The constant change in the business world puts increasing pressure on companies to optimise their processes. However, this is only a basis for end-to-end process optimization concerning costs, efficiency, or agility.
To remain competitive in the modern and digitised business world, companies should rely on experience management to complete end-to-end process optimization to improve the experience of customers, employees, and suppliers. In five steps, implement an experience management strategy for the holistic transformation of business processes.
Create A Target Actual Analysis
Before companies can expand their process optimization with the information from experience management, inventory is necessary. This is the only way they can find out what the current processes are like, i.e., which processes work and which do not. Once this is done, a target state should be defined: What should the process landscape look like in the end? The target/actual analysis provides clarity in a data-driven manner as to where the company needs to lend a hand to create the necessary conditions for business process transformation.
Experience Management: Understand The Stakeholders
According to the conventional model, process optimization completely ignores the wishes and experiences of customers and employees. In business process transformation, on the other hand, they are an essential point. To involve them in their process transformation, companies need information they can extract from surveys, for example. It would be best if you also considered the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It is an essential indicator of whether customers would recommend a company or not. It is crucial at this point that all internal departments communicate openly with each other and provide their data for planning further steps.
Identify The Most Critical Touchpoints
The proper understanding of where exactly, for example, the customers come into contact with the internal process is crucial. This is the only way to identify the most critical touchpoints. When buying a new smartphone with a contract, the customer goes to a website and completes their order. In the backend, however, much more complex processes take place: The provider has to request the device from the manufacturer, enter the customer’s data into the system, activate their phone number, and ensure that the hardware arrives at the customer’s.
The many processes of which the customer is unaware often intertwine. So-called customer journey maps help identify the dependencies between the internal process and the external experience. They can target stakeholders – customers, partners, suppliers, and employees. Based on the data collected, companies can take targeted measures that bring added value and do not increase efficiency at the expense of the experience or vice versa.
Experience Management: Define And Implement Measures
Identifying the process points where the action is required is followed by their definition and implementation. With this potentially disruptive step, companies must not forget to get all employees affected by change on board. Carrying out the process optimization without looking at the employees’ experience would be grossly negligent since resistance to the changes could form. The planning of measures must therefore be transparent, and the stakeholders should have the opportunity to participate in its design actively – after all, they have to work according to the new rules at the end of the transformation process.
Evaluate The Process Transformation
Business process transformation is never a one-off thing because changes to the process can – despite all planning – remain unsuccessful. Or even raise new problems. Therefore, it is essential to carry out further evaluations for optimising the business processes even after the process transformation. The Net Promoter Score is an excellent guide to this, as is the full breadth of experience management. Companies should initiate the necessary steps again if something is not yet running optimally.
ALSO READ: Tested In Practice: How Companies Can Halve The Costs For Public Cloud
