Get PAID: A Unique Approach to Customer Experience Design

Customer experience management can be a complex animal. In order to deliver a holistic solution that works, businesses must effectively align people, process, and technology dimensions across geographies, markets, and channels.

Experienced project managers know that aligning people, process and technology is critical. There have been many business methods, tools, and techniques for aligning these dimensions, but some fall short in tying them together.

A relatively new and straightforward approach for designing holistic and comprehensive customer experience solutions is PAID Diagramming. While the elements of PAID Diagramming are relatively straight forward, the single illustrated view that it provides represents an innovative and holistic approach to customer experience solution design.

The exact origins of PAID Diagramming are not known, but I’ve formalized and refined the technique with numerous clients and projects. P.A.I.D. is an acronym that stands for Process, Application, Integration, and Data:

1. Process Layer: Identifies the high-level business process that enables the customer experience. This layer may also be utilized to represent the customer experience process from the customer’s perspective.
2. Application Layer: The application layer identifies the set of applications that are utilized to support the process layer. Simple lines are utilized to represent which application enables each discrete process step.
3. Integration Layer: The integration layer identifies the major information subject areas and illustrates the linkage between applications and data sources.
4. Data Layer: The data layer identifies the various physical or logical data sources and illustrates how data is integrated with various applications.

A PAID Diagram combines these layers in a series of swim-lanes to provide an architectural view of how processes are enabled by information technology:

THE PAID DIAGRAM MODEL

While the PAID Diagram approach may appear simplistic and straightforward, the approach provides numerous benefits when dealing with complex processes such as customer experience management:

1. Creates a Holistic View: The PAID Diagram combines process and discrete technology enablers in a single view. This provides a clear linkage between process and technology that is typically overlooked in process modeling or technology-based data flow or use-case modeling.
2. Enforces a Process Centric Approach: The PAID diagram starts with the process-layer; an approach that establishes and reinforces a process-centric viewpoint for solution design.
3. Enables Detailed Analysis: Current State PIAD Diagrams provide a holistic view of potential ‘pain points’ in the customer experience process. For example, the process layer can illustrate bottlenecks or disconnect, the application layer can illustrate capability gaps or unnecessary redundancy, and the integration and data layers can illustrate where duplicate and disconnected customer data may reside.
4. Clarifies Future State Visions: PAID Diagrams can be created to reflect the current or future state environment. A future state PAID Diagram provides a single view of how a proposed solution would enhance the customer experience process or specific capability areas.
5. Provides an Architectural Viewpoint: The holistic nature of the PAID diagram provides business and technical architects with a modeling tool necessary to align the various dimensions of the business. When applied across multiple functional areas, PAID Diagrams can be combined to create an enterprise-wide customer experience blueprint that can help to drive customer relationship management, operations, and information technology strategies.

Like most solution modeling methods, PAID Diagrams work best when the appropriate level of structure and discipline is applied to the model. To get the most out of the PAID Diagramming method, businesses should follow some basic best practices:

• Create a Process Hierarchy: PAID diagrams are based on processes. If your company doesn’t have a formal process model, create one. A more formal process model will help to drive the PAID diagramming exercise.
• Keep It Simple: Don’t try to map all processes on a single PAID diagram. Instead, break your processes and diagrams into a hierarchy so that additional levels of detail can be illustrated on a separate PAID Diagram, as appropriate.
• Don’t Over Think Technology: Don’t over think the exact structure or location of physical technology assets or databases. The intent of the PAID diagram is to illustrate enabling relationships. The PAID Diagram is not intended to be a formal IT Architecture Model (but it can help in that regard too.)
• Annotate the Diagram: The more details you can provide with each link, the more meaningful the diagram will become. For example, showing the specific data elements that are being pulled from a database will help identify potential issues or opportunities.
• Use a Standard Modeling Tool Like Visio: For Windows-based computing environments, businesses should utilize a standard business-modeling tool such as Microsoft Visio to create and maintain your PAID Diagrams.

Having helped to design, develop, and implement countless business strategies and solutions in my career, I can honestly say that the PAID Diagram is one of the most useful tools in my toolbox. In businesses where I have used this technique, nearly every one of them have adopted the method as part of their stand solution design methodology.

It just goes to show you that often the simplest of techniques are often the most effective.