Session Information:

How to drive efficiency and customer excellence on your business transformation journey

For a long time, there has been a disconnect between operational excellence initiatives and customer experience. Organizations find their plans to transform customer journeys never make it from ideation to execution, or that supposed solutions create even more problems.

The good news? There's a way to achieve both efficiency and customer excellence while on your transformation journey. Hear case studies of companies who are leading the charge.

Session Transcript:

I mean, directly from Boston, Massachusetts, today, we have Kevin ... with us. Kevin is an enterprise customer success manager for ..., and his mission is to align corporate and team the specific goals in order to create and execute optimal solutions that distinguished brands in their marketplace. And I'm thrilled to have you with us, Kevin, with your cross industry experience, and sharing your expertise with us, on behalf of over 2000 participants in our global audience today.

I'm thankful for you to take the time, to share those insights with us Already. I'm happy to be here.

So, good morning, everyone.

Like Jose just said, my name is Kevin ... and today, I'm going to be discussing how your business transformation and your customer excellence go hand in hand. So, really today, I'm not going to just be talking about how you get from point A to point B in your business transformation, but the importance of making sure that when you focus on your customers, that's at the focal point of every step in your transformation.

But, before we get into that, I want to go over a little bit of who I am, because they just did a wonderful introduction. But just to give everybody a kind of a quick glance at myself, So the crew as I said, my name is Kevin ..., I'm an enterprise customer Success Manager here at .... We are an sap company that's focused on business process management.

Really, our mission is pretty simple. So by using the wisdom of the crowd or a company's employees, our customers can discover areas of process enhancement that really take and elevate their business operations to a whole new level.

So today, I am recording, or I'm presenting from Boston, Massachusetts, but I'm originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

And the last thing I really want to mentioned about myself is, I describe myself as a lifelong learner.

So, at every chance possible, every person I meet, every situation I'm in, I tried to take something from it, or from them, and be able to grow myself, and learn, and really just kind of better myself. And, the reason I mention this is because, and why, the reason I have a photo of my family up here is, because I've learned and grown from every single one of them throughout my life. They've shaped me into the person. I am today, and I'm very appreciative of that.

But also, the reason I mentioned this, is because that's really what a business transformation boils down to, always learning, always growing, never settling, and always making sure that you're taking the next step and that you're continuously evolving.

When talking about a business transformation, it really has three major components, So one, the ability to anticipate future needs through technology.

The second is to establish a sustainable competitive advantage by the anticipation of those future needs.

And lastly, it's focusing on the customer experience.

While the ability to not only predict the future need, but solve it, can really disrupt an entire industry and put your competitors on their heels.

The first mover advantage is pretty short-lived.

The largest opportunity it really creates is to have that first crack in establishing that customer loyalty.

And really, when you're talking about a business transformation, it's pivotal and make sure you're focusing on the customer experience throughout every step of the transformation, and not at the end.

That has to be your end goal. And you ultimately need to work backwards from there.

Let's take the use case about, Apple set the standards for smartphones just a little over a decade ago.

Now, today, it's seem pretty, almost Sapped religious, to not have an i-phone.

People are absolutely embarrassed for their texts to be great.

I mean, personally, I have an Android phone. And everyone continuously makes fun of me for having greentech so I know how it feels.

You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

That was Steve Jobs in 19 97.

To say he was a visionary, would be pretty much an understatement.

The process of creating and maintaining this type of brand loyalty started at the birth of Apple and has remained the foundation of their mission and vision all the way through today.

Even back then, Apple wasn't focused on one-off transactions.

Apple was about creating and establishing relationships with people, and making sure that it every single opportunity they had to meet the customer experience better.

They took it.

They sold, as people weren't just buying a product from them, they were becoming part of something bigger.

They were becoming part of Apple's community.

Today, companies are really starting to fully embrace making their customer focus as a market differentiator for their companies.

Business transformation is make internal processes better, faster, and stronger, and ultimately, who is now going to benefit the customer?

