Process Mining Camp 2014 — Fireside Chat with Shaun Moran
Process Mining Camp tickets are sold out now and people are coming to Eindhoven from 16 different countries! As a warm-up for camp, we have asked some of the speakers for an up-front interview. Previously, we have already spoken with Frank van Geffen from the Rabobank and with Johan Lammers from the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.
Today, you can read the interview with Shaun Moran. Shaun is the founder of Customer Dimension Analytics and previously was working in various customer experience roles at eBay.
At camp, Shaun will give a workshop on ‘Process mining and customer experience’.
Interview with Shaun
Anne: Hi Shaun, thanks for coming over to Eindhoven for the workshop! You have been working in customer experience management for quite a while now. Which kind of roles have you had there and what exactly should we think of when we are talking about customer processes?
Shaun: Hi Anne, It’s really great to be here again, this is my 2nd Process Mining Camp and I am really looking forward to it. The role I perform can vary from project to project in terms of function, but it always centres around a core theme – that of closing the loop between the customers experience of what they have gone thru and the methods employed by the service provider to deliver that experience. So my role goes from working with clients to map out high level customer journeys to walking the shop floor to understand process steps that do not even touch the customer directly, but the output of which will have an effect on them.
All processes should have a customer and the customer should define what is an acceptable level of quality, and while that is quite straight forward for a product offering it can become quite abstract in terms of a service one. When thinking about Customer Experience the important thing to think about is perspective – starting with the customer and their experience and then connecting it to the process that produced it. Process is about outputs, experience is about outcomes.
Anne: Exactly. I mean we all know how frustrating it is to get a bad service, like being an hour in a phone queue at your telecom provider, for example. At the same time I see all these satisfaction surveys popping up over the web, which I don’t really care about until something is wrong. Do you see a mismatch, or inability of the companies to provide feedback channels where it matters? Or is it not about feedback channels at all – What does it take for a company to provide excellent customer service?
Shaun: Some companies take the wrong approach – they see the channel itself as the solution to any problems the customer is having. It is not the solution (though some channels are better for certain types of issues than others), it is the only medium by which the message is communicated.
Process defects elsewhere in the system are the cause of the problems. Connecting the customer message back to the process in a dimensional way is the first step in improving customer experience.
Improving customer experience is about strengthening your relationship with customers, but first you need to understand the customer experience.
For example, let’s take the results of customer satisfaction surveys and how they are utilised; Often they are aggregated to a departmental level and reported out to the department manager with the expectation that they fix it. In many situations this is not reasonable as the department is dealing with contacts arising from defects in processes that they have no control over. But more importantly, the context to be able to understand this has not been created. Their reporting capabilities for both transactional and survey data only provides them with a vertical and silo perspective.
One of the fundamentals for excellent customer service is the ability to have an objective end- to end view – Process Mining is a key enabler of that.
Anne: So, the results of the customer satisfaction survey are going to a different department than the department that could do something about this customer experience? Can you give an example of how an end-to-end view of the process could change that?
Shaun: Just think of any customer service centre handling Insurance claims for example.
Broadly speaking, the end to end view is the core process by which the customer registers, takes out a policy and makes a claim should something go wrong. When the surveys are issued to the customer they are done so in relation to a contact that they have made to the service centre. However the reason for the contact may have a root cause further upstream within the core process, leading to a gap in the customers mind between their expectation of the service and the perception of what they have received.
For example, perhaps some levy is applied to any refund and the amount was never clearly communicated to the policy holder at the time of making the policy but only when they opened a claim. This could, for some customers, be a bad experience. The service centre is seen as the fix when the solution is in how the core process is executed. The end to end view connects the voice of the customer to the core process as allows companies to localise issues in relation to the core process that deliver their value proposition to the market.
Anne: OK, great. We are all looking forward to hearing more about that at camp!
Process Mining Camp takes place on 18 June in Eindhoven! Tickets are sold out and the waiting list is pretty full, but you can still sign up and be notified if more ticket should become available…
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