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June 22, 2021

RPA & Intelligent Automation Live - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT: Overcoming Obstacles to Accelerate your Automation Program

Courtesy of Uipath's Brandon Nott, SDI's John Delligatti, and Merck's Jonathan Wong below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Overcoming Obstacles to Accelerate your Automation Program' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at RPA & Intelligent Automation Live.

2-Jun-16-2021-02-22-21-02-PM

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Session Information:

Overcoming Obstacles to Accelerate your Automation Program

It is no secret that RPA can dramatically accelerate your digital transformation initiatives, or that it can scale your business operations overnight, or how it can de-risk initiatives by simplifying your compliance obligations with repeatable, auditable processes…

The burning question leaders are faced with is no longer ‘can I get value from Automation,’ but rather ‘am I getting enough value?’ Companies with established Unattended Automation practices are flocking to Attended Automation and Citizen Developer programs to unlock an entirely new level of business outcomes.

In this session, we’ll bring on industry leaders who have expanded their automation programs to include Attended Automation and Citizen Development.  We’ll examine how employees think about automation and (86% are willing to use automation / 80% are willing to become citizen developers) and how COEs can run top-down automation programs while simultaneously embrace and leverage the bottoms-up contributions of their employees.

Session Transcript:

His car coming from Birmingham in the UK today and it's Mark ..., Mark McGregor will be familiar to many regular attendees of our events. He has share with us on Enterprise architecture, process management, process, mining. And should they? It turns his attention to customer experience with over 25 years of experience across vendors, analysts, farms, and end user organizations. Mark always has interesting sites to share, and I always look for jar discussions because he speaks tromp practitioners stamp will, not just from a purely theoretical standpoint.

So, Mark, always a pleasure to have you here with us. Looking forward to your presentation. Very much looking forward to our engagement later on with our global audience on our live Q&A as well.

Great. Thanks as an absolute pleasure, too.

Be here with everyone.

Thank you again for those find words, and, yeah, I'm very much looking forward to our discussions later on, and I'm sure we're gonna get some good stuff going on. And, so, interesting there that, in the introduction, you highlighted that intersection between the people, process, and technology stuff.

And, just for the benefit of our audience, know, we have these great discussions, Jose and I, but we never see what the other one's going to be presenting until you guys are seeing it live. So, always, great fun.

But, that's exactly where I'm coming from, that intersection between people, process, and technology for today's sessions.

Because, across all of the sessions, today, tomorrow, and Thursday, we're going to hear a lot. Whether it's from vendors, about great technology, where the technology is moving to, and this intelligent automation. You know, high for automation, low code, no code, your code. My code, Fred, because everybody's code RPI and all the automation technology.

But, you know, all the automation technology in the world isn't gonna savors if we apply to doing, let's not say, the wrong things, but, let's just not say, the best things. So, for today's session, I wanted to share a little bit about why we should be focusing on customer excellence, if we want to deliver long-term value from those automation efforts.

And here on the screen, you've got a book cover of a book that I wrote with Steve Towers. And it's pretty incredible to screen has not been shared just yet. So, if you could just make sure that's coming through.

OK, I will do it again. Thank you. There we go.

We're good to go.

Excellent. So, my apologies and thanks for interjecting that I was like, so, yeah.

So, the screenshot that I've got here is the book that thrive that Steve ... and I wrote. And, would you believe it was 15 years ago?

How to succeed in the Age of the customer?

And it's just so fascinating that here we are 15 years on, and yet, still, we have, let's say, whether it's the operational excellence groups, whether it's the technology groups, whether it's other groups within business, still questioning whether a customer centric customer first strategy is the right one, still chasing what I think is some of the wrong things.

So, what do I mean by customer excellence?

We go. So, I'm suggesting that customer excellence is your needle style.

Now, you know, we've all seen people using bits of the quote from the Alice in Wonderland. you know, well, gee, which why should I go?

Well, you know, anywhere is going to take you somewhere.

And you're gonna get there, if you will lineup, but whether that's where you want to go.

We don't really know.

So, when we're thinking about automation, are we really thinking about the destinations that we want to get to the same, that is not just with automation, with operational excellence and everything else.