So back in 20 15, market research firm Forrester mentioned, monitor five pairs of companies over a period of five years.

one company in each pair had a significantly higher score than the other based on Forrester's own index.

In every single pair, the company with higher customer experience score outperformed the other on revenue, and the high customer experience scores collectively grew 14% faster than the other five firms during the five year period.

Customers ultimately remember three experiences.

They're best.

They're most recent, and they're worst.

Studies have shown that it takes 12 positive customer experiences to eliminate one, single bad experience.

This makes it more important than ever than ever, to remove as many negative experiences as possible.

Take a look at all of these companies.

I think we can all agree that every single one listed here, focuses on the high value of the customer experience.

Let's take Trader Joe's.

Everybody doesn't go to Trader Joe's because they have the cheapest products.

It's because they have the best quality products, and at every opportunity they have a positive customer experience.

Their entire focus is on treating the customer better than all of their competitors so that they're not doing one-off transactions but creating customers for life.

Sam Walton pretty eloquently summarizes the importance of the customer experience.

The customer's the ultimate boss simply by spending their money elsewhere.

They can remove any CEO or put any company out of business.

So now that we understand the importance of the customer experience, it's time to work backwards from there and create your business transformation roadmap, and really weren't creating this transformation.

three key goals need to be kept in mind.

Start with the end in mind before you know what steps need to be taken in your journey.

You have to know pupils.

You have to know where you're going, where you're starting.

Once you understand your current position and your angle, you set those goals, and you work backwards from there.

Number two, is you gotta execute on the fundamentals.

Companies need to take a hard look in the mirror and understand where their strengths are, where their weaknesses lie, and what is their current perception by their customers.

It's going to require stepping into the shoes of their own customers and understand what their basic needs are.

These basic needs need to be met at every single turn.

Just like we were talking about a minute ago, with customer experience, customers aren't looking for a grand gesture at every single stage, They want their basic needs being met on a consistent basis.

If you're executing on the fundamentals, you'll rarely have any bad experiences, and you won't have to create 12 positive experiences to make up for that one negative.

Leslie, you need to establish a culture of continuous improvement.

Like I said before, I would describe myself as a continuous learner.

Businesses really need to internalize this.

Business transformation is an ongoing project and not a one-off initiative.

To make sure that this initiative never dies, it's really important to create a culture within your organization that never settles.

It always looks for ways to become better, to improve the customer experience.

You want to embed this mentality into the DNA of your organization, because it will transcend any physical asset you have and separate you from all of your competitors.

Now, what's starting with the end in mind, hindsight is 2020, it's really easy to look back at the end and see how all the dots are connected, but you will eventually ask yourself, could things have gotten better?

Unless you really know where you're going, you'll never know when you've gotten there, or even what that destination is.

So at this stage of your transformation, you need to define your starting point, and your end point.

Your endpoint being your goals need to be clearly communicated and defined throughout your entire organization.

Everyone needs to be on the same page. So they are working in lockstep towards these goals.

From there, you work backwards into where you are in your current position today.

Now, this doesn't mean that every single step needs to be defined down to the most minute detail, but the steps should be starting to take place.

The next thing that you need to do is you need to formalize your success criteria.

It's great to have goals, but, really, what are they, without any metrics to evaluate against?

You need to establish a launch date for your transformation, assign your stakeholders, and put in black and white.

What will make this transformation successful?

The only way you will know if the time the money and everyone's attention was worth investing into this, is if you have something to compare it against.

So, make sure those goals are put down, that everybody knows what they are and how to work towards.

Now, the first customer example I have today, I'm going to be talking about ..., who's one of the world's largest manufacturing companies. They began their business transformation with Cigna View of just a few years ago.

Their ultimate goal by working with us was to be the factory of the future.

They knew that what they were doing today was inefficient.

They had no way of recording what was what was happening, or the changes in variations between all their plants. And they knew this needed to change.

If they were becoming to become the factory of the future, they had to change how they operated on a daily basis.

So once they did that and defined their angle, they needed to understand where they are.

They understood that currently they were pretty process immature.

They knew that all of their regions and plants globally used the same processes, but all had different regional variations.

