Superior Customer experience : "Organization instinct or Process"?

Robert G. Howard  has this interesting post on how Companies seeking to become more customer-centric should define the customer experience as a formal end-to-end process in their organization.

 

He makes a compelling point : "For those organizations that have formally adopted a process-centric approach to business, the process is often formally defined, measured, monitored, and continually optimized. This level of discipline is critical to deliver a process that is high performing, predictable, efficient, effective, and error-free. In order to become more customer-centric, businesses should add the customer experience end-to-end process to their portfolio of strategically important processes. The customer experience is a process. Like any process, the customer experience process can work perfectly (or go horribly wrong), may contain numerous scenarios, and it can be analyzed, re-engineered and optimized.
Great customer experiences don't happen by accident. They require a keen attention to detail, a focus on every touch point, and an orchestration of all customer encounters regardless of how each customer may navigate the company. Mastering the customer experience must begin with mastering the end-to-end customer experience process."

Read more about what Robert has to say at:

http://www.clearbrick.com/blog/labels/customer%20experience.html

My take is as follows:

• In many organizations no particular function is mandated with driving a "customer centric" agenda.
• Often Marketing picks up the gauntlet !But the reality in many Services organizations(banks, hotels, telecom companies) is that Marketing often does not have the clout to push through organizational changes which impact customer facing processes.
• However in growth markets such as India the opportunity to embed "customer centric" processes into the fabric of the organization is very strong . This is because entire industries are being created right from "scratch"-Retail, telecom and many others. It needs a strong CEO who drives the customer centricity agenda himself and makes it practical for the market to absorb. The CEO then must drive a technology agenda ,with the CTO, which puts together the "plumbing" for crafting a great customer experience.

 

 

To hell with analytics?

CEOs often talk about the need to use data while taking key decisions. But Marketers still seem to operate more from the gut . Why is that?

 

According to some research from Accenture, nearly half (40 percent) of major corporate decisions are based on  intuition or the “gut”. Accenture surveyed more than 250 executives in July 2008 about their companies' use of and investment in business analytics to remain competitive.

Thomas Wailgum in News captures the reasons why the gut still reigns supreme . Here is what he says: “So why is the gut still so in vogue? Of those respondents who said their companies still make decisions based on judgment rather than business analytics, 61 percent said it was because good data was not available, and just over half (55 percent) said their decisions relied on qualitative and subjective factors. Other reasons related to workforce challenges: 23 percent of respondents said "insufficient quantitative skills in employees" were a main impediment at their company, and 36 percent said their company "faces a shortage of analytical talent." That 61 percent of respondents said "no good data was available on which to make decisions" is striking, given the terabytes of internal and customer-related data available at most organizations today. It's also, of course, indicative of the sad state of data management inside organizations.”

I also came across this very interesting blog by Business Intelligence expert Steve Bennett

 

http://analytics.typepad.com/oz-analytics/2009/07/10-signs-that-you-need-analytics.html

 

According to Steve, here are the top 10 signs that you need to improve your organisation's analytic capability:

1. You have to wait longer than a day for either IT or your business intelligence department to make/change a report for you.
2. Across the organisation there are more than 100 requests pending for reporting /dashboard /scorecard changes waiting for a specialist to deliver them.  
3. When you attend meetings, there are multiple numbers being quoted for the same thing - and you don't know which of them is correct. 
4. When you talk about fundamental things like transaction, account, balance or available stock - and you discover that the person you are talking to is using the same words but means something different to what you mean. 
5. You can't get an instantly understanding when glancing at a report/dashboard/scorecard and what it is telling you. 
6. The commentary is larger than the automatically generated report. 
7. The report is not generated automatically but is a handcrafted labour of love by either yourself or one of your staff, or you spend hours trying to locate the right data and then have to consolidate it manually into Excel. 
8. It takes longer than 5 minutes to view a new report. 
9. You can't access the report when and where you most need it. 
10. There are hundreds of reports available to you but you don't trust them and you spend time trying to manually validate key numbers.  

My view :

The key to making analytics matter from a business context is to embed it into your day to day business processes. Till you do that Analytics will be a nice luxury, used more to justify decisions that the “gut” seems to support! How do you embed it into business processes- we will talk about that another time!