So if we think about a customer experience OpEx, business process management, supply, chain, optimization, RPA, and so these are all going to take us somewhere.

The challenge is, within our organizations, is that often, that each taking us somewhere different.

Because what's going on in the customer experience team is disconnected from what's going into the OpEx team, which is not the same as the supply chain team, which is not the same as the guys doing RPA.

So, actually, we're heading off in a whole bunch of different directions, and then wondering why we're not really making serious difference.

So, I'd like to suggest that by taking on the idea and the thought processes behind customer excellence, that actually you can help make sure that everyone is moving to a common destination, though that common destination should be your new North Star.

Screenshot - 2021-06-22T191937.995So, let me just share with you, the working definition. And as you can see, oh, you may not have noticed there in the in the copyright note.

This is some work that started two years ago, with some of you may have seen some of the presentations from another former Gartner Analysts gym sign-up.

Very good friend of mine, Weev, been friends for over 20 years.

I'm working with him and the former CEO of Founder of Scenario Gary Decker.

This is something we started to pull some of that we're building on some of the stuff that came from the earlier book.

So if we see the Customer Excellence is a business practice aimed at leaders to implement and continuously improve all end to end business processes, to deliver on parallel customer experiences, OK?

It's underpinned by the concept of customer first.

Yes, we know we need to be operationally efficient.

Yes, we need to have compliant business operations.

Tend to do these things and be effective, and Customer Excellence is going to draw upon a whole bunch of different things from CX, OPEC's, from BPM, using a blend of those management concepts and software. So, that's, that's what we mean by customer excellence.

Let's think about, why is it so important?

Now, I can't tell what industries many of you were in, but just, let's take a little look if you were just a normal every day.

You know, big box bank, you're spending an absolute fortune on automation.

But how many traditional banks spoken of in the same light as the fintechs?

How many of those banks are still seen as disruptors, as innovative?

That's creative. And the people that we go, wow, they are so good.

They look after me so, well, very few and almost nowhere, because much of that automation has been focused on effectiveness.

We're focusing on reducing pain for our organization.

So if we think about it, we're chasing all of this automation to be highly effective.

Sorry, highly efficient.

But we're not looking at it effectively from the customer's point of view.

So we're simply going to move from dying slowly, to dying quickly, sorry, from dying quickly to dying slowly.

We're still actually going to die as a bank Or as an insurance company, or as a manufacturing company, or indeed, as a retailer.

Yeah, Just reducing the costs of big box retail, I'm running a retail store is not going to enable me to go and compete with innovation.

Actually, I need to focus on being effective.

And this means focusing on customer outcomes, focusing on people on the outside as to what they want to be effective, and then looking at saying, how do I deliver those experiences efficiently?

Then I can not only thrive survive. I can thrive. So it's that combination.

So, the focus, interestingly, on the effectiveness, means that the worst case we survive, the best case we thrive.

If all we're doing is focusing these automation efforts around efficiency, then all we're doing is changing the speed at which our organization is likely to go out of business. So, we can look at this through a slightly different lens. And some of you may have seen me using this slide before.

And ask yourself, OK, are you just doing things?

Are you doing the right things?

Or are you doing things right.

So you might say, the automation is helping me go from doing things which were inefficient, maybe manual, maybe using other systems.

And I can make them much better.

But it's only doing things right.

A real worry that I have for many of you is when you look at combining things like task mining, with things like automation, you're just able to do the wrong things faster than ever before.

Btog CTAThere was nothing there, in terms of, Whoa, hang on, let's analyze, is the current process, or the current system, delivering the outcomes that customers want.

Because if it's not, then no amount of automation is going to fix that, right?

And in fact, any, if anything, you can institutionalize it such that it becomes harder to see an fix.

Now, you might be saying, Well, that's OK, but, you know, our objective is to lower cost. And if we want to lower costs, then these things are going to do it.

And I totally agree.

But one of the things about taking that customer access perspective, because you can achieve what Jim, many years ago call the Triple Crown because when you look at it through the lens of the customer.

And you deliver better and consistent experiences for the customer, you will find that, as a result of the increased customer satisfaction, you're likely to increase revenues.

