Customer centricity: bottom or top-down approach?

“Customer centricity should be at the core of business decisions.” But what are those customer needs everyone talks about?  What is customer behaviour and how do you get to understand it? Do we know or… do we think that we know? 

The bottom-up approach to customer centricity aims to optimize the design of  selected, automatizable patterns of interaction chains. While this approach definitely results in huge cost/time savings (especially on input side, when digitizing process chains), it has its drawbacks: 

• First, it relies on the assumption that you are certain what are the “right” interaction chains to focus on.  This certainty emerges from what people think the ideal processes are, and how they should look like – based on customer feedback (e.g. surveys), common sense (generic expectations and frustrations assigned to certain customer groups, categorized via predefined features such as age / income /…), or procedural guidelines.
• Second, it does not take into account the human factor in the interaction chain. It is often the case that process sequences do not happen as expected. While compliance could be enforced, to some extent, on service provider side (for instance, by deploying automated systems to process customer’s needs according to formulae that would not allow the processing of a step if preconditions are not met), what can not be automatized is customer’s choices. Whenever given an option, customers are free to choose to undertake certain steps in the interaction chain with a different service provider. Or to revisit the same step multiple times. Or to cancel unexpectedly some parts of their customer journey.  

Optimization of end-to-end interaction chains and standardization of end-to-end offers could benefit from the top-down approach to customer centricity: the customer is observed in terms of their action sequences, not in terms of  what they say they want / need / do / will do. To win the war, you might want to take a step back to observe an overview of customer journeys, and understand what are your most frequent and important battles: of those end-to-end journeys, what are the ones most likely to maximize the value added to the customer while minimizing the cost. Those are the “right” customers, on which you should focus, and for which you should design better journeys,  to get strategic advantage. And this is precisely were process mining can help you.

ThiaperProcess: a process mining solution

Thiaper Systems is a Bucharest-based company. We kicked off the development of ThiaperProcess – our process mining solution – in April 2019, in collaboration with the largest private healthcare provider in Portugal. 

You can see ThiaperProcess in action for an open dataset here. 

And if you want to know more, come talk to us to see how we can help you! You can find us  on the 2-4 December in Web Summit 2020.