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.
Aside from the product placement this is about removing those pesky IVR’s forever. Great illustrative video of a lousy (and frequent) poor customer experience.
James Dodkins, BP Group Executive Coach and CCO, takes us through a simple example of creating the SCORe, an initial stage in the CEMMethod(tm).
BP Group Certified Process Professionals are coached in the approach which uncovers customer needs (even when they don’t know themselves!). For the latest courses across UK, South Africa, USA, UAE, Australia and Singapore see http://www.bpgroup.org and join 80,000 others worldwide.
In many countries, the phrase public service is considered something of ananachronism. At all levels of government and government led services, customers perceive that overall they get a raw deal when compared to the levels of service they now regularly expect from privately held organizations. In this article we will explore how Customer Age thinking and he concepts of Successful Customer Outcomes and Next Practice are helping to change that perception and lead to increased efficiency in public services around the globe.
With regard to the issues of local, regional, or national government we firstly need to remember that in a democracy government is of the people, by the people, with the will of the people. As governments increasingly raise taxes and start to play a more active role in the everyday lives of people there is a real risk that if they do not focus on their ³customer² and what the customer wants, that they might lose that will. So for government departments at all levels there needs to be very clear on who the customer is and what they want. In this they are no different from a private enterprise, customers do not care about your internal bureaucracy or your policies and procedures, they do care about being able to access your services in an efficient manner and know that they are being cared for.
Nobody is suggesting for one moment that you can please everybody. But if those that you are not pleasing are displeased through poor service or overly complicated procedures and policies then they have in most cases good cause to complain. Indeed, employees in the public sector would do well to remember that it is their tax money that is being potentially wasted too! Many people might feel that government and public sector is ³different² and that the same rules cannot apply. To a small extent this may be right, but in the majority of cases fresh thinking can still lead to increased service and efficiency.
Take the case of a police force. While recently working with a regional police department the point was raised, that they are a very different business, and unlike anything in the private sector. This is typical of the inside out thinking that tends to occur in public service. It we look at it from the outside in, the police force could be considered rather like an insurance company. The parallel is quite a simple one. With insurance we pay a monthly or annual premium to a company on the promise that if something goes wrong we can contact them and they will sort it out cars, home, or life. So in the case of the police we pay taxes each month (our premium) so that if something goes wrong we can contact them and they will send someone to help us surely this is just the same, from the customer point of view, as the insurance scenario? The same also of course can be said of the fire and ambulance services. Why then can such services not look at what insurance companies are doing in order to improve service and responsiveness?
As a side issue in another discussion with a different police service the issue of customer became apparent in a different way. In this force they felt that the way they had been organized was to ensure that they provided the best service to their customer, it was just that in their case they saw the criminal as the customer, not the victim! So when identifying your customer you do need to be clear on your purpose in order that you are serving the right customers.
The example of the emergency services given here is a good example of how ³Outside-In² can be applied in the public service and how in looking for new and innovative ways to improve service and increase efficiency the public sector can benefit from looking at how the very best people are handling that situation, regardless of geography or industry sector.
The parallels do not end there though. Those familiar with the Beatles may recall a song from Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (an older but a goody) and a track mentioning 4,000 pot-holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. The song related John Lennon¹s curiosity at how many pot-holes would it take to fill the Albert Hall (a particular large musical venue in central London) and indeed why were there so many holes? Well clearly at that time he had never visited Chicago as they have enough holes to fill the Grand Canyon!
The story of how the Chicago Works Department transformed a moribund public service (fixing said potholes) which typically took 6-8 weeks, involved up to 30 people, and on average cost an incredible $42,000 USD is now becoming legend in BPM parlance.
The full story of the fix will wait for another day however the quantum leap here with Outside-In and Successful Customer Outcomes drew its inspiration from Expedia. Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) would be proud of the right brain thinking which imported Expedia¹ scheduling idea¹ to let citizens define the problem, chose a suitable repair and select a convenient date for the repair team fix from a two screen web based system. Problem fixed. Now on average 4 days, 5 people and $2,000 USD. That still seems a lot (especially for tax payers) for filling a hole but boy is it giant step in the right direction!
Of course we can extend this thinking even further into many walks of public service. Where would you start your Outside-In endeavors?
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.
Process Transformation (PT). What is the meaning of that?
Let’s try three versions:
1.Process exists to be transformed. But when we say transformed how high is the bar? 20%, 30% improvement or more? And what are we measuring when we say PT. Is it elapsed time, touch time or actual real metrics important for business success like cost, revenue and service?
2.Process is a collection of tasks and activities aimed at achieving clearly defined outputs. So PT sets out to turn the existing Tasks and Activities upside-down and completely realign everything towards achieving Successful Customer Outcomes? Really. Or is PT just a fancy name for the latest version of Lean or Six Sigma?
3.Process itself has changed its spots. Someone famous once said “the customer experience is the process”. For those who worship at that alter of process PT represents a means to the end. That is to truly make process subservient to delivering customer success, and as such that embraces incremental and radical ideals.
Those organizations who get it and achieve results others think are magic understand the third point. PT is, at the end of the day, all about delivering Successful Customer Outcomes, consistently without exception.
“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?
Simply put everything an organization does, from the tasks and activities through to strategy should be explicitly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome.
Say you are in the Accident and Emergency at your local hospital? How much of what is actually happening is contributing to the well being of the patients? At a recent family crisis as a visitor I managed my stress by doing a time and motion study (sad I know). Over 48 hours I sampled activity and tasks, and albeit not scientific (it was hardly a controlled environment) it produced an interesting profile:
Sample size 256.
I would suggest an interesting stat in there is the time with the patient (7%).
If we assumed the objective of going through the process (the Successful Customer Outcome) is to make people better how much time is really spent doing that? How much time is spent on tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to that?
All our jobs involve us in tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to the SCO – how many of those could be released to spend more time achieving the desired outcome? It might not be 93% but it is one helluva a lot.In this example we would reduce costs, improve morale of overworked nurses and enhance the customer experience. Who wouldn’t want that?