And the funny thing is, you will lower the costs.

So, by looking at it through the lens of the customer, you can still get the cost reductions that you're looking for, But also, you're going to increase revenues, increased customer satisfaction, and we all know that satisfied customers keep spending tend to spend more.

And tell other people. So, there's a whole bunch of things that go on there.

Just say, and I'm not saying that the stories are not out there.

But when it comes to intelligent automation and the application of these technologies, I don't see too many cases where someone says, Boy, you know, you should go and buy with Company X, because, Whoa, those guys are amazing.

Know, I had such great experiences and it's all because they put it in this obscure automation and it's made my life so much easier.

I can't speak for you guys as an audience, but what I say is, in many cases, where people have taken these sorts of approaches, actually, what they've done, if I think about it in, in the utility sector. And, to a certain extent, in the banking sector, it seems that actually, it's just pushing the work outside of the organization and onto the customer.

And as an example of, you know, automation, not cutting it, will give you the an example of an ally.

So, Flight goes mechanical system is really clever, understands where the passengers are going to go, and it automatically rewrote the passengers puts them on different planes.

Fantastic idea, except if you're trying to get from Berlin to Birmingham than simply booking you on the next flight to ..., and then, having your second flight from Zurich leaving 36 hours later, without any regard to, well, what's happening to the hotel? Bearing in mind, you don't live in Zurich.

It's not overly intelligent.

And for many passengers, they're not even discover that and something I'm hearing.

Now, interestingly enough, when we take the people side, we started engaging with the lufthansa team, particularly as a frequent flyer, in the in the lounges, or with the frequent fires, off the shelves, so pretty dumb system, isn't it?

Yeah, you're right. Well, what should we should we do? Should we just simply reroute you via Brussels and get you that tonight?

or should we route you through ... and we'll organize the hotel?

So smart people will always get round a dumb process, but their IT people will tell you, that was intelligent automation, because it was making their life so much easier for Rebooking, but not through the eyes of the customer.

And, interestingly enough, many of you will have seen that in the days when we could fly, um, that the frequent flyers or the most expensive flyers can get round the system. They can talk to those staff that consoles them.

But, interestingly enough, would someone ever become a frequent flyer if their first experiences were being dumped in a country that they weren't expecting, or they weren't able to speak to someone?

So, think about the whole thing through the eyes of the customer.

So, customer excellence means raising the ball, couple of different ways.

So.

If we just look at it in terms of the classic stuff, we've gone from customer support, we've gone through customer success. We're now into the paradigm of saying, Well, gee, it's all about customer experience, customer experience.

But actually, very few organizations that are talking about customer experience, in my opinion, or delivering on customer experience.

Because what they're really doing is actually interpreting customer experiences.

How do I optimize the sales funnel?

How do I get you to spend your money quicker?

Customer experience, Well, it's all making it easy to take the money, as opposed to making it easy to deliver consistent experience.

So, customer excellence takes a slightly different tack.

And he's combining customer experience and operational excellence.

Because customer success or customer excellence is really about delivering amazing service every time, through every touch point. However, the customer chooses to engage with you.

And it's that consistency that so often the problem.

Because if you talk to some of the Forester guys, they will tell you that they too find it incredible that the customer experience teams all safra and divorced from the operational excellence teams.

Well, it's the connectivity between the two that actually makes the difference.

And without dropping names of those that are always being dropped, think about it for a moment. Think about those.

High profile, tech oriented, online, marketplace oriented companies.

Do they separate the experience or the operational excellence or relate to deliver great experiences? Because that operationally excellent.

And so those things go together.

So, as we go through today, obviously, we don't have lots of time, but I'm going to be sharing a whole bunch of graphics if you're interested in using them in whatever ways for your own purposes, and reach out, and in touch, And I'm happy to share some of these with you.

So, another way that I want you to look and think about, whether it's the automation projects that you're working on or really make the difference, Here's what this one, what I call the zones of customer excellence.

So, you know, is it poor service isn't just the expected service delivering great service when it comes to my doing business with you.

Is it just difficult, yeah, expectedly difficult, Oh, wow!