These regional variations weren't being tracked or monitored.

There's no way to know if they could improve their operations.

So, it was at this moment that ... identified their starting point, like I said, where they weren't mature in their process management at all.

The next step, what they decided to do, was ... began to utilize ... to put all of their processes into one place.

They created that single source of truth, where they would create and document all their processes, and be able to point all their employees into one area.

So, now, then, not only were mapping the standardized processes, they were mapping the regional variations as well, and making sure they could point older employees to one area.

Now, this is a big undertaking for a company, so, especially when you have global plants and you have one process, spirit, and transformation team, conducting all of this, you don't want to be going to all, or you don't want that team being traveling to all of the different plants across the globe.

So, what they did was they took advantage of their global workforce.

They trained and enabled all of their employees at the different plants to be able to map the process variants.

They were the on the ground workers who understood the differences and the deviations from the global standardized processes.

So, ... went and enabled their workers to map these processes and to onboard their users so that they knew the one area to go to, to follow all of the process variations.

Today, ...

continuing their process transformation journey with Sigma of You being there single source of process truth globally, where all of their processes are defined and have hundreds of users going into the collaboration hub in order to observe and use the processes on a daily basis.

Now, as we dive into the second key goal, I have a quote from the late great Kobe Bryant.

So Coby, Brian, understood at a young age that he was faster than most players, but not the fastest.

He knew that he was more skilled than most players, but not the most skilful.

But the most important thing cobie knew was that these advantages were temporary throughout MBA careers.

But the one thing that never diminished were the fundamentals of basketball.

Know, if you can master the skills, not only one day where he does be superior to all of his other competitors, but he would, any did is extend his playing career well beyond that of all of his rivals.

The same can really be said for all companies.

If you don't master the fundamentals, you're not going to be in business very, very well.

And that goes not that goes for mastering the fundamentals, but not only your internal operations, but for your customer experiences as well.

So Que Aflac, one of the world's largest insurance providers with thousands of workers and hundreds of software systems. Aflac at a difficult time consolidating information into one area.

And so it was a first step in their transformation journey.

Aflac, decided for all their business processes in one area in ....

Over the course of several months, slash core BPM and team started to create their business processes within ... process manager.

Once this entire process hierarchy was complete, they began to ****** users to the signal, the collaborations help, in order for them to comment, to understand, and to be able to put these processes in practice in their daily operations.

This not only made it easy for employees to find the right information quickly, but it's significantly mitigated any process, confusion or deviation internally.

The next part of athletics equation was established in internal ... champions.

So with a company the size of aflac, it takes a lot more than one team to get transformation initiative off the ground.

They turned their size into their advantage, though.

What they did was, they began to train employees from various internal teams in BPM and ....

These users were then dubbed ...

champions, and went on and trained others from different internal teams, widening the effects of their transformation.

Today, Aflac, as a full-blown certification process for users to become trained and certified in not only BPM in ...

view as well, they will not distribute a license to any of the users until they have completed their ... BPM entering it.

They want these license system, and they're not just going to hand it out to end it out.

With the time and energy, each of their employees infests into being certified, they know the stake in the game.

They have skin in the game in terms of the success of athletics, business transformation, which is going to want them to work harder and see the succeed. They don't want their efforts and being trained to, to happen for nothing.

As a culmination of all of this, it's resulted in not only a significantly significant increase in employee operational feedback, but as such, overall, customer experience has increased, and been enhanced by there, operations becoming more simplified, and users be more knowledgeable by getting the right information as quickly as possible.

Now, the last of the three key takeaways is to establish a culture of continuous improvement.

So, we've all heard the phrase. It takes a village.

It drives home the fact that nothing is ever accomplished alone.

No, Op's optimal solution is found in the Sun and the same really happens for business transformation.

It requires a shift in the mentality of your entire culture and your entire organization in order to be successful.

When creating their culture continuous improvement, the Prudential Company identified three things.

They needed to use the wisdom of the crowd.

Just like I just, like ...

Aflac previously, Prudential knew that it was essential to gain as much widespread support as possible.

