Why is it so hard to give customers what they want?

Everyone likes the idea of the ‘future state’ but delivering it is hard. It was easy to get everyone together to create the Customer Journeys, but when it’s time to get stuff done, why does it all fall to pieces?

Be prepared to fail and learn from it

Getting ANZ to become world class has definitely been a journey; we’re still learning and continually adapting our processes to remain agile in our changing environment. There hasn’t been a program like ours before – we’re crossing so many borders and in some cases, have needed to completely overhaul how we do things – a major effort when you’re trying to change the way people have done things for decades, over multiple countries and convincing over 40,000 people that there’s a need to do so.

So how do you move an entire organisation to purpose around delivering the journeys you’ve created.

In a nutshell, we needed to try new approaches, new delivery methods, new engagement techniques and when they didn’t work try something else new – we failed fast, and changed quickly.  How did we do this? I’ll step you through something we tried, how we failed at it and what we did that had better results.

Failing Assumption: That what everyone agrees to in the room, will get done when you leave.

We ran workshops, we had the right decision makers in the room and we left with a clear vision and governance model to support implementation. We left. We went back to our days jobs with the best intentions…..but it failed.

We didn’t understand why it wasn’t working. The CEO was supportive, all the senior stakeholders had bought into the process and the Customer Journey. So where did it go wrong?

• Because it had CEO support everyone wanted to be involved – we needed to narrow down our decision making rights.

 

• We didn’t have the right resources – A component of this is increasing the continuous improvement capability of our staff which is an ongoing thing. But it comes down to prioritising initiatives so that the few improvement resources we have are working on the right initiatives. If this is really important (which our customers are telling us it is) then we need to stop all the extra things that we are doing and focus on those one or two things that are going to have the biggest benefit for our customers.

 

Now I’ve only talked about one failure point when delivering end to end solutions; there are many more. It is difficult to deliver transformation

The key: You are going to need to be agile and review your approach regularly.
We used the ‘5 why’ technique on the issues to ensure that we were addressing the root cause and taking actions to respond accordingly.   It doesn’t matter what methodology you use, but you’ve got to reflect regularly, to ensure you don’t get stuck on the wrong path…or that will be your biggest failure.

Next week I will share my thoughts on what you can change today, to achieve sustainable results. In the meantime tell me your experiences with transformation and how you have learnt from failure. Those with the most likes will be added to my list of things to talk about in a webinar at the end of March. Chat soon. Nina

Thinking from the Outside In

We all know the customer is important but how do we become customer centric?

I don’t know about you but my LinkedIn and twitter feeds are filled with people talking about customer experience and how we all need to put the customer at the centre of our organisations, but how do we do this?

It all starts with Outside In Thinking. We need to stop thinking from our business perspective and make decisions not just with our customers in mind but thinking like our customers. Depending on your business this will change slightly but at the heart of it our customers are wanting simple, easy, and real time responses and we need to be able to respond accordingly.

Elon Musk is a perfect example of how this should work. He is active on Twitter for a start and a customer tweeted about trying to charge his car at one of the superchargers and wasn’t able to do so because other Tesla owners had parked their car and gone shopping taking up a valuable spot. In six days Elon had not only responded but had executed a fix. This is action. This is listening, this is responding to customers.  This is what we need now to succeed in today’s digital age.

But if your business is like mine – then your internal departments probably aren’t effectively communicating with each other, and this makes it really difficult to respond to customer concerns the way Tesla did, let alone implement an outcome in six days.

So this puts us in a difficult position to become a world class organisation, or achieve our goal to strengthen our relationships with our core customers by investing in sustainable innovations.

We need to change how we work to ensure that we are delivering end to end solutions for the customer that are simple, easy and responsive.

Delivering end to end solutions?

Customers don’t care about how your organisation is set up, and nor should they. They want a seamless experience.To have a chance at being successful the first thing you are going to need to do is get through those organisational boundaries. Bringing everyone in a room together not just to talk about where you want to be, but reflect on where you are today and the gap that you are going to need to fill and who is responsible for these outcomes.

At ANZ we ran workshops; we grouped a small set of our executives together, we mapped our current state. But mapped it from our customers perspective (back to Outside in Thinking). We looked at the whole eco system, from when they start to think about engaging with us, to when we deliver the product and the service following that.  Then used customer data including listening to calls and complaints to really show what was happening. This had a pretty big shock factor. When you put the customer at the centre and back it up with data it’s hard to argue the results, all of a sudden the usual politics has nowhere to stand. These powerful maps were Customer Journey maps.

What is Customer Journey mapping?

Customer Journey mapping is all about telling a story. From the dawn of time story telling has been used to engage people – to teach. And journey mapping is no different, it should tell the story of your business.

Often organisations are great at collecting data, but data and spreadsheets (as much as I personally love them) often fail to really communicate a customer’s joy, excitement, frustration and anger.

A journey map should help a designer understand the context of its users. For managers it should provide an overview of the customer experience helping them to identify opportunities to enhance that experience. But most of all the customer journey map puts the customer at the centre of the organisations thinking, it demonstrates how social media and the digital age have changed the customer behaviour and demonstrates the need for the entire organisation to adapt.

Tips for creating a successful Customer Journey map

1. Do your research first – analyse your customer data, talk to customers, and know the current state, what are your peers and competitors doing?