There's no pain at all, Amazing service.

Getting people up into what I call the zone of advocacy.

I just want you to think about and by the way, for this one, this also applies to any vendors that are watching.

Think about our customers.

How many of our customers, if we're lucky, or existing, riding the century? That zone of tolerance?

Yeah, I know they're a tech company. I expected the software to be full of bugs and they didn't disappoint.

It's full of bugs.

Well, it's not as easy as it could be, but, you know, I can make it do what I want. So actually, I'm gonna put the product in the zone of tolerance.

Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (4)-1Is it a case of saying, and for me, this is my experience of retail banking, is, Hey, you know what?

The service is poor.

And there is pain. It's not necessarily real pain.

Put that some pain, and it's the zone A transaction. Don't bother trying to build a relationship with me, mister Bank Bank.

Don't bother contacting me to sell the products. This is a zone of transaction. I've got an account, I put my money in, I take my money out, and I'll leave me alone.

She don't want to engage with your organization, pestle.

I just want to use what I need to use.

If I contrast that I'm forgive me for anyone that said we tell the story before with a coffee chain was principally here in the UK.

But I know they're in a few places in the US now called ..., um, where they give incredible service.

And my definition of no pain and great service. You can say, well, there's a coffee shop, you know, how do you say, Well, yeah.

Sometimes the coffee's too strong.

Or maybe notice how does that one, or maybe I just don't make it well.

And you simply walk up and say, she's beige book, it's gone. They make the next one.

Nothing is too much trouble for them.

So actually get it right.

As another example, and this was one that came up last week in the conversation, way back in the, in the early nineties, because I'm too old and gray, assuming has left his right.

I worked selling some services.

I was selling some services or trying to, to an organization I hadn't sold to.

And eventually I managed to make the small sale.

I was really pleased, and that led to a second small site.

But with the second small sale, there was a bit of a problem.

Something went wrong in the delivery, and so the customer called me, said, Look, I don't really know how to handle this situation. I know that, you know, we've got a month's notice on this situation, but, you know, it's really not going to work out. And I said, Well, OK, well, I can be with you 2.5 hours.

I got in my car.

I drove to this client, and I resolve the situation such that they didn't have to wait a month. They were actually able to resolve it that day at zero cost to tonight.

four weeks later, the guy called me, and they require some more product or services.

And we delivered them.

Wala.

They gave us a sole supply agreement.

They gave us a soul supply agreement, say, well, you know, it isn't until something goes wrong, and we'll see how things being handled go wrong, and how quickly it's put right that we realized that, wow, there was a difference between organizations.

Oh, And by the way, I've also had a word with a number of my colleagues in other places around the country and suggested that they should do business with you as well.

I went that way.

Know, the zone of advocacy, that's really where we want people.

So customer excellence is that combination of customer experience with operational excellence. It's there. So not just delight but amaze customers. And it's when we get together.

And if we can use automation as a part of that, great.

But we shouldn't be automation for the sake of it, never forget, the people are an important piece of the jigsaw. We're gonna come back to that.

So, building on those, what we started to put together was something which I call the customer excellence framework.

So, I suspect most of you on the session here today won't have seen this.

So, this is a framework for excellence when it comes to delivering, Gee, how do I deliver those customers and what you say?

We have five elements: persona, journey, process, technology, and people, and we need all of the five elements working together in harmony, if we want to deliver true success.

And then we have a life cycle, So we go through discovery, analysis, design, validation, implement, etcetera.

If we're not looking at the technology, in the context of, Well, hang on, who's it for, what's the journey they're going through?

What are the processes that we have in place or needs have in place?

and now, what is the technology that we need to support those processes and enable our people, then we're missing whole great chunks, so let me just take a couple of minutes and give you a little more insight into that.

So, when we're looking at personas, um, we're looking at stylize groups of people. So, yes, customers is the obvious one.

My caution to you is never be afraid to use the other variants, so users, citizens, patience, don't make the mistake of just using the word customer.

So, when I'm talking about customer in the context of this presentation, I'm meaning the people outside of your organization to keep your organization in existence.

Primarily through spending their money with you.