They not only wanted to hear the feedback from the multiple perspectives of their maternal stakeholders, They wanted to be able to understand why it was important to these users that they be part of the transformation.

They provided their colleagues, the platform, to have their voices heard in their VPN team, listen.

They took these cumulative perspectives, and really were able to take a hard look at the efforts they were doing, why they are reporting, and how to adapt and to shift to meet the growing need.

This collaborative mindset helped break down the silos of information within Aflac, allowing different teams and individuals to connect points of information seamlessly.

Otherwise, would it that would have taken long lead times to be able to connect just by the silos of information and tens of hundreds of systems internally that they have.

Now that their information was flowing morefield freely, prudential's operations began to simplify and their customer base took notice.

The last point that Prudential identified and easily the most important is to have patience.

None of these things are going to happen overnight.

It's going to be challenging because a business transformation is no small undertaking.

But Prudential knew that if this was done methodically with patience and attention to detail, they knew that their culture would be something that was more valuable than any physical resource they had.

They knew that this was going to make sure that they stay a Fortune 500 company and that ultimately with the enhanced operations that they reaped.

They're called their customers who would have the best experience possible continuing to make them a top choice among their client base.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with everyone today. I really hope to be able to do this again, in person soon, I hope you all have a nice day.

Kevin, very good review of the, you know, this critical steps on successful transformations.

I have one of the questions that, that came up as you're presenting this in the very structured way, in a very clear way, what it takes to be successful.

In your experience, working with multiple organizations, you know, a lot of organizations talk about business transformation. And certainly, digital transformation is, is involved right now, because of the, the acceleration of technologies that we have experienced, and certainly cov, it has accelerated the deployments faster.

But what do you see as your work across organizations? Well, it's maybe the most common mistakes that organizations make on their transformation journeys.

What you see is, as an impediment to their success, because the data that we have access so far as the most transformations have not been successful including digital transformations, what do you see as kind of common failure modes that those organizations may be experiencing?

The, the biggest mistake that customers make is doing it in a vacuum, like a really try to drive home and my presentation, is that you need to get as much widespread support in your transformation as as early as possible from the top down. You need to make sure that you've got multiple perspectives. Because the transformation is a companywide operation. It's not going to be something that's only going to effective a few teams. The ultimate goal is to, to change the company as a whole. And with that being said, you need stakeholders from every single part of the organization. You need to understand, what does a transformation mean to that? What do their end goals look like? What are their current team goals? And you need a meld all of that together.

The more that people feel invested in a transformation like this, the harder and longer that they're going to work to make it successful.

Know, you've talked about this during your presentation, I thought, was? Well, a very important point, talking about the patients that's necessary to see this transformation through, and I would add that there is, there is a need for resilience, which is this ongoing effort in out there, there.

There isn't there, there are typically, no, no, although, a few quick wins, but it takes time for a vision to flourish. William Fuller, and many others here have have caught on to that concept, and they think it's a very powerful concept that you're emphasizing there.

And, specifically, William Fuller says, It's encouraged. It's encouraging to hear, acknowledge, just say that things don't happen overnight.

That's, that's very good here, but the question is, how begat organizational leaders to heed that advice? because a lot of organizational leaders are looking for a quick fix on a lot of different things.

So, I'll, do, you get, the, this, senior leaders in your organization, she realized that, you know, it takes time, it takes patience for some of these things to come to fruition.

I think resilience is a, is a great point there as well, because it's, it's challenging this is going to take years. And really, if you're looking at a shorter timeframe months before you see kind of any fruit of it, it takes a lot of investment upfront in terms of time. In terms of diligence. Getting people on board, getting them on the same foundation in terms of understanding why this is important for the future, because, again, you're transforming your business to adapt to, to the future. Just in that sense, it's, it's not going to be overnight. That's, the first thing I say to all of my customers, is, that when you're starting this initiative.

You set the expectation that, especially with your stakeholders, that it's not going to be done in a week, It's not going to be done in a day. When you're doing a whole cultural shift.

