To ruin the customer experience, it only takes one…
Some time ago I was switching between two cars of a prestigious German brand. I’m a big and loyal fan for more than 20 years now, also due to their great customer experience. So I turned in the old car at the official dealership and drove home in the new one, happy as a child at Christmas…
A few weeks later, I still get billed for the rent of the old car. I’m confident that this is just an innocent mistake. But as I call the company, I’m confronted with an employee insisting that I didn’t turn in my old car. Quite absurd of course, but nevertheless, the employee keeps on insisting that I’m still in possession my old car, despite all the facts and documents proving the opposite. The reality was that the intake process had not been fully respected at the dealership. This resulted in a tiny single check box remaining “open” in the employee’s computer.
You would expect that this little detail could be solved in a second. After all, everything was obviously ok. But no, there was only one solution: turn in the car again, scrupulously following the official process, so the check box could finally be ticked. You can imagine how disappointed I was by this quite kafkaesque customer experience. It took several weeks, calls and mails before the manager of the department realised what was happening and finally arranged things.
This story is rather anecdotic, but it’s a good illustration of how an inadequate employee experience can ruin the customer experience. You must realise that, like this major company, you can spend millions of euros and tons of energy on building a nice customer experience. But at the end of the day, it only takes one single employee to ruin everything.
So, the rule is very simple: if you want to create a sustainable customer experience, make sure that every employee is aware of his or her essential contribution to the customer experience. As we illustrated in a previous article, more employees are getting deeply involved in the customer experience.
Secondly, if you expect your employees to contribute actively to the customer experience, make sure you empower them to do so. In this little anecdote, it would have been easy to blame the employee. But maybe he or she has been told to “never, never deviate from the process”, even if forcing the respect of the process would ruin the customer experience. Which was thoroughly applied in my case ;-).
Again, we can easily make the link between customer experience and employee experience:
If you want to create a sustainable delighting customer experience, you must make sure your employees are aware of their essential role in creating and maintaining the customer experience.
On top of that, you must make sure they are enabled and empowered to give priority to the customer experience at any time.
Digital transformation is not about technology but about value chains
Many organisations think of digital transformation as a way to inject technology into their existing business. But digital transformation is not about technology. Digital is only an enabler and an opportunity to design new, competitive customer experiences and value chains. This is a golden rule when working on your organisation’s digital transformation.
This holiday we travelled through France, following the sun, booking our hotels just one or two days in advance. The process was simple: we checked on the app of Meteo-France where the sun was heading for the coming days, we checked the area on Google Maps to see where are the most interesting towns or things to see, looked for a nice hotel on booking.com, double checked its reviews on TripAdvisor and finally made the booking in a few clicks. It might seem fancy, but from a customer’s point of view, this process isn’t really disruptive. I did the same thing 30 years ago, using a local newspaper to check the weather, a map of France, a hotel or camping guide and some coins for the phone booth to make the reservation.
What really changes
So the process hasn’t fundamentally changed. Neither did the travel experience. It’s still the same thrill when you arrive at the hotel, hoping you made the right choice, not knowing if it will match your expectations. Two things have changed although: the user experience and the business model behind it.
Digital platforms still allow me to go through the same process, but in a much faster, easier, and smoother way. Yes, the process has been tweaked to create more convenience, but it has not fundamentally changed. Of course I can see the efforts of data marketing pushing me to specific offers, but to be honest, it doesn’t really make a difference. Data marketing in this sector is still in a very early, pushy and rather ineffective stage...
The change is much more dramatic when you look at it from the business side. 30 years ago, travel publishing companies like Michelin or Guide du Routard sold editorial content to me, which I needed to perform my buying process. I had to pay them for their content. After a few years, or whenever travelling to another country, I had to pay for updated or adapted content. To provide this product, these companies had to pay a lot of people to gather, edit and publish content. When I finally made the transaction with a hotel, the publishing company was not involved in the game anymore.
Where there is disruption
The disruption of companies like booking.com does not come from the fact that they are “digital”. Yes, they enhance my customer experience by tweaking the process, using digital to increase the convenience. The disruption comes from the fact that they use the potential of digital to redesign the value chain which supports the travel process. They don’t pay for the content they provide, their customers provide it to them, for free. They don’t sell this content; they only use it in support of their process. In times where too often people think that digital is about disintermediation, they get their money from taking up an intermediary position, with a strong brand, collecting a nice fee on every transaction between a customer and a hotel. So in a nutshell, they rethought the customer’s travel experience and the existing value chains, using digital as an enabler, not as a purpose.
Digital transformation is about redesigning the value chains
This is the point I want to make for those who are working on digital transformation.
