The Road to Hell is Paved with good intentions

This series of commentary is addressing the challenges faced by Certified Process Professionals® as they progress their organisations Outside-In.

We start with what is now a classic denial strategy and will progress over the coming weeks to review TEN (sometimes deliberate) misconceptions that seek to stop you on your journey to Successful Customer Outcomes.

‘The company has to get its own processes right first’.

In the context of Outside-In this is clearly a major mistake. As the Southwest Airlines and Apple examples demonstrate you fix the internal processes by understanding and acting on “the Customer Experience is the process”. In doing so eveything changes internally to better align to successful customer outcomes. That reduces complexity, removes costs, improves service and grows revenue.

Now if you brief is ‘in the box’ and does not yet extend to the Customer Experience the approach should be around optimisation through understanding the causes of work – moments of truth, breakpoints and business rules. Even though this is at best sub optimisation (recall the US banks Customer query process) it will take you to a much better place with significant performance improvements as you highlight and eradicate the ‘dumb stuff’.

Often times this has to be the starting point as, by definition, the way inside-out works is by the sub division of labour. You can only see the immediate walls around you and looking beyond maybe beyond your brief. Do not lose heart. Go with Optimisation (and if necessary stealth) as you introduce through existing projects the concepts of moments of truth, breakpoints and business rules. You will catch the eye of those responsible for the numbers as the changes you introduce go way beyond the traditional expectations.

Ciao, Steve

Next week… Changing the picture ‘My job doesn’t really involve the end customer. But I do have a mass of internal customers!’