Sometimes it seems that no matter how clear the writing on the wall is there are those who simply can’t (or won’t) get the message. That would be fine with me except for a certain group of these people, the ones that are out in the market attempting to influence others. That’s my neck of the woods, and I take it very seriously (and personal) when I see people PROMOTING really “dumb stuff.”

Now granted, they may feel the same about me although it seems that the real reason I make these people angry is that I am a threat to them (or I should say my ideas are). Let’s qualify that. The message I bring threatens some people’s existing “world view” suggesting to them that what the have come to believe is in fact not real (or reality) and that puts them in a very unsettling place. In our human psyche the natural response to this “threat” is to respond with anger and even to attack.

Ok, if that somehow makes you feel more confident in your false reality – and that is the only place you feel you are capable of rising to - then so be it. But you best not read on because I am going to “that place” again where I throw down the gauntlet against much of the “dumb stuff” that continues to ride like an albatross around our necks as we struggle to meet the challenges of the current economic incarnation.

Modeling the Customer

It seems there is now a suggestion that we may need to “add into” our BPM activities a bit of dalliance on modeling the customer. I mean, heck, customers are out there and they do at times touch our processes so it seems that perhaps we should extend our modeling activities to include a customer aspect in order to make sure we’re covering all the bases.

Give me a break. If there is one certain way that I can think of to royally *iss-off customers it’s to start “modeling” them (us) as if we are some kind of inanimate OBJECT that businesses should use and manipulate for their own selfish gain. I am a person I am NOT a lab experiment! I cannot believe that anyone would seriously think that extending existing modeling practices to include “modeling the customer” makes any sense under any circumstances. If you want to know what the customer thinks, wants and feels then for goodness sake, GO ASK THEM.

Oh but gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend our programmatic and pragmatic BPM Standards to include the customer object, perhaps with “psycho-metrics” that we can use for motivation models, behavior models and so on? Let’s just go ahead and completely strip all human dignity out of the equation and relegate these troublesome “people objects” to a nice little rote exercise where we can put them “into their place” and “out of our minds” so that we can get on with the real work of the business, creating our robust process models.

The Road to Purgatory

I have no doubt that this is the road to purgatory. Let’s get real. There are a lot of changes that we need to make in order for us to move back into a business realm where people are proud and feel good about the work they do. Somehow we have distanced ourselves from the people in the organization over time and NOW it seems some people want us to extend that malaise to our customers as well. Suffice it to say that there is no better way to take a company into the grave than treating the customer as an inanimate object in a set of programmatic work methods. Ugh.

So I’ll say it again, Successful Customer Outcomes provide us the opportunity to change things for the better. When people begin orienting their focus on customers as if they were right there standing in the customer’s shoes, experiencing what the customer experiences, our worlds can begin to undergo the change needed to take us to a far better place than where we are now.

Isn’t that where we all want to be? In our work roles and in our customer experiences? Aren’t we all ready to make the shift to a positive, embracing style of business that nurtures the “animate” and uniquely human people it is meant to serve – and who work within the business to serve those customers?

I think that is enough said on this subject for now, but mark my words. History will tell a story for this era we are in the midst of and it will be laced with both the famous and the infamous. Those perpetuating the old inside-out thinking and customer as an object approaches will be in that history – but they won’t be in the “famous” category, and we know where that leaves them.

On Another Subject, What is Your Business?

Now for a bit of dessert to wash out the sour aftertaste that the preceding bits have likely left in many a readers “mouth.”

So what business are you in? That can be the defining question that can lead you to a new place where you too can be marked as a Market Leader!

In a recent phone conversation I chatted with a pleasant gentleman in the audio/visual services business. We chatted about a number of things, but the conversation slipped into the area of what businesses do, and why some (like Virgin) seem to have an amazing knack for getting things right.

One insight in this regard is how you see yourself (your business). Are you a service provider? Is that how your customers see you? Is that how you see yourself?

Why is one service provider better than another? Price? Quality? Selection?

But what if you WEREN’T a service provider? What if you were a business that helped your customers achieve their Successful Customer Outcome in the REAL PROCESS they are engaged in, of which your services are only a detail item?

So what if you offered SOMETHING that DIRECTLY ALIGNED with your customers achieving the SCO of the over-arching process they are really involved in (if you are new to this stuff, take a look at the SmartDraw CEMM Edition 2007 product that includes SCO mindmaps for taking things to this level – the Advanced Template), within which you also delivered the “services” of your competitors at the SAME PRICE as those service providers? What do you think THAT would do for your business?

It is these types of challenges that we must take on to become Market Leaders. We must innovate by challenging our assumptions against the current “world view” that pervades our markets. We do this by asking questions like:

1) How would we do it if we were going to do it in a tenth of the time, or at a tenth the cost?

2) How could we change what we do so that our customers’ lives become simpler, easier and more successful?

3) What is the business we could be in that would directly make our customers’ overall process (the process they are really engaged in) more successful?

4) Are we really focused on delivering something that is eminently useful and beneficial to the customer? Does everything about how we do that remain tightly focused on this simpler, easier and more successful concept?

5) How can we become an essential part of our customers’ success – to the degree that there is simply NO REASON for our customers to consider even looking at others how provide a similar service?

6) What could we do that would make our customers not only appreciate the benefits of what we uniquely deliver to them but have a fun (positive, rewarding, enjoyable, pleasant) experience with us EVERYTIME THEY TOUCH US OR WE TOUCH THEM?

7) How could we look at what we do in such a way that we could radically change HOW we “work” resulting in a dramatic reduction in the Points of Failure and Causes of Work in our underlying processes? (Note - this is one of the essential concepts behind CEMM and is likely the most powerful discovery around process improvement uncovered to date!)

8) What would our world look like if we CHALLENGED everything we currently do under the umbrella question of: And how does that contribute to the Successful Customer Outcome our customer wants? It may be a big step, but the Market Leaders are doing just that, and they are culling out process dross left and right!

The new world Market Leaders will certainly share one thing in common. They will have powerful answers to these questions. They will offer unique and compelling value propositions to their customers that explicitly make their customers’ lives simpler, easier and more successful in the overall – or over-arching – process the customer is really engaged in. They will have lean and mean processes that have been cleansed of all that “dumb stuff” that somehow has accumulated over time from the old inside-out way of thinking about the business.

They will have accelerated customer growth, reduced customer acquisition costs, decreased customer attrition, dramatically reduced cost (reduced Points of Failure and Causes of Work), their customers will enjoy working with them and appreciate their products/services – and they will bask in the glow of exceptional profitability and shareholder value.

Meanwhile the rest of the crowd will be busy “modeling” the customer “object” (me and you) right out of the customer-business relationship…