But it could also be by voting for you from a political or governmental point of view.

People are inside your organization.

They are not customers.

They can be colleagues, they can be users, and we see this a lot in the Agile world were, suddenly we talk about, oh! Well, I'm working for customers, Well. No. Actually, you're not. You're working for people inside these colleagues, and their users. So, these often user journeys, which, leads us into the second column, which is taking that journey centric view.

So, often, when we talk about customer journeys, people are only looking actually at buying journeys.

Well, what about the service journey issue to resolution?

What about when we're looking at staffing, we talk about an onboarding journey for an employee.

But what about believing journey?

And then, of course, we can also have other types of journeys, whether they're system journeys or user journeys.

Yes.

You could say, well, actually, there's no real difference between a user and a customer journey. They're really the same thing.

They all, but they're coming from a totally different perspective.

When you look at customer journey, then often many of the steps in your customer journey occur outside of your organization. I looked someone up on the Internet, or I looked them up on the Yellow Pages, or I'm walking down the street.

These aren't part of your process.

They all, however, as to the third column, the connected processes, the processes that deliver those experiences, or are triggered by those customer actions.

So, we need to have that separation.

Now, whether we look at them through the lens of value chains, whether we think about them as operational processes, or management processes, or indeed, decisions and roles, because the fascinating thing that I've found over the years is so much process simplification can take place without a great deal of analysis.

Simply looking at who the customers or users are looking at the journeys. They're going through and questioning the decisions. And rules often results in amazing degrees of simplification.

And actually, a lot of the systems that we might be building, we don't even need to build because actually that was easy.

Outmoded, outdated, or irrelevant decisions and rules taking place. Great swathes of costs can fall out of.

Once we have that understanding, now we can look and ask ourselves the question, the Civil War technologies are available, What do we have?

What do we need in order to deliver, enable, support, or manage those experiences, and what are we doing to monitor, manage them?

And then finally, gee, what does it mean for our organization or our people?

All we're rewarding them the right way.

one of the things that I always found fascinating over the years, it is the number of times that people will say to me, I don't understand it, I can't get these guys work, They won't work as a team. You, I've got my OpEx people, and my CX, people, my IT people. They're just not playing nicely together.

Nothing I do seems to get them working together in harmony.

I usually ask the same question.

How are they rewarded?

Is there a collective reward system that says, if the three things aren't working in harmony, then nobody picks up the bonus, The raise, promotion, whatever it is?

The also usually comes back as: Well. No, the rule will reward separately.

Well, therein lies the answer, behavior follows reward.

I'm rewarded for building an IT system regardless of whether it's fit for purpose.

Why do I worry about the purpose?

If I'm rewarded for delivering something on customer experience, why do I care whether it is operationally efficient?

Conversely, if my efficiency is what I'm rewarded on, no one's telling me to connect all those things together.

Customer excellence.

Winners are those that bring those things together and bring the rewards together and set common goals.

Because if you set common goals, and you set commun reward structures than most of the other noise or much of the other noise that we all deal with, it just goes away.

Screenshot (4)And actually, we don't have a problem to fix. It's one of those strange things about change management.

If we get out of the way, often, it'll sort itself out.

So the, the eight stages that I showed, look linear, but actually, there's a couple of things that, one, they loop round, so you go from the improvement background to discover.

So it's a continuum, but also, you'll, you'll look looping backwards as you go forward, because you start to validate something.

And you realize that some of the assumptions aren't quite working. So, you might need to go back to design and analysis, et cetera.

But the main thing to remember is that this is not prescriptive in saying how you should do design, or how you should analyze.

There's all sorts of different tools and techniques that each of you can use.

But if you're not following this life cycle, then you are missing a real treat because I'm going to make her a pretty arrogant statement that this life cycle is the most effective change life cycle you will ever come across And I wrote about this in the people centric process management book with end goals.

This life cycle is based on human change.

Through neuro-linguistic programming was based on some interviews that I was doing with Richard ... many, many years ago.

And if we think about it, your linguistic programming, whether it's directly from Granger and Bangalore, whether it's from the likes of Paul McKenna or a one on the other thousands of life coaches that there appear to be around the globe now are all based on those teachings.

