Focus on processes to ensure customer success
Why focusing on customer centricity and the “outside-in” approach for processes are key to business efficiency and growth
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Ahead of hosting the Certified Process Professional Master online training course on PEX Network on 7 February 2022, Steve Towers, CEO and founder of the BP Group and self-proclaimed “CX obsessed enthusiast”, discusses what customer success looks like and provides his advice on taking a process approach to achieve this.
Find out more about the training course and register – limited availability only.
PEX Network: As a process expert, what does customer success look like?
Steve Towers: Customer success is centered on working proactively in conjunction with customers
throughout their relationship and interactions with you to assist them in generating more value out of your services.
Within the Customer Experience Management Method (CEMMethod), we introduce the concept of successful customer outcomes, which progressively enables processes to drive enhanced consumer experiences. That way, happier customers keep coming back for more. In non-profit-oriented companies, work simplification improves efficiency, effectiveness and control.
There are wins for everyone, regardless of the organization's business sector.
PEX Network: Can you tell us more about the CEMMethod and how it can benefit organizations?
ST: The CEMMethod was officially launched in 2006 after a five-year development period. Its basis is to look at the world from an “outside-in” perspective, rather than more classical approaches like Lean and Six Sigma which are based on industrial-age thinking.
The inspiration for taking this “outside-in” perspective arose from leaders like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. They reframed the process by recommending business start change and transformation by clearly understanding customer needs.
One of Steve Jobs talks in 1997 at the Apple Developers world conference included the immortal "you have got to start with the customer and work backward to the technology, not the other way around".
Jeff Bezos talked about “working backward” to explain the same thing. Industrial-era methods sometimes say they pay attention to customer needs, however, understanding the “real ones” is relegated to a stage in a project rather than informing all process, systems, people management and transformation thinking. After all, it is the customer who pays all the salaries and logically everything an organization does.
The CEMMethod is the codification of the “outside-in” practices of companies who have successfully transformed the way they work. Now in its 14th version, the method continues to advance as more organizations seek to understand the rapidly evolving needs of their customers, coupled with digitization, enabling processes like never before.
PEX Network: What is your advice to organizations who want to adopt a customer-centric approach to manage their processes?
ST: The proven benefits of evolving to “outside-in” and customer centricity include justification like “winning the Triple Crown”. This observation was first surfaced by former Gartner senior analyst and Forbes contributor Jim Sinur more than twenty years ago.
He suggested that companies successfully implementing process transformation concurrently reduce costs, grow revenues and improve customer service. This in turn naturally grows shareholder value. Furthermore, aligning everything and everyone through processes to deliver successful customer outcomes significantly reduces complexity, improves control and builds business agility.
PEX Network: You are conducting a virtual training course on PEX Network on 7 February 2022. What key takeaways and learnings can attendees expect?
ST: The course is experiential and will introduce the techniques within the CEMMethod with delegates being able to apply the approaches based on their own experience. This learning style enables them to return to their organizations with an immediate toolkit of tried, tested and proven techniques.
The sessions are interactive with exemplar case studies that discuss today's real-life issues and challenges. Interestingly we do not “test” the attendees. The assessment of achieving the Certified Process Professional Master qualification is based on reviewing the content of the exercises with the supporting one-on-one reviews.
Philosophically it is not a question of memory recall and more a demonstration of real-life understanding.
You can register for Towers’ online training course here – limited availability only.
