In our last SAP Signavio March 2022 release we announced the general availability of journey to process analytics.
Journey to process analytics provides you the opportunity to identify insights into your combined process and experience reality: for example, how NPS or CSAT scores relate to reworks or cycle time, looking at all the variables through the lenses of your customers, employees, or suppliers – and discovering how processes contribute (positively or negatively) to those experiences along their journey.
From here, you’re able to operationalize journeys and trigger process and journey changes to drive increased customer satisfaction levels and financial benefit.
All business units are built and targeted to optimize their own operations. And it’s almost impossible for customer experience teams to know about every change in business processes, let alone analyze their impact.
Updating an invoicing procedure, moving suppliers, and any changes designed to make your business more efficient can impact how customers experience and feel about you. It stands to reason that if the people responsible for customer experience don’t know about details and changes in other areas of the business, they don’t stand a chance to measure their impact. Equally, business operations teams need to know the impact of their work on customer, employee, or supplier satisfaction scores. And, as the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
To pinpoint where experience is hurting, you need to look beyond operational data and connect it with all the available experience data (like NPS and survey results) to give a unified view of our data. And most organizations fall way short of this.
There haven’t been tools to do this until now. There may have been single projects all over the business, but most approaches require manual analysis and specialized consulting. The result is a non-dynamic view of the organization that doesn´t evolve with consumer, employee, or supplier needs. And a business transformation must keep the pace of the market to lead to success.
Journey to process analytics is a completely new way of looking at business process management and process mining – still collecting all the usual operational data but combining it with experience data to create a single, unified view.
In previous blog posts, we started explaining how journey to process analytics can help customers solve their experience gap in their processes by considering customer journeys, touchpoints, and data and leveraging experience-driven process mining.
But there is a journey the organization needs to go on to achieve this:
Relying on information from operational systems to make decisions helps you focus on achieving cost-driven efficiency and automation. However, this data lacks insight into a critical element – people. This can lead to an experience gap, resulting into a disengaged customer base, giving ground to the competition, disengaged employees, or putting core supplier relationships at risk. Acknowledging the existence of this gap in your organization is the first step to start.
We’ve already talked about bringing together processes and journeys, but as an organization, it’s vital to decide which the priority is and to focus your teams around this.
You´ll need sponsorship and commitment from leadership and business functions, and ideally ownership of experience journeys and business processes within the same teams or closely working together. Customer (or employee, supplier) centricity AND a process mindset need to be culturally ingrained in your business.
Objective setting and ownership is paramount. And it’s not just the high-level business objectives but also more granular goals that need to be set out: which processes, which journeys, what is our end objective?
You´ll need to have the right systems in place to measure them and track and share progress and results throughout the organization.
A Customer Experience journey (like a buying journey or a customer support request) lends itself well into the process world, as journeys and processes are interrelated. Focus on modeling journeys with the same rigor as you are designing business processes. Think about personas, phases, touchpoints and the complete interaction and engagement.
Manage your business processes most efficiently and effectively by collaboratively designing, recording, and maintaining them centrally. This leads to reduced operational ambiguity and provides explanations and guidance for a common understanding of how you operate in your organization.
Within your journeys, it’s crucial to identify the “moments that matter”, the hard metrics, and the indicators that will help your business understand what is really happening within these journeys. What experience and operational metrics can you monitor that will help you understand not just how happy (or not) your customers are with your organization but also what may be influencing it from an operational standpoint?
We’ve said before that achieving excellence over all touchpoints is only possible when considering the back office and the front office. If experiences are caused by processes (and they are), it’s essential to know where they intersect, considering all touchpoints customers, employees or suppliers have with processes in your organization.
You have your customer journeys mapped out, but what’s happening in the real world? That’s where collecting, visualizing, and analyzing the data comes in.
Start discovering your process and experience reality in the same framework and unearth previously unknown relationships in the data. See how and when processes hurt the experience and better understand the interactions between stakeholders. You can now start sharing your insights with your teams and answer the question, “our customer satisfaction is low, and the reason seems to be X. Now what do we do?”
Of course, this work comes to nothing if we don’t change. As a result of the data analysis, start making real improvements to your processes, customer journeys, or even organizational structure.
Going on this journey puts you in the position of finding the moments that matter to your customers, employees, and customers so that you can use processes to create experiences that drive profit for the organization.
The final step is governance. Start guiding enterprise process management activities, managing your process lifecycles and ensuring that processes are reviewed regularly - while establishing process ownership and automating process approvals throughout your organization.
Creating seamless journeys also requires different teams in your organization to work conjointly and engage with customers at various touchpoints. Hence, journey governance is equally critical to ensuring consistent experiences.
We’ll cover each of these steps in detail in a series of blog posts around journey to process analytics.
Stay tuned!
_______________________________________________________________________________
Journey to process analytics provides you the opportunity to identify insights into your combined process and experience reality: for example, how NPS or CSAT scores relate to reworks or cycle time, looking at all the variables through the lenses of your customers, employees, or suppliers – and discovering how processes contribute (positively or negatively) to those experiences along their journey.
Example: Considering process and experience data along the customer journey
From here, you’re able to operationalize journeys and trigger process and journey changes to drive increased customer satisfaction levels and financial benefit.