So this life cycle has actually successfully transformed the live lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

So, for anyone that looks upon it and saying, well, you know, I'm not so sure about that, I think I know a better one.

I just throw out loud that says, if someone can share with one with me, this has had such a deep level of personal impact, and I'd be interested to, to learn and see more.

So, what the framework isn't?

Is it not an absolute method? It's not prescriptive.

It's not aimed at replacing things like Lean, six Sigma, TQM, et cetera.

It's a thinking framework to combine with other methods and tool.

It's a guy to help frame your mindset, and, to be honest, to understanding why we've been successful, or why we might have been less successful than some of our projects along the way. Because we can look at it and ask, well, OK, which of those things didn't we do?

Did we myths one of the five elements?

Did we ignore a stage in the life cycle? And usually, by the way, the one that's ignored is the validation phase.

Now, if we put the effort into analysis, discovery, analysis, and design, then we say, great, we've done a lot, and now we're going to rush off and implement it.

It's amazing how many people don't go back, It'll say, Before we build it. I just want to check in with you.

This is what you said the problem was.

This is where we found the causes. This is what we think we're going to put in place to solve it.

Are you sure that's what you want us to do?

Do you want us to proceed? Has anything change, et cetera, et cetera?

If I had to pick one key stage of that, then that's the one that will save you a lot of heartache.

The other piece of it is it's a communication vehicle by which all parts of your organization can help make sure, but you're on the same page.

OK, so, taking a little look at tooling now, some of you have seen me use the next couple of slides before, I've used them in different ways, and I'm going to use them slightly differently today.

So.

Over the next three days, as you listen, and you talk about RPA, you talk about intelligent automation.

You know, as I've been talking about, ...

doesn't exist as an island, So, ask yourself a question.

How well have you discovered the processes, or how well, have you mind the journeys or the processes? Have you simulating what the real impact?

So, yeah, and there's all sorts of things that you will learn or need to think about.

So, for example, if I take process mining as a technology, how many of the vendors actually combine full simulation with the process mining?

The answer is actually not many, unless they're linking it with modeling.

So, if they've got modeling a mining, inter-connected, you know, I mean, things like, BP ran, the star modeling, et cetera, then we can start to do broad based simulation, we can simulate resource, we can simulate better timing, We can test our theories, which is different from some of the simulation that says, well, OK, are a predictive simulation? I can predict If these things have happened based on history, this is what's going to happen in the future.

So standalone process mining can do a lot in terms of that predictive behavior, but it doesn't necessarily help you simulate new behaviors, new resources.

And if I give you a specific pointer, then one of the areas that I frequently come across ace.

If we think about a discrete event install simulation, think about calendaring, assuming that we're not all having to work from home. Your building is potentially available, 24, 7.

Your staff may only be available, 9 to five.

Other equipment may be available at different. So, calendar needs to be specific to the resources. And often, when I see people working on approach the simulation, they say, I've got an average on an average on an average while that's less than average results.

So you need to be looking at each of these pieces and thinking about, is it the ideal?

Now, how hard you you need to work on it, and how deep you need to go, is going to depend on the desired outcome and the size of the problem.

Simple problems don't justify lots of stuff. But, hey, some of this stuff can be done pretty simply, pretty quickly on a lightweight level.

So.

Now on the right hand side, a lot of that focus has been around using RPA, Intelligent automation, ALP, whatever the systems to build the systems.

Now, whether we start from the left, by, understanding the processes that we need, whether we're going to capture them through mapping, whether we're then going to model, behaviors, ideals States, etcetera.

And then we're gonna go and build them.

Then running, monitoring, management, et cetera, or whether you want to start from the systems, and do system process discovery, because remember, with process mining, we're only discovering what's going on in the system. We're not discovering the whole process.

Um, we can get nearer to large parts of the process through toss mining than we can process mining.

But it still doesn't account for totally manual's situations.

Screenshot - 2021-06-22T191937.995So think about when we're looking at that automation piece, have you got the other pieces in place, whether that no heavyweight or whether they're lightweight, you're going to need all of those things together.