We can just see from from history itself, none of that happens overnight. So I tried to set that expectation with my clients right off the bat is that there's gonna be a lot of hard work before you, you really see the fruits of your labor. Another thing I tried to do is connect my customers with other customers that have been doing this for a little bit longer, so that they can understand that this takes years of consistent efforts. So, really, whenever I connect members of the ... Community together to learn and to share best practices, I always do that, because it's much more powerful hearing it from someone else than hearing it from me.

That's excellent. The, these three cases that you share with us, there are three organizations. There are those are great examples.

First of all, not a very good deal of their journeys and how they had, you know, different targets to hit, and the different visions, and the, and the starting with the end in mind, as you pointed out, and they had their own path chugach.

It should that, Anne So Jay, Bill, Aflac, and Prudential are good. examples of organizations who have been consistent with their purpose. If you will over a period of time.

Do you, what was in place in this organizations, in your opinion that made their journey more successful versus other organizations who embark on a digital transformation journey, or a business transformation journey or a process transformation journey?

And then they, they lose their way in that process. What do you think is unique about? If we're if there is something To glance and learn from you know gebo Aflac and Prudential as a group. Is? There are some unique characteristics there that you think made them successful.

I would say just from those three companies, they've all had buy in from from higher ups within the organization. It wasn't just one team that wanted to embark on this.

It was the fact that they had people from the BP level up seeing the need for business transformation, understanding the value of processes, and documenting those, monitoring, those, understanding the deviations, that has made them all successful. And that's where I think each one of them has created this culture of continuous improvement, process excellence, that has taken them further. They've all been doing this, their digital transformation and really, their BPM emperor practice for three plus years. Each of them. So again, goes back to that. Taking time, it's going to be a lot of time and investments.

But they've had the backing from higher ups within their organizations to really make sure that they're getting the resources that they need to be successful, so that it's not just a one-off initiative that dies after awhile because they don't see any benefits in the short-term. They have the higher ups be able to go to bat for them, set the expectation with other teams and leaders internally that this is going to take awhile. And because they've had that support, and they've been given that leash to really make sure that they gave the time and resources to get this off the ground. And now they're starting to see the benefits and continuing to get that upper management support.

That's that's absolutely critically important. They seem to have established some level governance as well. I just want to check if that's correct. That they established some, some basic governance on how this should be done in the organization. It was governance an important component of what they did, or not Really?

Absolutely, I think when you're dealing with any kind of software tool, governance is key because you don't want to just be handing out access to the tool or licenses to everybody who just says they want to try it because somebody could try it once and never want to be using it again, but they're taking up that license. And what it all rolls back to it with Sass, it's it's each license costs money.

So organizations need to be mindful of their budget, especially today with a pandemic, but also Sass being as powerful as it is.

It's even more of an optimal solution with everybody being disbursed today. So I would say governance is, is huge in terms of understanding who has a license, what they're using it for. I know jubal, Aflac, and Prudential all with global users of the tool.

They really need to be understanding, OK, who's using it for what is being put?

Is it being put to the most value it could be? So definitely governance in terms of license management.

As well as who is putting the content in to the system and the processes. Whose green the processes? Are they the best ones in the most knowledgeable to be create those processes?

Who else can add value to the feedback here, if there is a regional deviation for the processes?

So, what I usually see is that there will be users across the globe, are a lot of my clients, especially these three, What they will always have a poor BPM and team. Who are the admins up there, signoff your workspace, and are able to really kind of maintain and have that level of control.

So that information, really, false information, isn't being put into the system.

That's excellent.

I wanna go into the customer express that you highlighted early on, you know, quote from Steve Jobs, the reverse engineering of the customer experience, our way of developing, you know, great products and services. I think that's, uh.

Very important, insight for everyone should keep in mind. I can imagine that a certain organizations that can be quite challenging, though, because I can take ... as an exemplar. Well-known, large, global manufacturer. A large percentage of the employees, ..., don't have a good feel for based on how where they operate and how they operate. They. They may be quite disconnected from the customer experience on how do you build that customer express mindset, or someone who may be deep into operations. Here is about some tips that you may have to choose to really extend that customer experience mindset throughout the organization.

