Jim Sinur

In a day and age where gaining advantage in garnering new business and maintaining good client relationships is paramount, executives should be asking themselves “Are my processes adequate to please my constituents”. The days of just masking standard transactions with a cute and functional web sites are numbered and this is no longer good enough.

This means that processes should not only remember information about the clients and their past habits, but link to processes that the clients do business with on a daily basis. In addition, clients should be able to personalize their interfaces to the organizations processes. In way out examples there may be ways to delight clients through animation and gaming as illustrated in Dave McCoy’s blog posting about gaming interfaces to systems.

Example:

Today I can have my payments easily integrate to the billing systems of my providers by linking my online banking site to my providers account numbers. This is a great step towards integrating my normal payment behavior to a variety of my service vendors through a common interface. Unfortunately, my bank only gives me a generic way to do this that follows the way they want me to behave. I might want cluster payments around dates that I normally process certain payments. A smart process would ask me if I would like to make the payments I normally make around a specific time of the month.

I would like my bank to allow me to have icons for each of these providers along with my ability to rate each of these providers for their service levels to my household. I would also like my bank to allow me to dynamically allocate my electronic deposits to owned accounts under this banks wing as well as other investment firms that I would like to invest in on a periodic basis. The process might allow me to have a normal allocation formula that could be overridden in case I became overburdened by surprise expenses or delighted by a surprise gift and/or bonus.

I find most organizations unimaginative in their process interactions and how they relate to my preferences and likes. I think a day will come when others will expect processes that play better with client’s desires. What do you think?