Process Design – Page 6 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 6, 2022

An opportunity

Yesterday brought home to me just how ageist our banks have become.

My husband helps to run a small non-profit organisation. Just over a year ago, they were told their account wasn’t active enough and would be closed.

13 months later they are still trying to open a replacement.

Doing anything face-to-face is out of the question – the banks simply won’t countenance that. Everything has to be done as a combination of phone calls with a bank contact and online.

First of all, the bank contacts are obviously overloaded. It took months to speak to anyone, and months for them to get back with a decision.

But the online part is the pits.

Because the non-profit does things properly, several signatories are involved. And as with many small, local non-profits, all of them are over 60, some well over 60 – because that’s how they have the time to devote to these causes.

They don’t all have mobile phones, and if they do, they don’t carry them around all the time. So a simple thing like 2-factor identification becomes a real difficulty.

Then, when they get things wrong, the error messages coming back are unhelpful, for example being told you have entered the wrong email address via an an email sent to that address (!!). So they get worried about getting things wrong, and do what seems sensible. They write things down, take things slowly.

But their fingers aren’t as fast as they used to be, so they get logged out of screens before they’ve had time to type things in.

And so they get frustrated, and have to spend more time getting together to try and sort things out.

These are intelligent, kind, generous people who are just trying to help their community. All they are looking for is somewhere safe to keep the money people have trusted them with; somewhere that will give them an audit trail for the few transactions they need to carry out.

Tough. Because banks have clearly decided that people don’t matter. And what could have taken a day to set up in-branch has taken 13 months – so far.

There’s a massive opportunity here for someone prepared to offer a no-frills, human service. Perhaps not for long, since the baby-boomer bump will be over in a decade or so, but for long enough to do decent business.

I wonder if anyone will take it.

August 16, 2022

Keep it simple, stupid

I’m facing a really interesting challenge at the moment.

Over many years I’ve developed a methodology, notation and software for capturing a Customer Experience Score in a way that suits people rather than machines. My notation is very simple. There aren’t many rules, and even those are only casually enforced.

This is because it’s all about making it easy for ordinary mortals. Whether that’s a business owner wanting to capture their desired customer experience or one of their colleagues wanting to learn what’s needed to deliver that experience. My aim is to make the software easy to learn and easy to use, and above all flexible so that the people using it can start scrappy, and build up to whatever level of detail works for them.

My challenge now is that some of those humans want to generate something more formal from their Score, something that needs clear rules to produce an output.

It’s interesting because it’s showing me how fuzzy (and sometimes inconsistent) my logic is. This is fine for humans, because humans are perfectly capable of interpreting fuzziness, and in any case I want to leave plenty of room for interpretation. It’s not so fine for software.

One approach would be to make the tool more rigorous, more constrained, more precise. In other words, to make it more machine-like. But that would mean adding levels of detail that would soon become excruciating for any ordinary mortal.

No, my work is all about liberating humans to be human, so I have to find another way, and I think it’s this: If humans are good with fuzziness and nuance, and machines are not, let the machine ignore all that and concentrate on the essentials.

For stupid machines, the answer might just be to keep it simple.

August 9, 2022

Where the system ends

When the idea for Crossrail was first floated years ago, I thought nothing of it. Abbey Wood station is 3 miles away. Too far to walk, and not a pleasant walk either. So I forgot about it.

Until TFL created a new bus route that took in the new station.

The thing that makes the new Elizabeth Line work for people like me isn’t the big, expensive part – the Crossrail system, it’s the bus that connects us to it. And that, plus all the other new bus routes created to serve the Elizabeth Line is what makes the expensive part worth all the investment.

Knowing where your business system ends matters.

Tempted to cut a ‘peripheral’ service for your customers?

Be careful. It may actually be the enabler for your core business.

August 4, 2022

How much value you create

One of my favourite stories from business school was this one:

A sheet steel manufacturer was looking to sell their steel at a premium.

They looked carefully at who their customers were, and the process they went through to get their job done.

Their main customers were white goods manufacturers. Now, steel doesn’t come out of the mill white, so these customers needed a paint shop where they sprayed the shaped steel casings of their products white. There’s a reason they’re called ‘white goods’. Offering other colours would mean adding another paint shop or creating an expensive change-over process for your single paint shop.

The steel manufacturer worked out that by adding a small cost to their own production process, they could save their customers a large cost and enable them to offer their goods at a premium. It’s easier to paint sheet steel when it’s flat, at the end of your production process. So that’s what the steel manufacturer did.

“Buy steel from us and you can have any colour you like. And de-commoditise your products to boot”.

You don’t have to ask your clients intrusive questions about their finances to measure – or at least estimate – the value you create for them. You just have to understand something about how their business works.

Some things to think about:

If you save them money, how much? What does that add up to over time?
If you save them time, how much? What was that time costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you save them effort, how much? What was that costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you enable them to get more from the same level of resources, how much? How much does that add up to over time?
Does any of this enable them to sell more, or to sell at a higher price? How much more? How much higher? That’s part of the value you add too.