If you want to be delivering consistent, great, long term value for your customers and for your own organization.

And then just to finish up, and this is why I was smiling with Jose's introduction.

I think, you know, let's say we didn't rehearse this, but he knows I'm passionate about this.

I can't leave the session today without reminding you, that is people, not systems, define and deliver most customer experiences, and you need to work hard to make sure that you get everyone on the same page.

So whether you're thinking about your marketing design thinkers or external agencies, what's the operation's impacts of the customer experience? What can we realistically implement and roll out?

How does the ideal roadmap, from the process professionals, line of business managers, how are the processes, KPIs, and decisions impact?

How should process improvement initiatives take place? How do we get everyone excited for change?

Then, most importantly, everyone in the organization needs to know how, what they do contributes to the success of our customers, to delivering those experiences.

They need to have that ability to work out. How, what they can do to improve the customer experience.

They may need to understand why we need to change those processes.

No really good examples here of cigarette travel related.

Travel and banking related.

Bank managers no longer have the ability to make a lot of those loans decisions they used to because someone decided the system makes a better decision, which reduces the experience for the customer.

Once upon a time, it was really easy.

four, the desk personnel in hotels.

To comp this or change that, make instant changes and then suddenly at some stage, they were the authority was taken away.

I've got to go and get a manager, or the system says, I can only do this, the systems and the that we put in place, technically or non technically, often actually reduce the customer experience and reduce the involvement of people because they don't care.

So ignore people at your peril.

So I thought this was an interesting statistic when I saw it.

Wanted to go from Guide Spock, one point three trillion into transformation, this initiatives, 900 billion being wasted on failed programs.

The biggest failure that was identified was effectively not effectively communicating goals, strategy, and purpose with the employees.

It's incredible, isn't it?

900 billion, I wonder, how many hundred billion of that goes on building systems That didn't actually make a difference.

So finally, another way of looking at excellence is excellence. Equals everyone engaged.

As I say, does everyone know who the customers are?

Does everyone know what success is for the customers?

A little frightening maybe and it's just as well that we're virtual world.

But I can be pretty sure that if I open this up and pose the questions to some of the vendors that are presenting over this week, naturally ask them, what is success for the customer?

Bromley through the eyes of the customer. Some of them may not actually be able to tell us. They can tell me.

The problems they could solve would solve, should solve what other people have done, and how great the technology is, but they don't necessarily know what success looks like for the customer.

Do we know how what we do impacts customer success?

How do we make sure that we keep communicating effectively?

And is everyone's business success judged by excellence?

Because I can tell you from your customer's point of view, excellence is expected every day.

Every time.

Bye everyone, therefore you reach and make sure that everyone is empowered to deliver it.

Use the automation.

But never forget that it's still going to be a people business, At least, I hope it is.

And with that, I'm going to stop sharing and bring Jose back in.

Outstanding Mark, always a masterclass on whatever topic you focus on, because you have the depth and the breadth of experience of as a practitioner and leader in this field. So the first question that came up is actually a general question. Not so much about your session, but the overall sessions. Pedro ... is asking, you know, are we having access to this excellent presentation? So, Pedro, here, the good news. You're going to have access to all of this presentation because we're, as a as one of the nearly 3000 registered participants for this conference.

We will send to you all, sometimes, the next week or two, an e-mail. They'll have a link and password for all of the recordings of each one of the sessions. So, a great benefit of being a register participant in the conference and the excellent presentation. Mark. Thank you so much for that.

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We only have a couple of minutes here and then this was truly a masterclass from beginning to end on customer excellence And in the context of technology process, and people, like you said, I have a challenging question for you, which is that, you've laid out the case for customer excellence.

How do you build innovation on top of this? Because some will say, You cannot do that by just listening to your customers or even understanding the customer journey, which is a bit controversial. So, I'm curious about, how do you build innovation on this customer excellence? Yeah. No, I think that's a great one, Jose, and I think it goes back to what I was saying is that, you know, when I talk about the, identifying the personas and the journeys.

I didn't say they have to be your existing customers.

So, they are the customers that you would like?

