The rush to modernize customer experience often stalls for a simple reason. Shiny platforms and polished service teams may draw the spotlight, but they can’t deliver results without the support of strong underlying processes. As enterprises deploy new technologies, they often tend to skip the structural work that determines whether those efforts stick.
“Organizations focus on the things that are very visible in the customer experience, and that's the people and the technology, but you have this invisible scaffolding—I've described it as the backbone—that makes both of those things work,” Gillian Chamberlain, Managing Director – UK & Ireland for Capita Experience, told CX Today in an interview.
“It's not a glamorous topic, process, but it's where the customer's intent becomes the reality and you overlook it at your peril, because customer experience will absolutely suffer if the process is fundamentally flawed.”
Even the most ambitious strategies depend on the scaffolding around them. When processes are inconsistent or poorly aligned, the entire experience wobbles, no matter how advanced the tools or how capable the teams are.
“The technology [is] not going to transform your customer outcomes or customer experience unless you've started with a process, and specifically, process observability.”
There are five elements to doing this well, according to Chamberlain.
Five Elements of Effective Process Design
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Aligning Processes with Customer Needs
The first is to orient the enterprise to the customer journey, rather than starting with an inside-out view of the organizational chart or functional teams internally. Teams should determine whether their customer service processes fulfil the outcome that the customer needs.
“For every interaction, you're asking yourself, in this stage, what does success look like for the customer? What are they trying to achieve? And is this step adding value or is it just adding another pinch point?” Chamberlain said.
“Companies need to design their internal workflows with the customer's outcome as the guiding principle mapping that journey.”
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Streamlining Workflows
The second step is to remove any non-customer-centric steps to streamline workflows, Chamberlain said.
“When you look at every step and you ask, ‘is this step making life easier for my customer? Is it making it faster for the customer?’ And if the answer is no, removing those steps that have probably been designed in for internal convenience rather than value.”
“We find as we work with organizations to turn their processes into agentified processes, we've uncovered 30 to 40 percent of steps in a process add no value. So you should stop doing them.”
“Look at your process and think, have I designed this to make life easier for the organization without truly considering the impact or the efforts it is putting onto the customer?”
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Automate the Repetitive, Empower the Human
The third element is embedding agility and using technology to handle repetitive tasks, so service teams can get to the resolution faster and advisers can be freed up to handle the interactions with customers that require more human problem-solving.
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Unlocking the Power of Data
Fourth is data. Breaking down silos so that enterprises can access the full breadth of the data they have is crucial. If processes are designed poorly, data will be underutilized. Enterprises have data across CRM, billing, complaints, and more, Chamberlain noted, and good processes standardize what data is collected, how it's cleaned up, and how it's made accessible to the wider organization.
“Make sure that you have used the data that is available to you in the process so that your advisors have as much contextual information to be able to personalize the interaction. That's really important.”
“When your processes are invisible, and when your outcomes are delivered seamlessly, that's when process can actually be a competitive advantage and enable your experience to be an advantage.”
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Using Customer Insights to Drive Process Iteration
“And then the last step is the measuring and the iteration.” Leaders should track and measure processes with the voice of the customer and their pain points in mind.