Michael Maoz

Process efficiency is the next focus for Customer Service Strategies. I have written about the Intent Driven Enterprise for six years now, but it hasn’t really caught on as a term or discipline. It is the idea that we need to capture the main reasons that a customer has for doing business with us. What, exactly, do they want from us? What do they implicitly want from us besides a product or specific service? Where do we maintain this inventory? Where do we define the business rules for reacting to their needs? Who decides how to communicate to the customer that we understand, and here, in return, are our intentions as the product or service provider….?

Gartner has a rich body of research on business process management. We’ve done an excellent job advising our clients on process awareness and process automation. Yet there is a fly in the ointment: automating a bad process just makes you do the wrong thing even faster than before. We all have a hundred examples. My favorite is when I was traveling from Tel Aviv to Cork, Ireland via an overnight in Zurich, Switzerland. My suitcase ended up on the wrong plane and didn’t arrive in Zurich. I discovered this as I came through customs when my name came over the public address: “Would passengers ….. and Michael Maoz please come to the X airline service desk?” That is never a good sign.

The story is sad and funny. The airline, from a country known for its process optimization, designed the lost baggage handling process from the ‘inside-out.’ They knew the plane containing my bag would arrive in the morning at 7:15 AM. My outbound flight to Ireland was at 8:20 AM. I thought I was in luck. But the ‘optimized process’ was to unload ALL baggage onto the belt, allow all bags to circulate at the Arrival area, and then, when all bags were claimed, the remainders were removed and dealt with. The logic? Well, all unclaimed bags were together. Even when the airline knew, 100%, that they were expecting a piece of luggage on the arriving flight that needed to be transferred to another aircraft within the hour. But the cost of dealing with two types of unclaimed luggage is too high for the airline, and they calculate that it is less expensive than dealing with the upset client.

My bag ended up floating around Europe for eight days, and the airline refused to recognize my loss, and treated me like a nuisance. And then one day, like magic, the UPS guy delivered the bag to my home outside of New York City, at the same time that I was on the phone with the Lost and Found for the airline, who were explaining to me that the suitcase had not yet arrived in the US. I have likely told somewhere on the order of 1,000 people this story over the past three years, embellishing as I go.

The net advice: before you take your performance metrics and set about optimizing them and deploying them consistently across lines of business and geographies, first walk in the footsteps of your customers who have had the worst experiences. Uncover what caused the failure in the customer’s words. Test that out before you miss the opportunity to get Business Process Management right. Read our research – we have great advice.