Why do we need to innovate our business processes and operations?

Why do we need to innovate our business processes and operations?

Often we hear people complaining about why the experience of requesting support from a company isn’t as great as they expected it to be. It looked perfect in the app – a nice button saying “support” that featured a form which helps explain the problem. The customer fills out the form and presses “send”. A few days pass and there’s no response. What do they do now? -They need to follow up, hopefully, they’ve written down the 20 digit reference number and maybe after calling a couple of times they will find someone that knows someone that can help.

What customers experience and see is just the surface. Having a nice app is great, and it’s very important if that’s the way that your customer access your services, but that’s not all you need. You need to ensure that your company is ready to deliver what you promised- you need to connect your processes and technology with your customer experience.

No matter what industry you’re in when your customers make such an important decision like what university they will go to,  what bank organises their loan, or what school they’ll choose for their kid,  they want to feel like they made the right decision. In this process of decision-making, there are some definitive key moments that really matter, we call them moments of truth.

Moments of truth must run smoothly. Simply put, they have to be PERFECT! And for them to be perfect, everything that happens behind the scenes needs to be aligned and efficient. 

“Innovation’s power is often fragmented by the disconnection between the modern front end and a manual, dated back office. As a result, it tends to remain reactive rather than dynamic and doesn’t scale.” Design Thinking In Process Operations – Genpact

Innovating in your processes and operations will ensure that you can deliver these moments of truth to your customers, efficiently and effectively. 

I am sure that you have seen this before in your organisations. I know that we have many times. So what can you do differently that will ensure a difference from the start of the customer experience till the very end? For this, you need great service design, and not just the flashy stuff at the start, but real service design. End-to-end service design. Service design that considers how each part of the process works. So what does this look like, and what do you need to do?

How we redesigned our client’s processes using end-to-end service design

Let us explain our key steps and what we did with a university client of ours. Now they had already gone through the discovery phase. They had interviewed students and designed the ideal student experience. They had highlighted the key moments of truth throughout their onboarding experience but even with this ideal journey, they weren’t delivering. They needed more than the journey they needed to analyse and redesign the current process. 

1. We looked at the process with them and mapped it out in detail. Really analysing what was going on. This took some time to get our head around. Why? Because while the steps for the students were relatively effortless, the requirements for the employees were cumbersome. There was a myriad of manual spreadsheets and systems, managed using emails.  It would only take a single sick employee for the whole system to begin to stall. These manual processes often meant that there were long delays and unknowns for the students.

2. With the process mapped, we were then able to highlight all the different areas where waste and risk was influencing the process. There were multiple different points of the process that were failing and these needed to be addressed. These failure points in the process meant the team needed to react for almost every case. Rather than innovating and delivering great customer service, they need to firefight.

3. We then thought up the blue sky scenario. If we could do anything, what would it look like? What would the end result be? And how could we deliver it? For this process there was an app or portal that tracked their experience, it was a seamless system that transferred data between different departments to help manage workloads and most importantly, it was automated. This allowed employees to only work on the things that mattered most- like helping their new students. 

4. We know that in our organisations, this isn’t always possible. There is only a certain amount of budget, change or legacy systems that we can manage or use at a given point in time. So what then? We come back to reality and create a roadmap to success. We look at what we can do in the next 3 months that will make a significant change to the experience. What can we automate to make the process more efficient? What can we do with data to help make decisions easier and faster? And how can all of these things work within our capacity to manage them? Essentially, we are streamlining our back end process and enabling growth and scale of the entire process.

This is the hard part, it takes discipline to continue to deliver and work with your team to change what and how you work. Delivering quick wins through continuous improvement whilst the bigger initiatives come through. Doing both simultaneously needs great change management and leadership, guiding the team and focusing on why you are doing it. 

Without the hard work, without looking at the underlying process and understanding those moments of truth to build out a roadmap to success, your front end delivery just won’t cut it. It will lack that memorable wow factor. So don’t just think about customer journeys, think end-to-end service design to enhance your innovation’s power.

Think of the last time you had a great experience. What made the difference?

Nina Muhleisen
Founder & Principal Consultant
hello@three6.com.au