Are you taking the customer experience seriously?
As Tacitus once wrote “"Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur - We are more easily led part by part into the knowledge of the whole”, and so it is with understanding the needs of customers and reflecting them into those core processes inside an organisation that meets their needs. There is no doubt that change is hard - getting things done in a large organisation can be extremely difficult. It can also be extremely rewarding, however, especially when what you are implementing will make a demonstrable difference to the experience of the end customer.
As a previous leader of customer strategy in both an international telecommunications organisation, and one of the largest Government departments in the country, Dan Sunderland - Executive Director at Rennie - saw this first hand – both from the perspective of diagnosing the issue, assessing the options and implementing the change. While all organisations seek to do good at the highest levels, internal structures, KPIs, legacy processes and technologies, make it difficult to form conceptual or theoretical answers to real world problems. It is experience that matters when designing change, and an understanding of constraints and the real world blockages that impede most large organisations.
Of the hundreds of examples, one stands out. Like most examples, it is the detail that matters, and provided learnings that Dan takes to most of the engagements he now advises on at Rennie. In one case, at one time, addressing a significant and emotive pain points for customers was taking on average 17 days to get resolved. After considerable thought, he and his team came up with an approach to reduce this to 2 days. The downside was that it would require a different business model, the involvement of a third party, systems to be integrated using near real-time data, completely new processes, and changes to policies that had been in place for many years. The impact to the customer however was clear and compelling, the financial business case was positive, and yet the challenges that the team had to navigate in order to implement the new approach were significant.
What followed was a journey with real learnings, and gave rise to a perspective based on seasoned experience. These are some of Dan’s reflections of how his team worked together to achieve successful implementation in that case, and others like it.
#1 Every part of the business needed to be engaged. The parts of the business that had a key role to play (read ‘veto rights’!) were numerous and included customer, marketing, product, supply chain, risk, legal, commercial and IT. Strong engagement was required with all of these areas as part of one team - not in the sense of having a meeting, but in the sense of actively working with them to identify and solve the challenges that they could see.
#2 The process needed to have a compelling ‘why’. In order for all of the areas of the business to get on board, it was critical that the whole team was on the same page, motivated by the goal and the opportunity to make a difference. Having a clear raison d’etre in terms of the positive impact it would have on customers was critical.
#3 The business case needed to have returns that stack up AND be strategically compelling. Capital allocation is arguably the most important tool organisations have to decide whether something is a priority, but it is never as simple as ordering projects in descending order of returns and drawing a line where the funding stops. Some projects are ‘must do’ e.g. for regulatory or safety reasons; others are ‘discretionary’ but with greater or lesser alignment to strategic priorities. Having a clear framework for capital allocation, and clearly articulating how a project aligns with that framework, is key to securing funding.
#4 Having a problem solving mindset was key. All involved had to be open to new ways of working, new ways of solving problems, and working with new groups of people and partners. The process relied on groups that had never worked closely together before coming together and challenging why things were done the way they were done, and what it would take to change them.
Sometimes “the knowledge of the whole” takes time, patience, experience, and above all listening. As Dan says, getting things done is hard, especially when they are worth doing! Reach out for more information or to arrange a meeting.