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Gaining Advantage by Combining Journeys and Processes

Blog: Jim Sinur

Processes have been a key contributor to operational excellence for decades and continues to progress with the addition of more automation, but the real secret to business success is to employ customer journey practices for a balanced set of out comes between customer and organizational outcomes. Let’s look at the advantages of aiming for customer excellence as a means to organizational progress in the digital age and beyond.  If you want to register for one of the first 300 copies of  a new book on customer excellence click here.


The Progress of Processes for Operational Excellence: 

The use of process for operational excellence is well known, documented and continues to progress with the addition of additional automation leveraging technologies like RPA, Process Mining and AI. This allows organizations to visualize results and continually optimize for cost savings or efficiency purposes. The complaint of this approach has been that these processes are not friendly and are quite often complex. To that end, organizations have been trying to make processes friendlier and less onerous. All of this is good, but will be  limiting over time as your competition heats up with even more enticing approaches that appeal to customers.

The Progress of Customer Journeys for Satisfaction and Loyalty:

The use of customer journeys has been emerging for the past several years because of new models in industries that have tried to put the customer first. The assumption here is that a great customer journey that takes penalization into account and puts the pressure on the business and business systems will deliver better loyalty and new customers. This desire for customer excellence first will make the customer outcomes as important or more important that the business goals at critical points inf the journey. In fact the journey disciplines are even reaching to employee and partner journeys in the most enlightened organizations.

The Power of Combining Both:

While most organizations are not willing to change their business models to be completely customer driven, the gap between ugly system processes and personalized an pleasing customer journeys is starting to narrow. Many organizations are starting to measure existing journeys and model target journeys figure out a way to bridge a great journey with existing processes. Adding chat bots and digital assistants in one approach for customer ease, but if your organizational silos still have to be managed by your customers, there is little gain. Taking your journey customer beyond the walls of your specific organization is the real way to come up with appealing journeys.               

Net; Net: 

There are real world examples of combining process and journeys. There are pragmatic front ending efforts like you see with “Rocket Mortgage” and Amazon. There are examples of complete rethinking of the journeys as exhibited by Uber and Lyft.  We even see big banks rethinking their experiences for attracting new customers. When many companies are able to personalize experiences while still keeping operational excellence goals in tact, we know we have arrived. When new and innovative journeys that span multiple organizations become the norm, we will finally relax.

If you want to register for one of the first 300 copies of  a new book on customer excellence click here.

Co-authored by Jim Sinur, Gero Decker & Mark McGregor

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