So, I've identified that there's this group of people who I would love to be my customers and I've Identified that these are the, the journeys that they go through and now I've worked out that this is where, I can intersect or interject myself either in their journeys or another way. That we don't have time for days.

Or I can now see. who else is already on their journey.

The I should now be part of that ecosystem.

Because hey, you know what? I think about it as the moving company.

You know the removal company says well hang on a minute If I inject myself with the estate agent, undo, the storage of the point they want to stage and sell a house, I automatically. I am now going to win the business. When they come to move home.

So, I can use that customer journey understanding to create innovative products. You're absolutely right, Jose, and I think banking is perhaps the best example.

But if you just focus on your current customers, and the products or services that you've always done, then you're probably going to miss the opportunity to introduce innovation.

Well said, well said. No, I was actually going back to my notes here, and because some of the themes, of the, of the questions that were posed by the audience.

And I want to ask this one a little over time, but I still want to build this one in, um, that you build customer excellence as really the kind of the pinnacle. You have, you know, building on customer support your customer success to customer experience with lot being talked about that this days, to then building that you know top level of customer excellence.

The question is for almost an Economic Darwinism standpoint. You would expect that more organizations had come to this conclusion that were acting on it.

Well, what's going on? Why do you think so few organizations have done a good job at customer excellence? Do you think it's a lack of understanding vision? There are other reasons. What's the barriers that organizations are having to get to that well?

So, I think it's twofold. So, one, if we look at it from many of the audiences that we both speak to in terms of the operational excellence stuff.

Often, that's still very inward looking, focused on efficiency, either have not been able or been prevented from understanding who the customer is. Hey, that's not your job. Get away from that. So that's kept them down.

Then on the other side, when we look at the support success, then we get the big language syndrome.

Well, we're actually going to rejuvenate our customer success. I know, we'll call it customer experience.

Or, I guarantee you, and you, or you can guarantee made, if we have this conversation in two years time, or three, is someone at a conference is going to present their success story on customer excellence.

And I'm sorry, but you and I are going to be scratching our head.

Because there was nothing about them changing the underlying operational processes, it just became the new word for customer experience, because the old word got tired. And I think, that's my frustration. Yeah, we've both been around for a long, long time now, and it's really frustrating how the same stuff is just being given bigger. Intelligent automation. Sorry guys, you're all here.

Wasn't automation always to a degree intelligent, hyper automation? Yeah, but we keep using a bigger and bigger buzzword.

It's still fundamentally the same thing and I think that that's the frustrating part.

Well said, I have to mention that, you know, and it gets distorted over time to remark because, you know, I cannot tell you how many people I'm supporting these days, that I was talking about artificial intelligence and when I look at what they're doing, it's nothing more than multivariate regression analysis that has been around for decades. There's not the cognitive about what they're doing, but they're calling it AI.

But it's great to have you with us, Mark. It's a masterclass on customer excellence. Thank you for that. We are all better off by listening to someone who does it consistently and has done consistently for several, for a few decades now, not to talk too much about how long you've been around.

Ladies and gentlemen, please a big virtual applause to Mark McGregor and the from Birmingham UK to our global audience. Thank you so much for your expertise and insights, Marc.

Screenshot (4)I have the, the duty of following up on the shoes of greatness by sharing with you at the top of the hour how great enduring organizations and leaders is scale, um, technology, leadership and value in their organizations, in this times of rapid change and extreme uncertainty.

We're gonna look at the benchmark of great enduring organizations and leaders.

We're gonna look at the components of their extraordinary performance, and try to learn from them, and how we can apply that, those concepts in our organization. Is it about ideas? Is it about methods? Is it about technologists? Is it about people?

So, which components drives the performance of great, enduring organizations? A very small slice on, on the distribution curve of performance. The ones that they're very, and the top end of the distribution.

Is it about ideas? Masses? Technologists are people. Keep that question in mind. I'm going to ask you that question again. I'll see you all at the top of the hour when we're going to accelerate excellence and innovation together. Thank you.

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About the Author

more-Nov-24-2020-01-06-22-75-PMBrandon Nott,
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more-Nov-24-2020-01-06-22-75-PM,
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