Inside Jobs, November 14, 2008

Got Blueprint?

Customer Experience: Fine Architecture or House of Horrors?

Imagine what would happen if you had dozens of architects and hundreds of contractors all working on your business. Now image if there was no master plan and each individual spoke his or her own unique language. It’s not hard to imagine that you would have something that would resemble the Winchester House - the now-famous 160-room house that was cobbled together over a 38-year span with no master plan. The house is notorious for stairs that go nowhere, doors that open to a 2-story drop, and a maze of rooms, hallways and doorways that can perplex even the most seasoned of navigators.

Losing site of the big picture can happen to even the best of businesses. When short-term business challenges inevitably arise, decisions can be made in haste to address them. Without a master plan, those seemingly innocent decisions can begin to create a burden for the company in the long run. Independent and uncoordinated business initiatives can result in processes that don’t connect, systems that don’t play well with others, and departments that develop their own unique business lingo that is not universally understood by others.

Like the Winchester house, each individual project may seem like the right solution at the time. However, the compound affect of numerous independent and uncoordinated projects and solutions can result in an Achilles heal for the company: True change becomes increasingly hard to accomplish; integration and sharing of key business data slows to a crawl; and enabling cross-functional processes (aka end-to-end processes) becomes nearly impossible to accomplish. Each function may seem content, but the business as a whole can begin to suffer due to inflexibility, knowledge hoarding, and turf wars.

Indicators that your business may suffer from the ‘Winchester House’ syndrome:

1. Process Indicators: Business processes are not well defined or understood and each function prides itself on simply doing whatever is necessary to ‘get the job done,’ even if it requires winging it now and then. Each functional area designs, develops, and manages its own unique processes with little or no sharing of best practices across functional areas.


2. Technology Indicators: Each functional area has its own set of business applications and data. Applications often don’t work well with others and data is not consistent across departments. Key business information is fragmented and stored in multiple locations and collecting data to conduct company-wide analysis is a long, difficult, and largely a manual process.


3. People Indicators: Individual functional areas have very specialized people, and it takes years to train new employees to ‘learn the ropes’ of the business. Employees care only about their functional area, have their own set of performance goals and metrics, and don’t understand how or why other functional areas get things done.

Unfortunately, when companies lose sight of the bigger picture and become a victim of the ‘Winchester House’ syndrome, the customer experience invariably suffers. Customers can be inconvenienced by inconsistencies between touch points, lack of integration between channels, and absence of a meaningful relationship between customer and company. The company’s internal processes, policies, and infrastructure often ‘get in the way’ of providing the customer with what they want; an emotional connection to the company powered by great service.


See the Forest Through the Trees

Businesses that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. Furthermore, the enterprise blueprint can help a business to develop a detailed master plan for where the business is today and where it is going.

An enterprise blueprint can help any business to avoid the ‘Winchester House’ syndrome by serving as a detailed model for how the customer experience is influenced and enabled by the compilation of people, process, and technology assets. A comprehensive enterprise blueprint will consist of a detailed definition and model for each major component that comprise the business. This model can be invaluable for identifying any current deficiencies as well as charting a future course for the business.

A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions:

1. Customer Experience Lifecycle (Customer): A formal definition of the customer experience lifecycle process from the customer’s perspective. The process includes a complete end-to-end view of how customers are attracted, acquired, facilitated, served, and cultivated well after the point of purchase.


2. Enterprise Business Process (Process): A formal and detailed enterprise process model that defines all major processes, sub-processes, and activities that comprise the enterprise. Ideally, the process model should be defined as a hierarchy to allow both low-level analysis and optimization as well as executive-level roll-up of detailed activities into larger process areas.


3. Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology): A complete information technology model that identifies and defines key IT capabilities, applications, data, and infrastructure. Ideally, the components of the IT architecture model should be expressly linked to the customer, process, and people dimensions of the blueprint.


4. Enterprise Organization Chart (People): An enterprise-wide organization chart that includes an up-to-date definition of the reporting structure, roles, and responsibilities.


5. Enterprise Business Metrics (Value): A standardized definition of all key business metrics that includes a definition of how the metric is calculated and where key data is sourced from in the enterprise.


6. Corporate Strategy (Strategy): A clear and well-defined strategy that sets the long-term goals and directions for the company. The corporate strategy should include components to define specific strategies for areas such as the brand, market, product, service, price, promotion, channel, and customer experience.

Enterprise Blueprint – It Does Your Business Good

Businesses that are seeking clarity to their current and future business environment can develop their own enterprise customer experience blueprint by identifying and analyzing their key business assets:

1. Assemble available business artifacts: Gather all available customer experience processes, business processes, technology architectures, organization structures, business metrics, and strategies that are available for the business.


2. Identify gaps and inconsistencies: Evaluate the existing business artifacts to identify what is missing, where inconsistencies or duplications occur, or where additional detail is lacking for each of the major dimensions (customer, process, people, technology, value, and strategy).


3. Create standard definitions and assemble the blueprint: Create and agree to a common set of standards to accurately define and describe each dimension of the blueprint and close any gaps that are identified. Consolidate and summarize all artifacts into a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint and keep them up to date. Use the blueprint as a management tool to guide the business going forward.

Developing and using a comprehensive blueprint has its benefits; businesses that define and maintain a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint can improve their return on investments, increase productivity, and improve the customer experience:

• Improved ROI: Initiatives that are better aligned with the enterprise blueprint can result in fewer conflicts and duplication of efforts. Furthermore, short-term efforts can be better aligned with long-term goals so that all resources are rowing in the same direction.