Do not map the customer journey thinking that you know what the customer wants and thinks – you’re too close. Outside In Thinking is essential.

2. Get all the important stakeholders in the room – lock them away, establish ownership through engaging them in the process. They need to experience what your customers are experiencing. Play customer calls. Listen and analyse complaints, walk them through all the steps and make it visual so the process, successes and pain points are clear.

Do not map the journey on your own – otherwise the only support you will have is your own.

3. Critically review the map – look at the areas for improvement and what your future state will be. Develop your end to end strategy, get someone in to challenge you who doesn’t know the process, assign owners for the whole process and business owners for building blocks of work to come. It is also essential to think about how this journey aligns with other journeys, look at what are the capabilities your business needs that will generate economies of scale and consistency in service.

Don’t map and then do nothing with it – it will leave all those senior stakeholders with a sour taste in their mouth and your customers unfulfilled

Customer Journey mapping is a critical step to developing Outside In thinking and therefore enabling us to strengthening our relationship with core customers by investing in sustainable solutions and therefore progress us on our journey to being a world class bank.

As we continue delivering our principles, next week I will share my thoughts on being prepared to fail and how to learn from it. To ensure you don’t miss it subscribe on the link below.

In the mean time; tell me your experiences below with customer journey mapping, and post any questions that you have on Customer Journey maps or your transformation journey. The questions with the most likes will be answered in a webinar at the end of March. Chat soon. Nina

 

All views are my own.

An Aussie with PEX – Disruption or continuous improvement?

Think about Florida; sunshine, oranges, Cuban sandwiches, seafood, beaches… well whilst the sun was out that was not the reason for the 24+ hours of flying – it was the annual Operational Excellence Business Transformation world summit where I’d be speaking to over 800 people about disruption vs continuous improvement.

Alongside other speakers from companies like Nike, EBay and GroupOn I shared my journey and views on whether a disruptive business model or continuous improvement was the better approach on designing and executing value for customers.

At ANZ we have been transforming our global services and operations to be world class for the past 18 months. Banks aren’t seen to be world class at anything. We have legacy systems and we have grown by acquiring new businesses. Not until recently, have we had a need to change…but just like all other industries, financial services is rapidly changing and we don’t just want to survive. We want to come out the other side as a world class organisation.

Disruption or Continuous Improvement?

Disruption is an issue or problem which interrupts an event, activity, or process. So when we refer to disruption in business, we often think of it as disruptive innovation or digital disruption.

Ultimately we are talking about when a new market or value network is created and eventually disrupts an existing market which can displace established leading firms, products and alliances.

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has defined disruption as:

• Disruption is a process – they all begin as small scale experiments – they focus on the business model and when they get it right they expand from the fringe into the mass market and erode the market share
• Disrupters often build business models that are very different from their incumbents – they challenge and look at things from a different perspective
• Some disruptive innovations succeed and some don’t – success is not built into the definition of disruption you have to be willing to fail
• The mantra “disrupt or be disrupted can be misguided” – Businesses should not overreact and dismantle profitable businesses

Let me paint you a picture. This is what we’re facing in the financial services industry:

• Peer to peer lending is expected to reach US$50billion by 2020
• In Australia this is anticipated to be 6% of all our lending by 2020
• Bitcoin which only came into existence in 2009, and the value is expected to increase to above $1000
• Bitcoin transactions have increased from 1000 to over 10 million per month.

We can deal with this, this isn’t our biggest challenge. According to a report by Accenture, 85% of bank executives believe that the biggest disrupter will be the eco system. The industry boundaries are disappearing as our customers expect us to know more about their buying and usage patterns and therefore develop experiences based on their needs. Experiences that go outside the traditional product focus and expand to include the end to end from the customer perspective – outside in thinking.

So when we reflect on disruption and think about the size and complexity of the borders that we operate in it’s going to be difficult, not impossible but it’s going to take significant effort. We have a very structured business model that would need to adapt to become more flexible and we also have shareholders that don’t really like not getting a return on their investments – which makes failure very difficult.

And can’t ignore our existing customers who are still very profitable. As you can see, being a disrupter is going to be hard to achieve – we need to do things differently.

So how are we doing this?

When I was at the OPEX transformation week two years ago, we took home the award for the best business improvement program under 2 years. Our programme was focused on getting the employees engaged in improving their own processes and focusing on the customer outcomes no matter where in the process they sat. Delivering outside in thinking to our people and therefore delivering results through making our processes simpler for both our customers and also employees.

Well two years on this programme has expanded, we are not only looking at the quick wins but focused on re-engineering at all levels.

Over the next couple of weeks I want to tell you how we got here. I am going to share with the three key principles that we have been living by to help transform ANZ into a world class bank:

• Understanding the customer journey – Customer Journeys are critical for aligning the organisation and determining investment decisions
• Be prepared to fail and learn from it – End to end transformation is hard, and you are going to need to fail fast to succeed
• Make sustainable change today – Waiting for tomorrow is not good enough you need to deliver sustainable results today

We are transforming through continuous improvement on mass. Whilst disruption is important, we need to be actively managing it, looking at market trends and responding accordingly. We need to focus closer to home, strengthening our relationship with Core Customers by investing in sustainable solutions to enhance their experiences.

Over the next couple of weeks as we explain these principles, post your questions below on your transformation journey, those with the most likes I will then answer in a webinar at the beginning of March.

 

All thoughts are my own.