Serving customer experience

Last few days I went through two separate incidents reminding me of poor business applications resulting into bad customer experience that can easily be avoided – should customer view point is considered while automating any business process. 

1. My elder daughter who is now 17+ was in the process of buying a car. I decided to have her apply for an auto loan where she can be a secondary co-applicant with me – hoping it will start to establish her credit history. We spent multiple hours at one of the major national bank filling out the paper work, etc. only to be reminded after few days that loan can’t be granted with her as a co-applicant given she is a minor. How hard it is to have a simple work flow in the loan application process to error out on the age of a minor while filing the application when certain conditions are not valid? Think about the countless hours wasted of the banker; someone from their lending department and leaving customer with a bad taste who unnecessarily have to go through this long process. 

2. A national university suggests we pay bill on-line to get student registered to their college. We all conduct commerce on-line and now assume certain level of service. However, this university only accepts MasterCard as an acceptable form of payment. It does not accept Visa cards or other popular on-line payment forms. Visa and MasterCard are the big gorilla in the credit industry. In fact, hands down Visa is #1 in the industry with 60% of the market share. MasterCard comes second with close to 30% market share. We happen to be fortunate and had few days left before the deadline for us to apply snail mail way posting cheque in mailbox. Why tout on-line when you can only serve a percent of the customers? 

Anyway, it brings me to the point – automating business processes are to provide improved customer experience. Making business applications usable and customer connected is important.

We experience similar trend in the enterprise software industry – particularly products that have been around for decades and has accumulated lot of features over time. But if those features are hard to use and don’t provide basic reminders or simple error checks – what is the point as they anyway end up in lost productivity and unsatisfied customers. Just ponder – how few features get used when the product is difficult to navigate and hard to use. Feature rich is good – but product build without customer experience in mind is simply not a recipe for success. Applications has to be usable and not just functional to serve desirable customer experience.

Usability matters and it is much more than just cosmetics.

Me Inc.

Are you the CEO of your destiny who is  investing towards your future – learning and sharpening the game?

Great musicians never stop trying to improve; great athletes never stop trying to improve – so why should that not be true for everyone else.

However, it is rather common that many of us stop investing towards learning once formal education is over. Class room education may stop but quest for learning and keeping up with the changing landscape should remain high on the personal agenda. Whatever it is that one want to be better at – can be better – should a person keep hunger in the belly to learn and create opportunities to apply.

It remain a key difference that set apart individuals who succeed from others. Successful individuals never stop applying new learning. They can be gauged by their curiosity to learn and apply everyday. One key metrics – just check their book shelf. It is common for them to read several books a month.

So ask yourself – what is competing for your time that takes away personal obligation towards investing in yourself and learning?

One way is to make a commitment – find books/on-line material/social networking groups/etc. that are relevant to an individual profession and get started. Good books can be the single best personal investment and life mentor. 

I say let’s start today.

People process

Bob Bennett from Sage Payment Solution Division recommended “The Future of Management” and also send me a copy to read. It is an interesting read and the book compares the management practices of the yesteryears to what is needed now to build an innovative/high performance organization. Management Innovation is called out repeatedly touting empowered employees in a self managed, transparent organization where peers hold each other accountable to build a high performing organization.

Truly, at the end of the day an organization success is a direct product of the people it employs. I like the example of Toyota’s TPS (Toyota Production System) fondly known as “Thinking People System” is a good example of how it can be a differentiator in tough industry environment. It is keeping Toyota healthy despite all the challenges within the automobile industry.

A team from Detroit once took the tour to Toyota to find out the difference. Initially, success was attributed due to the Japenese culture and different work ethics resulting in Toyota (and similar other Japanese auto marker) an edge over its Detroit counterparts. It soon got belied as Toyota expanded its manufacturing base in US. Now, even within the same cultural context and country Toyota continues to make the difference that has made it famous.

The key to the success, as people find out, is the constant change that happens at Toyota – mostly driven by its employees who are always looking to optimize or making things better. It is widely touted as “Kaizen“. Contrast this with other companies where change is induced from the top when the need is drastic and employees resist change resulting in half hearted adoption akin to too little too late. Thus companies struggle to remain agile and difficult to keep up with the market need.

In mature market and competitive industry landscape where margins are hard to acheive and average growth remains minimal - it is such a boon for Toyota where employees bring gradual change among themselves ensuring organization to remain current with the need. Also, it fosters a culture of team work, collaboration, and change that thrive to remain agile. Essentially, Toyota is successfully reaping on the bright brains it employs.

Learning here is no different for other industries including enterprise software. Key to success remains empowering employees who regularly reflect on day’s work and adapt; fostering a cross functional team environment; and an environment where peers hold each other accountable for the joint success.

Kaizen

A key measure of a successful product organization is its ability to deliver on Quality commitments. This usually is the cost of entry in a competitive market landscape. There is no magic formula for an organization to get there. Key remains building a culture of continuous improvement.

In Japanese, there is a term that describes “continuous improvement” mindset well. It is called “Kaizen”. Toyota actually mastered this and it later became part of the DNA of various Japanese companies causing them to win the marketplace primarily on the basis of Quality.  

Kaizen emphasize the culture of continual small improvements that yields large results in a form of compound productivity improvement over a period of time. The “zen” in Kaizen emphasizes the learn-by-doing aspect of improving productivity. Idea remains smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted as new improvements are suggested.

In our industry one way to measure Quality is considering how its “Quality curve” looks like during product development. It is plotting number of defects on y-axis during various phases of product development. A traditional organization that deals with quality late in the development cycle may look like the following:-

to another with the emphasis of bringing quality early on during the development cycle:-

So watch out next time as you encounter bumps that can be improved. What you do to get around those bumps and how you address it has an impact towards building winning organization. Every effort counts.