Customer service typically moves service requests through many systems and many hands in departmental silos (e.g., sales, service, operations, product development, administration), but not always as planned. Inevitable business changes create execution gaps between the ideal service and the actual service, which alienate customers and aid the competition.
Furthermore, there are layers of business operations within these functions that further fragment the organization into a collection of islands. This creates additional seams and chasms that customers, internal staff, and partners must tediously navigate to get business done.
Employees and customers are in the difficult position of having to navigate this dispersed environment, by bouncing back and forth (a “swivel chair” phenomenon) between various computer screens, organizations, systems, and manual procedures. Most serious are the explicit execution gaps where the automation and infrastructure haven’t kept pace with what management wants to be done. In other words, these are the all-too-common situations where manual procedures or training must try in vain to fill the gaps.
For example, Pega often sees gaps in the opening of a new account process and in implementing strategies for customer retention and cross-selling (i.e., deciding which customers should get which offers and then ensuring the right follow-up). There are also often the gaps caused by difficulties in introducing new products, gaps in ensuring that complicated proposals are subject to the right compliance procedures, gaps in fulfilling customer-specific commitments or promises, and so on and so forth. These execution gaps further exacerbate the chasms between the departmental silos.
Initiatives to fix these execution gaps (process exceptions) tend to require adding staff, ad hoc IT solutions, or both. With traditional “stop-gap” approaches to throw in more people and heterogeneous IT tools, a servicing infrastructure proves to be prohibitively expensive and highly disruptive in terms of system downtime, replacement costs, poor customer service, and many other related “moment of truth” nightmares. Consequently, business users get bounced around in these gaps struggling to get to the right outcome.
To make a distinction, execution gaps due to process exceptions can be reduced with automation using better (more detailed) policies and rules, and can be managed using a good people process. But there is another set of execution gaps (referenced above as “departmental silos”) that need smarter integration, at the data, business logic, or presentation layers, to cross the silo boundaries. These are also addressed by enterprise-class BPM suites like Pega’s.
Compliance and control are particularly serious issues, since in this ad hoc environment there is no way for management to dig in and really see what is happening until it is too late, long after the work has been done. In fact, this ZDNet blog post talks about the nine worst business processes that Pega has identified, presumably based on the difficulty of capturing and automating them, starting with governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) .
The execution gaps (exceptions) are the worst business problem of all, and everyone would like to build an ideal scalable service infrastructure, where things work the way they should. Thus, let’s explore how organizations with complex operations could apply technology to address and prevent execution gaps. To that end, agile service organizations first target critical gaps to bring quick value by improving processes and decisions, while guiding users and customers through the gaps.
Thereafter, building on the benefits and experience achieved in filling the initial process gaps, agile organizations continue to put a non-invasive layer in and around their IT infrastructure. The idea is to shore up the weak spots and smooth out the rough ones. The goal is to also leverage the existing IT assets by incorporating them as services (implicitly inside the process or explicitly in an SOA framework). This “wrap and renew” initiative allows the organization to extend the infrastructure by creating a smart layer of business rules and processes that has the intelligence to make key decisions.
As explained in Part 2, the system should understand the business purpose (intent) of each interaction and thus perform the work to achieve management objectives based on best practices and the most current information. In this setup, people are not asked questions the system can figure out itself. Neither are business users forced to go through steps that are not relevant to a valid outcome.
With adept BPM solutions that accommodate change and with business intent-driven user experiences, companies can close the gaps and increase business agility, efficiency, and competitiveness. Rather than attempting a “big bang” undertaking, companies should implement improvements to one customer issue at a time, starting with any business process that needs improvement (e.g., open a new account, charge a dispute, detect fraud, increase credit line, missing a payment).
Furthermore, there are layers of business operations within these functions that further fragment the organization into a collection of islands. This creates additional seams and chasms that customers, internal staff, and partners must tediously navigate to get business done.
Employees and customers are in the difficult position of having to navigate this dispersed environment, by bouncing back and forth (a “swivel chair” phenomenon) between various computer screens, organizations, systems, and manual procedures. Most serious are the explicit execution gaps where the automation and infrastructure haven’t kept pace with what management wants to be done. In other words, these are the all-too-common situations where manual procedures or training must try in vain to fill the gaps.
For example, Pega often sees gaps in the opening of a new account process and in implementing strategies for customer retention and cross-selling (i.e., deciding which customers should get which offers and then ensuring the right follow-up). There are also often the gaps caused by difficulties in introducing new products, gaps in ensuring that complicated proposals are subject to the right compliance procedures, gaps in fulfilling customer-specific commitments or promises, and so on and so forth. These execution gaps further exacerbate the chasms between the departmental silos.
Initiatives to fix these execution gaps (process exceptions) tend to require adding staff, ad hoc IT solutions, or both. With traditional “stop-gap” approaches to throw in more people and heterogeneous IT tools, a servicing infrastructure proves to be prohibitively expensive and highly disruptive in terms of system downtime, replacement costs, poor customer service, and many other related “moment of truth” nightmares. Consequently, business users get bounced around in these gaps struggling to get to the right outcome.
To make a distinction, execution gaps due to process exceptions can be reduced with automation using better (more detailed) policies and rules, and can be managed using a good people process. But there is another set of execution gaps (referenced above as “departmental silos”) that need smarter integration, at the data, business logic, or presentation layers, to cross the silo boundaries. These are also addressed by enterprise-class BPM suites like Pega’s.
Compliance and control are particularly serious issues, since in this ad hoc environment there is no way for management to dig in and really see what is happening until it is too late, long after the work has been done. In fact, this ZDNet blog post talks about the nine worst business processes that Pega has identified, presumably based on the difficulty of capturing and automating them, starting with governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) .
The execution gaps (exceptions) are the worst business problem of all, and everyone would like to build an ideal scalable service infrastructure, where things work the way they should. Thus, let’s explore how organizations with complex operations could apply technology to address and prevent execution gaps. To that end, agile service organizations first target critical gaps to bring quick value by improving processes and decisions, while guiding users and customers through the gaps.
Thereafter, building on the benefits and experience achieved in filling the initial process gaps, agile organizations continue to put a non-invasive layer in and around their IT infrastructure. The idea is to shore up the weak spots and smooth out the rough ones. The goal is to also leverage the existing IT assets by incorporating them as services (implicitly inside the process or explicitly in an SOA framework). This “wrap and renew” initiative allows the organization to extend the infrastructure by creating a smart layer of business rules and processes that has the intelligence to make key decisions.
As explained in Part 2, the system should understand the business purpose (intent) of each interaction and thus perform the work to achieve management objectives based on best practices and the most current information. In this setup, people are not asked questions the system can figure out itself. Neither are business users forced to go through steps that are not relevant to a valid outcome.
With adept BPM solutions that accommodate change and with business intent-driven user experiences, companies can close the gaps and increase business agility, efficiency, and competitiveness. Rather than attempting a “big bang” undertaking, companies should implement improvements to one customer issue at a time, starting with any business process that needs improvement (e.g., open a new account, charge a dispute, detect fraud, increase credit line, missing a payment).
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