BPM from a Business Point of View

Someone once told me that the key to business success is to find out what people want and then sell it to them...

In our day to day routine to keep our business running, we can lose sight of the more important things - like our Customer.

We are all customers ourselves. We know what we like and what we don't like. Every day we interact with companies - we give them the opportunity to meet, exceed or fall short of our expectations. Our experience with a company determines whether we will buy from them again or whether this will be a one-time sale.

My Thoughts...

Sometimes we forget that our interactions with our customers are part of a process. Oversimplified, we sell and they buy. If we are to improve this process [the customer experience] to encourage repeat business, we need to focus on the customer.

We need to analyze and improve the process to achieve what my friend Terry Schurter calls 'Successful Customer Outcomes'. Yes - Find out what people want and sell it to them - but make the experience enjoyable, rewarding, etc. for the customer.

A pundit at BPM Institute recently stated that 'Business processes exist at two levels - the predictable [the systems] and the un-predictable [the people].

Reviewing the processes that interact with our customer, we must make improvements to the predictable [the systems] focusing on 'Successful Customer Outcomes'. And, we must make improvements to the un-predictable [the people] with the same focus.

I like how they called the people portion of this process un-predictable. This takes into account the personal interaction between the human in a company as they relate to the customer [human]. As we all know, this is where problems can grow. I was once told that a bad attitude of one employee can affect the entire company.

To end up with a 'Successful Customer Outcome' you must talk with your customers and jointly arrive at a definition of a 'Successful Customer Outcome'. Then you can revisit your processes and improve them in order to achieve your 'Successful Customer Outcome'.