Have we forgotten about customer excellence?

We see from a lot of examples that optimizing customer satisfaction has currently taken a back seat at many companies. Most operational excellence initiatives focus on efficiency and cost optimization. Customer care and operational excellence units seem to speak different languages, yet integrating the external customer view with the internal process one opens up major competitive advantages.

Learn how to make interactive customer journey maps with this on-demand webinar from Software AG

We all still have this summer's images of airports in our minds, with long lines of passengers waiting for check-in and security checks or chaotic piles of suitcases that suggest that they will not all find their way to their owner. Many of these passengers will certainly not book their next vacation as an airline trip.

Customers are currently experiencing similar frustration in many other industries due to long delivery times, lack of service personnel or closed stores. For many companies, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and disrupted supply chains have led to operational problems that have a massive impact on customers and their satisfaction.

Forrester reports in their US 2022 customer experience (CX) index rankings that nearly 20 percent of companies have seen a significant CX quality score decrease. However, it seems that these dissatisfactions are not causing too much concern in management floors.

Many of the operational excellence initiatives that are currently being launched are aimed at reducing costs and increasing the efficiency of business operations. Customer obsession has disappeared from the top agenda. Have we lost sight of the customer?

It is clear that this is short-term thinking, because at the end of the day, customer satisfaction is what determines business success. The following well-known statistics are still valid:

• To win a new customer is six to seven times more expensive than to keep a current one.
• Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.
• A total of 78 percent of customers will not purchase again after a poor service.
• It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one negative.

Become a PEX Network member and gain exclusive access to our upcoming digital events, industry reports and expert webinars

In other words, it makes a lot of sense to take care of existing customers and it takes a lot of effort to make up for negative customer experiences.

In practice, however, we see that different departments are involved, which in principle operate in different worlds: On the one hand, customer care units that take care of customer journeys and touchpoints and measure their success with customer-oriented metrics such as net promoter score (NPS). On the other hand, business process management teams that optimize internal processes and analyze throughput times, processing times and process costs.

We should stop this separation into external and internal perspectives on excellence and bring the two worlds together. The solution has been on the table for some time but I estimate that less than 10 percent of process management stakeholders are interested in customer journeys.

Here are the key issues you should address:

• Connect your company’s process landscape with the documentation of the relevant customer journeys. Create an integrative view that connects customer touchpoints and process steps.
• Use the customer journey description to create digital surveys and interactively solicit customer feedback. Watch this webinar from Software AG to see how the integration of ARIS and CUBES supports this very efficiently.
• Define the relevant metrics for both customer journey and business process optimization.
• Use process mining technologies to analyze the as-is execution of the processes. Use this technology to analyze the most important customer-facing processes such as contact-to-order and issue-to-resolution and the journeys from the customer's perspective.
• Calculate the relevant customer experience and process performance indicators on this basis and correlate both analyses with each other.
• Use intelligent analysis algorithms to identify dependencies, causalities and the reasons for poor customer satisfaction.
• Define optimization measures and use an integrated CX and process lifecycle to achieve continuous improvement.

Only when CX professionals and process experts work together, and customer and process views are integrated, will you exploit the potential competitive advantages.

Has CX taken a back seat in your organization? Let us know in the comments below.