Yeah, and I think that's a great question, Because there, there are so many employees that out of each company that are customer facing, And I think that the thing that I drive home is that everybody has a customer. It may not just be in the traditional sense. So I kind of look at it in some ways where you could be a manufacturer, and really you're working on those. Whatever it may be, building something every single day. You could see your boss is almost your customer. What is going to make it easier for them to do their job? How is it going to make you look good? To really make operations efficient, to find something? To find a way to do something better, faster, that ultimately make your boss's job easier, make him shine, which is ultimately going to benefit you.

So, it's understanding that everybody has a customer, again, it's just not in the traditional sense, is who will be your end user identifying that, and how to make their jobs or their experiences easier.

one final question, Kevin, that I have is that, we are so appreciative that we have solution providers who, like you, who come here, and talk about what are you doing Is thought leadership? You're sharing insights, and what really works, and sometimes, what doesn't work, So to guide other organizations and leaders in successful paths.

And so you don't come here and you're trying to sell product and service from Cigna, Fuel and The and we appreciate that because you know, we want to understand the context. We understand how the principle should apply before we get into tools and methodologies. But, having said that, give me a little bit of a glimpse of what ... offers, because now that you kind of kind of laid out the landscape, I'm curious about what type of tools and systems signals you find useful and Helpful for customers. Who are embarking on journeys like the ones you have share with us?

Millimeter, hm.

Yeah.

And, for me, I never see any, and he's, any technology, as a one size fits all for business transformation. It's going to take different systems that are all connected together, sharing information to really elevate that company to the next level in its transformation. For ..., at least, we focus, like I said, in the beginning, on business process management. So we have our process manager that helps create and define your processes within what area. And once those are kind of ready to be published to the masses, we have our collaboration hub where users can go in, who are not maybe the design experts, but they're there to consume the processes, understand how to get from point A to point B in a process. As well as all the details that go into it.

So that they can understand, without any interpretation, what they need to do with each step of the process in order for it to be successful. We also have a workflow acceleration tool that helps do task routing and task automation, so that, rather than manually assigning a test to to a user, the workflow automatically assigns it to them in one area.

So that they can go in and understand what task needs to be done after the self, the previous task. And who was responsible for that task? And this also connects to our process manager, as well.

And we also have our process intelligence tool, which is our process mining tool. And really, what, the way that breaks down is understanding, OK, this is how your processes have run. In the past, these are all the different cases. This is how somebody is taking your process from point A to point B, and understanding, OK, what is the difference between what has been executed versus what you've actually mapped out your process to be.

And being able to understand those differences, because it, as much as we want to say, we can map a perfect process. There's always going to be deviations. There's always going to be ways to improve. And that's really what our Process intelligence tool helps you do, is identify, OK, this is what people are doing on an everyday basis. Maybe we should rethink our processes to be able to adapt to those variations. Or be more stringent in terms of helping people adhere to the standardized process.

Really, kind of that is our entire suite. And, again, it's focused on process management, and management into making sure that you not only have one area for all of your processes to be mapped and consumed. But really monitor those and understand the value that they're providing to your organization.

Fantastic. Kevin, Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and insights of our global audience today. We really appreciate you taking the time to do that.

Happy to be here, thank you very much for having me.

Thank you, Ladies and gentlemen.

That was Kevin Fluffy from ..., Sharing, the journey of business transformation culture, business, and digital transformation, across multiple organizations, with different business models. Really interesting insights provided by Kevin and the team. So we appreciate that from Signoff, you were going to be taking a break now. And at the top of the hour, we're going to be heading to Namibia, where we are going to be talk about financial services.

We're going to have the head of digital transformation off, F and beat them, maybe a statute, the souls, share his insights on digital transformation in the future, in a simplified approach. So join us at the back at the top of the hour of the top of the hour with a global financial leader who is going to share the journey of culture of business and digital transformation at F and B Namibia. So, I'll see you back soon.