• Increased Productivity: Business can run more smoothly and produce more for the same or less effort by leveraging common resources, speaking the same process and business metric language, and by using a common and consistent set of information. Furthermore, businesses can make better decisions based on a more holistic and consistent view of enterprise-wide capabilities, issues, risks, and opportunities.


• Improved Customer Experience: Businesses that have aligned their people, process, and technology components are better equipped to provide meaningful customer experiences. When aligned and consistent, the business infrastructure can serve as a true enabler – rather than a hindrance – to powerful customer experiences.

Executive Summary

Over the course of the lifetime of a business various business challenges, opportunities, and issues will arise and be solved by numerous and seemingly innocent business decisions; decisions that result in new processes, organizational structures, and systems. Without an overarching blueprint to guide these decisions, however, the legacy of various and uncoordinated initiatives can be crippling. As more and more independent decisions are made, the weight of inconsistent processes, duplication of duties, and incompatible systems can burden both the company and the customer.

Business that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions including a 1) Customer Experience Lifecycle Process (Customer), 2) an Enterprise Business Process Model(Process), 3) an Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology, 4) an Enterprise Organization Chart (People), 5) Enterprise Business Metrics (Value), and 6) a Corporate Strategy (Strategy).

If your business were a house or building, what would it look like to your employees and customers? Would it be structurally sound, open, and inviting? Or would it be cluttered, broken up and difficult to navigate?

Having the right blueprint can make all the difference.

Inside Jobs, May 22, 2008

Taming the Customer Data Beast

Your business is growing; more products & services are being sold to more customers at more locations and across more channels. Behind the scenes, your customer data challenge is growing too; customer data becomes scattered across departments, divisions and locations; your employees can’t access the right information at the right time; and few – if any – data standards exist.

“Let’s build a massive
customer data warehouse
to solve all of our problems,”
shouts your CIO.

On the surface, his approach sounds reasonable. A single centralized database sure would be nice; create a common data repository where anyone in the company could get the most up-t0-date and accurate customer information. By doing so, you could provide better customer service, improve retention, and up-sell or cross-sell more products.

Does it sound too good to be true? It just might be.

Beware The Tar Baby

Building a comprehensive customer data warehouse for any company can be a daunting task. Don’t make the same mistake as Br’er Rabbit in the classic children’s story of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Underestimating the challenges of a customer data warehouse can be a real tar baby; once you stick your hands in it, it’s not easy to get out:

• The existing customer data will likely be in multiple formats that require significant cleansing and standardization.
• Different stakeholders will likely have unique data needs that will need to be reconciled.
• The number, type, and complexity of the customer data attributes that your employees would ‘really like to have’ will grow exponentially.
• Data warehouse solutions often require highly specialized technicians to design, build and maintain the monster on an ongoing basis.
• Your existing customer facing solutions likely won’t play well with a 3rd party data warehouse.
• Once you get the data into the data warehouse, it may be difficult to get it out in an easy, useful, or timely manner.

Despite the inevitable and oft-times obvious challenges with such an endeavor, many companies take on the tar baby and get stuck. Companies can spend a mountain of money to create their own holy grail of customer data. They buy expensive technology and hire highly specialized technicians to nurture and maintain it. The customer data warehouse takes on a life of its own and they lose sight of why they were building it in the first place.

Perhaps you turn to your CIO and ask,
“Now that we’ve built it,
what do we do with it?”

Taming the Beast

To effectively tame the customer data beast, companies must be able to develop and maintain an unrelenting focus on the customer experience. The ultimate customer experience is the ends while customer data is simply the means. Too often, companies can lose sight of the true goal when they’re in the midst of a building a comprehensive customer data warehouse.

To overcome this pitfall, companies should first develop a compelling customer experience strategy and define and optimize their end-to-end customer experience processes. By doing so, any customer data requirements will be framed by how they enable the customer experience strategy and process.

For example, you may all agree that you need to collect and maintain customer demographic information. But before you go through the effort of finding, dissecting, cleansing, migrating, and storing that information, make sure you know how, when and where that information will be utilized throughout your customer experience process.

In order to tame the customer data beast, you must use your customer experience strategy and process as your guide. Building the customer data warehouse without framing it around your customer experience process is a risky endeavor. Instead, your company’s customer experience process requirements should drive your customer data needs, not visa-versa.

Integration is the Key

Perhaps your company already has a customer data warehouse and you are looking for ways to use it more effectively. The key is data integration.

Since the early stages of the computer age, data has been king. Database management systems fetched top dollar and were in high demand. Remember the meteoric rise of Oracle, Sybase, and Informix in the 1990’s? Database administrators were also in high demand, and any individual with this highly specialized skill often fetched a top salary.

But the king has been dethroned.

Move over data, there is a new king and his name is integration. Having timely and accurate data continues to be very important. However, getting the right customer data in the right place and in the right context is how companies today are looking to make a difference:

Data is just data.
Data in context is information.
Information with relevance is knowledge.
And knowledge is power.

Today, companies must consider how to effectively share, move, and synchronize their customer data. Data quality and quantity are table stakes; the real differentiator is how you use it.

Realistically, you can’t have a conversation about customer care, customer service, or customer relationship management without talking about customer data. If you’re serious about becoming more customer centric, you will likely find yourself building a customer data warehouse (if you haven’t already). Before you begin, be aware of the complexities and make sure that you have a clear plan for using the data to effectively enable your end-to-end customer experience.

Inside Jobs, October 24, 2007