-In companies achieves 20-30% annually sustainable improvement across costs, revenue and service?
If there was a book of secrets featuring Outside-In one chapter would focus on Steve Jobs observation You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology” Watch the 5 minute video to get the perspective.
So what? We can really get to grip with the principle involved here with a couple of ideas. The first looks at the world which sees the organization and its resources as being the key strategic motivator. We have resources (people, systems, structure and so on) that develop products that we then approach the market with and pitch at customer segments. Hopefully gaining market share and establishing customers who buy the product. This model has really been the pervasive approach until this century. Born in the industrial age, updated and upgraded and taught in business schools globally as the way of business. We can represent that idea with this diagram – Inside-Out:
Until the explosion of information brought about by the internet this model worked OK. However with information customers have become choosey, promiscuous, fickle and have immediate and ever changing expectations. The resulting complexity – trying to sell many things to everyone – is the journey to ruin. Go ask Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster and Blackberry how they have fared faced with the prosumer of the 21st century. On the other hand we have a view of the world which starts with the customer experience (ala Apple, Emirates, Zappos, Zara and Virgin) and literally understands and then manages the expectations of the prosumer. This idea does not seek to segment customers by circumstance, but categorizes customers on the basis of need. This picture emerges – Outside-In:
By understanding customer needs, even when they may not know themselves, and developing appropriate products for your chosen categories of customer, the world is a simpler place. Yes you do also need to be flexible and agile to preempt (and for the best create new needs) however the starting point isn’t the product and the market. It is the customer and their needs. Creating the necessary skills and competence to achieve Outside-In and deliver consistently improving results requires this foresight and understanding. The previous approach is as obsolete as the horse and cart is to the electric car. So how can we do this? More on that soon however as a starter you can download a complimentary copy my book “Outside-In The secret of the 21st centuries leading companies” here. Also join us and the global community exploiting the benefits of Outside-In: LinkedIn: BPGroup Facebook: www.facebook.com/BPGtraining Twitter: @stowers@jdodkins Website: www.bpgroup.org More soon as we journey Outside-In. Ciao, Steve
Outside-in approaches create a completely new reality that reshapes how we manage and organize work so much so that functional pyramidal structures become artifacts of the past.
Born in the complexity of the 21st century Outside-In companies believe that all effort in an organization should be centered around the customer and ultimately deliver Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO).
Part of the insight of Outside-In companies is the identification of work that does NOT contribute to the SCO and accordingly may be ‘dumb stuff’ – work that can be eradicated and removed. In doing so Outside-In wins the triple crown of simultaneously reducing costs, enhancing service and growing revenues. Leading practice organizations include Apple, Southwest airlines, Google, Samsung and Zara. In our book “Outside-In – The secret of the 21st century leading companies” we review many examples and lay the foundations for systematic approaches to enable Outside-In thinking and practice by all.
“It is about establishing one guiding principle that goes from the very top down to the smallest branch. Our employees who deal with customers every day understand their needs and do the best for them – this customer-focused DNA needs to run throughout the bank. We need to remember – and then never forget – that the customer is why we are in business. We need to change our behaviour at every level to reflect this simple truth. To move from stability to renewal, we need to first address and then clean up every aspect of how we treat customers.” The Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) CEO Ross McEwan.
He’s been at the helm of RBS, once very briefly the worlds largest bank, for 18 months. Prior to this, he was the group executive for retail banking services for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) for five years. A New Zealander is the man from down under going Outside In?
CBA have certainly transformed and regularly outperform their peers. One of our favoured measures of ongoing success, the triple crown (simultaneously reducing costs, improving service and growing revenues) suggests he has what it takes. 18 months in and we should start to see the results. He can talk the talk, now can he really deliver for RBS. We will let you know next month 🙂
1. Start by identifying the Moments of Truth (customer interactions)that exist across all of your customer experiences (you can create more specific experience maps later).
2. Make a list of all the Moments of Truth (MOT).For each MOT write a description, method of interaction, and customer expectation. We use the Diagnostics dashboard to make sure we turn the MOTs into 15 quantifiable and actionable metrics.
There are three ways to collect and collate this information:
Workshops of all interested people. That includes customers, advisors, employees and management.
Recording of actual experiences. Yes, record the experiences and evaluate afterwards. We use a video technique that identified Moments of Truth with red flashes, Internal Interactions with blue and decision points as green.
Analysis of customer feedback. Review the letters, calls and social network commentary and capture the experiences to gain insights and a better understanding.
3. Document the learning and produce a visual illustration(process activity maps).
4. Use the maps to identify areas working well and those that need improvement.Focus on the critical MOTs — those crucial interactions that determine whether the experience you are creating delivers the optimum encounter, expectation and emotion.
5. Build a Action Plan to engineer the ABACUS of the customer experience. At each stage identify the relevant MOTs that cover off these elements:
Awareness When and How does the customer become aware of the process, product or service you offer?
Buy-In How and Where does the customer ‘get it’ and become an advocate for the experience?
Acquisition How is the purchase made. Not just a product buy but the actual commitment.
Care Why should the customer care? How do you ensure the trust and commitment is reciprocal and reinforced?
Use How does the product, service work. Has it been designed from the customers perspective (Outside-In)? Ease of use goes beyond efficiency and focuses directly on the actual customer experience.
Share In our always-on world how does Share happen? Is that understood and optimized? Recall the fantastic tale from Canada – Westjet Christmas story[1] with more than 35 million hits on youtube in 3 months. By the way that is more than the population of Canada! That’s good news, but what about capturing the bad news before it becomes a crisis – recall the United Breaks guitar[2] story?
6. Engage the entire organization to undertake the journey to Customer Experience Management.We use the structured CEMMethod™, derived from the work of companies such as Virgin, Disney, Southwest Airlines, Emirate, BMW, Bentley, Zara and many more truly Outside-In enterprises. Whoever and where-ever you are it is directly and immediately useful.
If you are serious about engineering the Customer Experience then let us know (below). We will provide immediate links to videos, resources and an expert community doing this stuff as a way of life.
[1] Westjet Christmas – a terrific example of sharing your values and ethos – http://bit.ly/1habsP2
[2]United Breaks Guitars – how a bad experience turns into a corporate crisis – http://bit.ly/1dmOKaW
There is a saying that the map is not the territory. And yet so many treat their representation of the world as fact and reality. When you draw a process and agree with others that is how it looks just because you may all agree doesn’t make it real. It is just a collective hallucination. It is an abstract of reality.
Does your world always flow top to bottom and left to right, or is it more real than that? KBO, James Dodkins
Do you feel, as a customer, like a nuisance to be endured? You are the disruption to a good days sleep in so many inside-out companies. The fact you pay their salaries is accepted under sufferance and they do the level best to avoid directly dealing with you, locking you into automated lines with interminable messages about how important service is.
These clumsy organizations even go to conferences now for advice on how to avoid dealing with customers; how to market to them in the automated lines and worst of all how to get you repeating your calls over and over. Feels wrong? Yes it should.
Our research suggest the answer is simple for progressive companies. Just answer the phone and talk with your customer.