Measuring how much value you create for clients isn’t easy. It is possible.

If you put your mind to understanding your clients first.

July 25, 2022

That Question

What question do you get asked over and over again about your product or service?

What could you do to save people having to ask it?

What could your people do with the time they spend answering it?

July 21, 2022

How does improvement happen?

First by collecting feedback, both quantitative and qualitative.

Then by looking at what that feedback might be telling you about what’s happened in the past, and what is likely to happen in the future if nothing changes.

Then by adjusting the system accordingly.

Your adjustments might be wrong of course, which is why it’s a good idea to keep them small until feedback shows you’re heading in the right direction.

Over time you’ll learn to keep it simple.

Then improvement will come naturally.

July 14, 2022

‘Sorry’ is never enough

Corporations, being founded on a theory of Homo Economicus, naturally believe that when someone complains, they are merely seeking personal redress.

That’s true, but it isn’t the whole story.

Most often people want recognition of their own case AND to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. Sometimes people just want to make sure the mistake isn’t repeated.

That means “Sorry” is never enough, even when accompanied by compensation. What people really want to see is evidence that the mistake is being rectified. That systems and process are changed to ensure it can’t be repeated.

Otherwise, the only conclusion to be drawn is that it wasn’t a mistake, but policy. And compensation a bribe to keep your mouth shut.

Check out this Twitter thread from George Monbiot to see what I mean.

And this thread for the complaint that started it.

July 6, 2022

Some more thoughts on packaging – Function

What does your Packaged Promise have to do? How far does it go to help your client get from where they are now to where they want to be?

Some questions to ask:

Can I do the whole job in one go?
Is that really doable, by me and by the client?
If not, how do I break it up so that the client can see progress, without being overwhelmed by the size of the task in front of them?

And an insight from that last question:

If there is progress, there must be a process. So what is it? How do I get my client from where they are now, to where they want to be?

Can I describe that as a process in a way that makes sense to the client?
Where are the ‘natural’ breaks in that process? Can I match Packages to those?
How can I keep the client motivated to continue the journey?

Sharing the process with the client before they start their journey, helping them to locate themselves while they are on it and celebrating milestones as you go can all help.

And a final question prompted by a conversation with Adam Forbes:

How small could you make those Packages?
How could you turn each step on the journey into a tiny or atomic habit?

After all, as any pub landlord or fountain owner could tell you – those single, small denomination coins soon add up.

Hmmm.

June 28, 2022

5 principles for composing your Customer Experience Score

Principle 1: Remember why you’re doing it.

Everything you do in your business is done in service of making and keeping Promises to the people you serve.

This is the bigger picture:

You need to remember that when you compose your Score, and you need to ensure that your people will remember it every time they play it.

Principle 2: Not how it is now, but how you really want it to be.

As soon as you’ve written it down, your Score becomes your new ‘As-is’. Until you improve it again. You’ll never get to ‘To-be’.

Principle 3: The person playing this will be a human being like you.

You’re not composing for a robot, or a computer. You’re composing for a human, who can fill in any gaps from their experience, knowledge and skill. They need prompts, not instructions. They’ll probably suggest improvements.

Principle 4: Have a golden rule for dealing with the unexpected, and a recovery process for when things go wrong

You can’t predict every eventuality. Things change. So it pays to have a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with them in line with your Promise.

Similarly, mistakes are bound to happen. The way you deal with them is part of your Promise. And there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise: Be human.

Principle 5: Admin is a side-effect of doing the job

You want to spend as much time as possible on the thing that pays – making and keeping Promises to the people you serve. Everything else is a side-effect. But you have to design your business to work that way.

The first piece of admin to treat like this, is getting paid. Make it part of the process – even if it’s the final note of your Score. That way you can make sure it happens, on time, every time. Especially if you also make it part of the customer experience.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

And if you dare, I can bring the discipline.

June 21, 2022

Connections

Back in 1978, me and my family were entranced by this BBC series in which James Burke explained how rather than being a simple forward march of progress towards some future pinnacle, history was actually a web of connected accidents. People built new ideas and inventions on the ideas and inventions of others, who had created these things for completely different reasons. Connections made that were never ‘meant’ to be made leading to new connections, and new inventions. Often with what seemed like spookily appropriate timing.

Fast forward 50 years, and I’m enticed into a little online group called ‘Connect the Carbon Dots’ by a mention of this TV series.

In our group, we’re taking the facts, issues and solutions in the soon to be released Carbon Almanac, and connecting them to each other, in a visual, interactive web. So that someone interested in ‘how to store carbon in soil’ for example can see why that’s a good thing for global warming AND how it also impacts food security, erosion, and pollution.

Looking back, that documentary may have been the start of my life’s work!

Everything’s connected. Everyone is connected. Everything’s a process.

You never know what’s going to happen next, but there’ll be an interesting thread to follow.

And life is actually more joyful when you look at it that way.

PS it’s not too late to join in!