Customer Excellence will bring new technologies, new challenges and new opportunities, so organizations will have to get ahead of this trend. To this end I am happy to announce a new customer excellence collaboration with Gero Decker and Mark McGregor which will lead to a new body of work that brings together a new Customer Excellence program, a new framework for change, new customer excellence journeys, new methods, and new combinations for technologies under new ownership approaches. The result is different thinking when it comes to technology and projects. If you want to register to one of the free copies, click here

  

Technology is no longer just the domain of special teams or something hiding in the basement. The technology lines have blurred, so much so that in many cases technology and product are now the same things. Cars that diagnose themselves and schedule dealer visits, or the banking that you expect to do via your smartphone, lights that know when to turn themselves on and off. These are not just exciting fun technologies. These are technologies that are completely changing our organizations and the relationships with the people and processes inside them. Twenty years ago, when BPM came along, it was still seen as a means to automate processes in the back-office, gradually moving more into the front-office, now it potentially has to branch out to survive. For today, the processes that historically BPM, Workflow or even ERP automated, are more fragmented, more embedded and even less visible than before.

Don’t be surprised to see orchestration used even more widely. The process will become the only way to serve the customer in a flexible manner at the scale you need. But, process, in order to act as the orchestrator or conductor, needs to live outside the technologies it is working with. The speed of technological change means that the underlying technologies might be replaced every two years. Think RPA and robots, it is highly unlikely that the robots you use tomorrow will be the ones you bought already. However, the processes they support may still be the same.

There will be new business approaches and new journeys to bust silos while taking an outside-in approach to orchestrating the jungle of automation organizations currently have to manage localized excellence. Organizations will be charged with removing friction from customers and laying it on technology combinations that deliver customer outcomes while delivering automation savings for the bottom line. These changes will be disruptive but absolutely necessary to thrive in the future.

Organizations need to get ahead of and ride the Customer Excellence wave or be struggling to stay afloat. As we look at the market today, no vendor has a complete offering to address the full requirements of Customer Excellence. In future blogs we will look at which pieces different vendors address and discuss where we think the complete Customer Excellence come from, vendors building out from their base or creating best of breed platforms.