Value stream analysis and customer experience

It’s not a big secret that I’m a big believer in lean enterprise principles. Today I’d like to express some thoughts regarding the relationship between lean and customer experience.

Value stream analysis is about starting with what the customer values and work your way backward into your business processes to ensure they only produces what is required to fulfill the customer’s expectations. I think it’s a great way to both eliminate waste by suppressing tasks that bring little or no value to the customer while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring value added tasks are executed consistently. I believe this gives customer experience improvement initiatives a more methodological approach to drive in the behaviors in the workforce by giving boundaries to delimit the extent to which customer experience initiatives should go.

I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t want to just meet customers’ expectations, I want to exceed them!” I don’t think value stream analysis is limited to only meet expectations, I think it’s a great way to consistently integrate what you learn about your customers in your business process. The more efficient you become at doing those incremental change to your business processes based on customer feedback the more successful I believe the company will be.

One effect I suspect could happen if you’re not careful while improving customer experience by starting arbitrarily in a “middle” business process, is the risk to unbalance depending business processes by creating overproduction, unnecessary delays, inappropriate input/output, etc. People mean well but sometimes impact assessment is neglected when deploying a new revision to a business process for the simple reason that people can become very passionate when it comes to pleasing customers! By starting with the customer and working your way backward, you’re chewing and digesting the business processes and the changes required as you go along while giving time to the business to appropriately adapt to the changes. It also gives you the opportunity to understand where the value the customer expects is coming from as you go up (or down or left or right depending on how you see this ) the process chain. As everything lean, seeing and understanding what’s going on is a big part of the game! Sometimes the most trivial things are misunderstood and so many assumptions and decisions are based on this… Genchi genbutsu; that works with both your customers and your employees!

Food for thoughts!

 

Is Customer Service Really Valued?

While I’m preparing myself mentally to attend our company’s training session on customer service excellence, I started to ask myself if good service is really valued by the consumer. When you think about it, it feels like it’s one of the thing where the person says one thing and does another. I mean, if customer service is so great, why are large retail chains dominate the market? You don’t see Wal-Mart bragging about how great their customer service is, yet, they consistently grow and acquire market share at the expense of small shops where the service is personalized. Don’t get me wrong, I like good customer service just as anyone else but when I shop for something, customer service is rarely a differentiator. As a consumer, the best customer service I’m hoping for is the one that will never happen because I won’t have any trouble with what I purchased. This also raise the question on where the company should invest funds, on quality assurance or in customer support?

Take grocery stores, what would you consider outstanding customer service there? When you look at them, they pretty much all do the same thing. They let you pick items from their shelves and then you get to meet the cashier who would rather get shot than ask you if you have any items under your basket. The big differentiator in service in the grocery store is whether you pack or not your own stuff or whether the cans are well aligned on the shelves… Woopedidoo! The price to pay for this service? Approximately between 15-30%. That’s a lot of money! If you want to give me great service there, how about you have someone tag along with me while I do my grocery to recommend stuff I could buy (while telling me how awesome I look today, of course lol)?

I guess my point is I don’t know many people who will filter out vendors based on the quality of their service right off the bat. At the end of the day, it’s all about the benjamins, let’s just stop pretending otherwise! I challenge you to convince me that you’re willing to pay a premium solely for better customer service and not for the quality of the product or service acquired.

There’s more to say about this topic, I guess I’ll keep some for another post…