How do you align the customer experience with process improvement?
I am looking for contributors who can write on how to align the customer experience with process improvement. I am interested in your best practices. What tools are you employing to create this alignment, i.e. VOC, NPS, root cause analysis, etc.?
Answers (10)
Gauravi P.
Senior banking executive with US and international experience in improving customer experience while reducing unit cost
Aligning customer experience with process improvement is fairly easy.
1. Identify your customer's pain points through internal metrics and customer surveys.
2. Identify processes that contribute to the pain.
Now when you improve that process, you will also improve customer experience.
Peter G.
Operations Management, Sales Management, International, welcome to my profile..
Best Answers in: Organizational Development (5), Personnel Policies (3), Change Management (3), Sales Techniques (2), Labor Relations (2), Air Travel (1), Mentoring (1), Mergers and Acquisitions (1), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Business Development (1), Customer Relationship Management (1), Business Analytics (1), Project Management (1), Personal Investing (1)
You could commit to best customer experience by measuring and improving ‘quality and time’
- of response to every customer query-.
Measure should be straight forward enough with most CRM systems. Enhancing customer experience could be achieved through additional value offerings. Every process that improves quality and time of response will be an alignment/improvement to best customer experience.
Arthur G.
Independent Quality Management Professional
Best Answers in: Manufacturing (1), Quality Management and Standards (1), Supply Chain Management (1)
It starts with top management showing leadership. Start with a well thought-out quality policy that addresses customer focus and satisfaction. Include a statement supporting strong comittment to continual improvement. From there, ensuring success requires management support, staff training, measurement and accountability, etc.
Giovanni D.
360° hands-on digital entrepreneur & veteran
Best Answers in: Green Business (4), Corporate Governance (2), Customer Service (1), Mentoring (1), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Public Relations (1), Business Analytics (1), Branding (1), Market Research and Definition (1)
Involve your customer into the process redesign
Neelsen C.
Senior Director at Solaria Corporation
Best Answers in: Change Management (1), Packaging and Labeling (1)
Hi Genna,
I will answer this from a manufacturing perspective.
For large corporations where there are multiple customers..the focus is maintained by a technical lead...he is called many names today...TPM (technical program manager), CFE (Customer focus engineer), Manufacturing excellence.
The main task is for a manager level person (usually with deep engineering bakground) to watch over the indices of the Key Result Areas (KRA) of the customer. This is also known as the VOC (Voice of the customer). He drives meeting and act as lead to help the operations head manage the individual account. The problem is, in large corporations..the smaller customer indices may be very bad, but the results is diluted in the overall results...leading to customer satisfaction issue. The TPM helps bring focus and attention to grow a specific account...by systematic measurement and feedback method, and collaboration with the factory and customer.
The VOC is linked up to the line process improvement/control via the VOP (Voice of the process). VOP is your line monitoring data.....variable and attribute. Variable can be temperature, pressure, force...etc. Attribute can inspection or sampling information. Out of control conditions are monitored via control charts (Automated SPC or manual graphs). The process is brought back into control using OCAP (out of control activity plan)...this is basically a defect based flow chart that instructs the operator on what to adjust or decision to take.
On the shop floor, the occurence of OCAP trigger is monitored each month to look for recurring issues. These are relayed to the Preventive maintenance team to identify machine wear or design loopholes needing modifications.
Independent line audits are also popular these...as factory in world class environment do not wait anymore for customer audits. Manufacturing Self Audits are done either by an operator against a checklist......with her peers. It also serve as a continuous training tool. The checklist is linked up to customer hot buttons...and updated on quarterly basis.
Factories today measured themselves against the overall indices...as well as KRA for individual customer account.
Hope this provides an overview of how things are linked together.
BR
Neelsen Co
Shaun S.
