Think beyond processes, think Experiences!
Business process management (BPM) has largely focused on making business processes more efficient and agile. It provides tools and methodologies to achieve this goal. BPM is quite valuable for back office processes where the processes can be well defined and there is not much customer interaction. BPM ensures consistency in the back office processes but what about the processes that are customer facing?
Now customer facing processes are in totally different category. Processes involving customer interaction greatly benefit from BPM’s values of efficiency, agility and visibility but these alone cannot ensure consistency in service experience. Why? Because the customer service depends on the skill of the agent who is serving the customer and the service quality depends on how a particular agent handles the interaction. This means it’s not only the efficiency that is important but also the quality of service experience.
For the solutions that have direct contact with customers we need to have a different approach than just process management orientation. That’s why, at KANA, we talk about Experience Flow rather than process flow. For customer service solutions, either for agent assisted or for self-service, we need to design experiences, deliver experiences and improve experiences; not just processes.
What is the difference in process design vs. Experience Flow design? A process consists of workflow, task owners, information model (data), user interface and rules. But to deliver right experience, in addition to these components, there is a need for defining agent scripts, contextual knowledge, contextual User Interface, and searches. In absence of these additional components we cannot enable our knowledge workers to help customers effectively.
Where process flow can describe the steps needed to deliver a service, the experience flow determines how to deliver the service effectively. For example, let’s look at customer refund request process, as shown below.
What this does not describe is:
- What questions to ask when a customer calls?
- How to engage with customer?
- What the standard procedures are in this particular case.
- What has been the customer history with the company?
Without this information, the tasks can be completed but there is no guarantee that desired customer experience is delivered or that all agents can deliver the same desired customer experience.
In this recent webinar on knowledge infused processes, Industry thought leader Esteban Kolsky points out that customer service needs to change the focus from efficiency to effectiveness. He says that a way to do this is to not to think in terms of process but experience that is delivered to customers, which in turn means to change focus from company to the customer.
Service experience management is different from business process management as it changes focus from:
- Efficiency to Effectiveness
- Process to Experience
- Company to Customer
Understanding this difference in experience and process is crucial in designing and delivering consistent service experiences that a company’s brand promises.
(Ajay Khanna is Senior Director, Product Marketing, KANA)
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December 9th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
I think this blog post does a superlative job of highlighting the conundrum of “service experience management.”
When is the last time you were delighted or wowed by someone reading a script?
Outstanding experiences, in my experience, come from people who have been given guidance and boundaries, but who ultimately rely on their own human judgment and empathy. To call back to one of Mark Angel’s blog posts, Gordon Ramsay may specify recipes for his line cooks, but he expects them to taste for seasoning.
How do you move from scripting experiences (which are unpleasant) to enabling genuine human service experiences? For me, this is SEM’s existential question.
December 11th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Hello David. Thanks for your comments. I agree that human judgment and empathy are necessary components for good experience but those cannot not replace the knowledge that is needed to solve an issue. If there is a 20,000 agent call center and we want to make sure the service is effective and consistent across the agents then scripts, contextual knowledge become necessary. And consistent service quality does not means one-size-fits all. We can deliver differentiated experiences and maintain consistent service quality. Scripts, KM etc are meant to help agents, reduce errors. The intention is not to convert them to robots.
Making service more human and personal, is the call of “Brand”. If the brand calls for customer delight and one-on-one ‘wow’ personal relationship then yes, I am looking to be delighted. E.g. when I call my personal banker. But if I am calling Lenovo to find fix for a product issue I want agent to have the necessary knowledge to solve my problem, if he does that effectively, I am happy. Of course, I would not want agent to be rude or anything. What SEM promises is, Good Experiences. On Brand. On Budget. Gordon Ramsey does ask his cooks to taste for seasoning but McDonald’s make sure that process is such that there is no need for it. I know it is an extreme example but McDonald’s serves millions daily where as Ramsey may serve mere hundreds. The experience that their brand promises is totally different. And as long as they stay true to their brand, customer is satisfied.
I would love to hear more thoughts.
December 14th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Ajay -
I think you’ve added clarity to the discussion; thanks.
Unfortunately, you’re reinforcing some of my concerns (biases?) about the real goals of SEM: picking scripts and contextual knowledge for 20,000 seat contact centers to reduce the risk of terrible experiences, rather than empowering people as people to do the right thing — just as McDonalds creates processes to ensure uniformity of its product.
I don’t think McDonalds is a good outcome for anyone. Reasonable people (including their shareholders and millions of customers) disagree with me, of course.
When I contact a contact center, and I suspect this is increasingly true of the younger demographic, it’s not because I need someone to follow a script or relay contextually-provided knowledge — if it could have been thought out well in advance, I likely could have done it myself. I contact because I need a thoughtful, human response that can apply judgment about how and why to apply policy. I’m looking for “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” People are most assuredly not going to be satisfied by having something read something to them that they could have easily found online.
I suppose at some point this all boils down to what you think it’s fair to expect of a human. Can workers be expected to apply judgment, or is the best we can hope for risk mitigation and compliance? I take the optimistic view that, if we can align people with a vision and equip them with easy access to the information they need–including search, which gets pretty bad press in this blog–we can deliver outstanding service experiences. Even companies like Lenovo. Because honest to pete, if I think that agent is reading what he’s been prompted to read, I know I’m out of luck — I could have done that myself.
December 16th, 2011 at 11:09 am
I wonder if it comes down to empowerment? Are the agents empowered to make decisions on behalf of the company? Are they able to make ‘non-scripted’ decisions to help a customer solve the issues they cannot solve themselves?
I believe that that’s the power of contextual support. Agents are able to see the impact of the overall experience and events that may be affecting the outcome and know the boundaries their business has set, without either making it up or sticking mindlessly to a process. Businesses need to set these boundaries and using experience management enables them to trust their agents to know what they are. It takes the guess work out of it. By knowing all the facts, the agent comes to the right outcome, both for the customer and the business.
December 25th, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Anne – Amen. “Empowerment with information and boundaries” sounds ideal — even the Ritz puts limits on what a team member can spend to make things right with guests, and provides significant training for them.
For all of our sakes, I hope that’s what your customers want to buy.
Merry Christmas from your American cousin…dbk
ps – Anne, as the blog maven, do you suppose you might see about making it possible to subscribe to comments? I don’t always remember to check if there’s a reply. TIA!