Why isn’t this happening today?
Challenge #1: Fragmented operations & disconnected teams
All business units are built and targeted to optimize their own operations. And it’s almost impossible for customer experience teams to know about every change in business processes, let alone analyze their impact.
Updating an invoicing procedure, moving suppliers, and any changes designed to make your business more efficient can impact how customers experience and feel about you. It stands to reason that if the people responsible for customer experience don’t know about details and changes in other areas of the business, they don’t stand a chance to measure their impact. Equally, business operations teams need to know the impact of their work on customer, employee, or supplier satisfaction scores. And, as the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Challenge #2: Data in silos
To pinpoint where experience is hurting, you need to look beyond operational data and connect it with all the available experience data (like NPS and survey results) to give a unified view of our data. And most organizations fall way short of this.
Challenge #3: Lack of tools
There haven’t been tools to do this until now. There may have been single projects all over the business, but most approaches require manual analysis and specialized consulting. The result is a non-dynamic view of the organization that doesn´t evolve with consumer, employee, or supplier needs. And a business transformation must keep the pace of the market to lead to success.
How can you build up a successful practice?
Journey to process analytics is a completely new way of looking at business process management and process mining – still collecting all the usual operational data but combining it with experience data to create a single, unified view.
In previous blog posts, we started explaining how journey to process analytics can help customers solve their experience gap in their processes by considering customer journeys, touchpoints, and data and leveraging experience-driven process mining.
But there is a journey the organization needs to go on to achieve this:
Step 1 – Acknowledging the gap
Relying on information from operational systems to make decisions helps you focus on achieving cost-driven efficiency and automation. However, this data lacks insight into a critical element – people. This can lead to an experience gap, resulting into a disengaged customer base, giving ground to the competition, disengaged employees, or putting core supplier relationships at risk. Acknowledging the existence of this gap in your organization is the first step to start.
Step 2 – Organizational alignment
We’ve already talked about bringing together processes and journeys, but as an organization, it’s vital to decide which the priority is and to focus your teams around this.
You´ll need sponsorship and commitment from leadership and business functions, and ideally ownership of experience journeys and business processes within the same teams or closely working together. Customer (or employee, supplier) centricity AND a process mindset need to be culturally ingrained in your business.
Step 3 – Identify your journey focus, processes, and owners
Objective setting and ownership is paramount. And it’s not just the high-level business objectives but also more granular goals that need to be set out: which processes, which journeys, what is our end objective?
You´ll need to have the right systems in place to measure them and track and share progress and results throughout the organization.
Step 4 – Better model your customer journeys
A Customer Experience journey (like a buying journey or a customer support request) lends itself well into the process world, as journeys and processes are interrelated. Focus on modeling journeys with the same rigor as you are designing business processes. Think about personas, phases, touchpoints and the complete interaction and engagement.
Step 5 - Better model your business processes
Manage your business processes most efficiently and effectively by collaboratively designing, recording, and maintaining them centrally. This leads to reduced operational ambiguity and provides explanations and guidance for a common understanding of how you operate in your organization.
Step 6 – Identify what you want to monitor
Within your journeys, it’s crucial to identify the “moments that matter”, the hard metrics, and the indicators that will help your business understand what is really happening within these journeys. What experience and operational metrics can you monitor that will help you understand not just how happy (or not) your customers are with your organization but also what may be influencing it from an operational standpoint?
Step 7 - Map your journeys to your processes
We’ve said before that achieving excellence over all touchpoints is only possible when considering the back office and the front office. If experiences are caused by processes (and they are), it’s essential to know where they intersect, considering all touchpoints customers, employees or suppliers have with processes in your organization.
Step 8 – Experience-driven process mining and sharing across the organization
You have your customer journeys mapped out, but what’s happening in the real world? That’s where collecting, visualizing, and analyzing the data comes in.
Start discovering your process and experience reality in the same framework and unearth previously unknown relationships in the data. See how and when processes hurt the experience and better understand the interactions between stakeholders. You can now start sharing your insights with your teams and answer the question, “our customer satisfaction is low, and the reason seems to be X. Now what do we do?”
Step 9 - Rollout of changes
Of course, this work comes to nothing if we don’t change. As a result of the data analysis, start making real improvements to your processes, customer journeys, or even organizational structure.
Going on this journey puts you in the position of finding the moments that matter to your customers, employees, and customers so that you can use processes to create experiences that drive profit for the organization.
Step 10 - Governance
The final step is governance. Start guiding enterprise process management activities, managing your process lifecycles and ensuring that processes are reviewed regularly - while establishing process ownership and automating process approvals throughout your organization.
Creating seamless journeys also requires different teams in your organization to work conjointly and engage with customers at various touchpoints. Hence, journey governance is equally critical to ensuring consistent experiences.
We’ll cover each of these steps in detail in a series of blog posts around journey to process analytics.
Stay tuned!
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- Join the Early Adopter Care program (EAC) and become one of our first customers to enjoy the full journey to process analytics capabilities.
- Visit our journey to process analytics page
- Learn more about journey to process analytics by watching the recordings of our recent webinar series.
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