Founder of Capable People (UK & USA), Director at Capable People (Africa)
Best Answers in: Quality Management and Standards (10), Change Management (2), Organizational Development (2), Ethics (2), Mentoring (1), Supply Chain Management (1), Databases (1)
I'm not sure I'd agree that involving the customer in process design is always either practical or desirable. From a customer satisfaction point of view it is quite important that you get the product or service attributes "right" and for that reason it is important to make sure you get those points of contact or "moments of truth" working well - and the best way to measure that is to ask
However, the actual process that delivers the product or service, frankly, is YOUR business. The customer generally won't care HOW you get it right (or wrong) and, more to the point, they will rarely have the technical competence to get involved in process matters - this is particularly true if the product is for the wider general public market
The key issue is knowing what your order of priorities for improvement should be. There may be, say, twenty different ways that you can make the process better or faster or cheaper, but which "improvement" is going to matter most to the customer? This is important, otherwise you can spend a lot of time and effort "improving" things that the customer could not care less about
So to summarise, at the front end there has to be some cost/benefit analysis. Not everything matters
Clarification added July 20, 2009:
Just to clarify my answer, you did ask about aligning the customer experience with PROCESS design didn't you Genna? I do note that some contributors have suggested customer involvement, but in my experience this involvement can usually only be practically applied to PRODUCT design. Indeed, my experience of QFD (as suggested by T Anand) is itself focussed on product rather than process attributes. If it was inded your intention to look at the broader aspects of product attributes, then you may also want to research Kansei Engineering
So on a fundamental point, you will need to be clear whether you're looking at aligning the customer experience with product or process design, because they are not the same thing at all, and can't be treated as though they are
Anand T.
Co-Founder, CEO & Managing Director at Knewron
Best Answers in: Education and Schools (1), Manufacturing (1), Incorporation (1)
Hi Genna,
There could be many ways to align customer experience with process improvement.
As Giovanni said, involving customers during product design is one of the essential thing. At times it may seem impracticle to do so, however, it is necessary and hence one must find some way to meet that necessity. During my earlier stint with consumer electronics field, I personally have lead many projects of that kind. There we used QFD (Quality Function Deployment) as tool to understand customer requirements and to map expected experience by customer. This tool helped us in many ways. We learned - what to focus and what not to during process execution. QFD simply helps us in looking thigs from customer point of view. From manufacturer / business point of something might seem important which may not have any relevance to customer. This gap of perspectives makes customer experience sour, many a times.
Another method we use these days is NPS. This gives clearcut idea of customer experience with minimal questions to them.
Gemba studies that are done at PoS (Point of Sales) do give very good input about customer's experience. Particularly anonymous studies; which are done without having customer known who you are.
Once these studies are done and finding are available, we can discuss within teams to come up with viable and effective answer to concerns raised by customer. We can also map what to focus and what not to. Then we can get on to do process improvements which definately will have direct impact on customer experience.
Hope this helps.
...Anand
Bruce B.
Government Industry and Smarter Cities Market Manager, Dynamic strategist for Tech, Industry and Business Convergence.
Best Answers in: Advertising (1)
I can speak from my experience at GE (Six Sigma) as well as IBM (CRM Consultant). What many approaches leave vague is the connection between potential investments (projects/services) and how the customer values them (How do I interpret VOC?). It is one thing to say "outside in" but quite often we fix the wrong things. This is where a page from the product management playbook is warranted. There are many quantitative and qualitative tools and approaches that come from this high-stakes function. A few that I have seen for grouping needs are cluster analysis, pairwise comparison, etc. The basic Kano charts and 2X2 are also good, but the old adage "Garbage In, Garbage Out" does apply. So basically, being able to effective group and translate the customers needs into simple areas where solutions can be defined is key, as well as being able ot truly place a value on those items (dialogue, analysis) is also important. I have been called in as a consultant many times when the "loudest voice in the room" ruled the requirements and the solutions delivered were not as valuable to the customer as they were anecdotally believed to be. I would also read "Blue Ocean Strategy" for ideas on approach (not too detailed unfortunately). Some links below you might find helpful.
Links:
Process improvement is undertaken by an organization for the purpose of realizing benefits that will ultimately impact a customer’s bottom line goal.
Alignment of customer experience with the improvement takes a back seat to the primary goal for which the improvement is being undertaken. Not that it is to be ignored, but, recognize that the process improvement must deliver the value for which it is being undertaken to the customer first.
Given that, it is important to articulate that impact since it could potentially be included by the customer as part of the value of the process improvement. If so, the conventional tools can be used to elicit the requirement for the alignment of customer experience: stakeholder analysis (to determine all customers), VOC (to determine customer desires and priority), maybe QFD (to help the prioritization process for the improvements).
first use any tool to collect VOC (Surveys, focus group, interviews,..) then use QFD to translate their requirements into measurable process improvent factors in your business