It’s not about getting your company “digital”. It’s about completely rethinking your customer experiences and your value chains, using the features offered by digital to support these.
This also means that digital transformation is not the privileged playground of a digital team, but a concern for everyone in the company who’s involved in part of the customer experience or the value chain.
In this transformation journey, it is the management’s responsibility to keep their focus on enhanced customer experiences and value chains, and to resist the sirens of digital “gadgetification” on the surface.
Why project and change management continue to fail
According to research, around 70% of change management programs tend to fail. Amongst the numerous reasons for failure, there is the lack of integration between project management and change management. Adopting an integrated approach will have a dramatic impact on quality, speed, effectiveness and sustainability of the overall change. We'll provide you with 5 simple rules that will dramatically reduce the risks and uncertainties of your transformation projects.
Recognise two disciplines, one objective
Project management and change management have the same objective: increase the probability that projects or initiatives deliver the intended results and outcomes. But their focus is different. Project management mostly focuses on the technical side to ensure that the solution will be developed, designed and delivered effectively. Change management focuses on the people side to ensure that the solution will be embraced, adopted and sustainably used by the co-workers who will have to work differently. It seems quite obvious that both should act in an integrated, coordinated way to produce the desired results. However, we to often see situations where change management is being seen as a sub track of the overall project management.
Don't mess it up with a shoehorn approach
Too often change management tracks are considered as simple sub tracks of the larger project plan, mostly situated in the lower half or near the end of the project plan. When the project or the solution is getting its final forms, change managers start to think about how they are going to sell it to the organisation. Change management programs are being put in place, but there is not much room for change left. The change program is already tied into the boundaries of all the irreversible decisions that have been taken since the early beginning of the project. So room for manoeuvres, for creating acceptance and adoption, is extremely limited. It’s called “change”, but in fact it’s not much more than a “take it or leave it” game. As a result, adaptation and sustainable change will often be extremely low. It's a bit like getting your feet into a too small pair of shoes. Even if you manage to get them in, you will probably not wear them very often.
Get the benefits of an integrated approach
In an integrated approach, the change management tracks are moved to the upper left corner of the project plan, and then deployed in an interwoven way with the project planning. In this approach, change management is being taken into account as from the first day of the project. Project management and change management will interact during the whole duration of the project as two equal forces aiming at the same objective. To achieve this stakeholders and impacted populations will be highly involved from the beginning of the project. Their role changes from "subject" to "participant", from "client / provider" to "co-creator". Considered either from the technical or from the people perspective, this integrated and participative approach will have dramatic benefits on the quality, speed, effectiveness and sustainability of your project.
Benefit #1: quality of deliverables
Classic, waterfall based project management approaches are based on the assumption that all previous steps are the golden standard for the next steps. After functional analysis (which is often a private party between business analysts and IT), end users don't hear about the project anymore until it goes into user acceptance. The reality is that, all along the development process, small distortions will have appeared. Altogether they will have created a huge gap between what the end user was looking for and what will finally have been developed. By integrating change management from the beginning of the project, you make sure that these small distortions are intercepted and corrected on time, thus leading to a higher quality of deliverables.
Benefit #2: speed
It might seem contradictory that you can gain speed by doubling the project management tracks with parallel change management tracks. However, the fact that change will have been integrated from the beginning saves a lot of time for change once the project is being delivered. You don't start from a "take it or leave it" situation, most of the change will already have been accomplished during the project development.
Benefit #3: effectiveness
As the project has not been developed "for", but "in strong collaboration with", stakeholders and impacted populations, the chances that the developed solution is the right answer to what the project was aiming at are much higher. The integrated approach increases your chances of being right from the first time.
Benefit #4: sustainability
Finally, because of the strong integration of project management and change management, the better quality and increased effectiveness, the change will be embraced and adopted in a much more sustainable way on the long term.
5 simple rules to get there
Rule #1: Organise your project and change management differently
As described above, make sure that your project management and change management are integrated in methods, tools and processes, both for progress steering and monitoring. If you are using a project management tool, make sure that both the project management and the change management tracks are integrated and shared in the same tool.
Rule #2: Create the right environment
Over the years most companies, because of the complexity of their processes, have built thick walls between their different departments. Sales, marketing, IT, operations, HR have been used to do things on their own, reducing dialogue with the other disciplines to a strict minimum, based on a kind of naïve belief that this would lead to better performance. But your business performance, the added value for clients and shareholders, is the result of the way these disciplines interact as a whole. The importance of these interdependencies even increases with the growing influence of digital evolution and of customer expectations on your business. So it is of utmost importance that people from different disciplines are in permanent dialogue with each other during the project, far beyond the sparse moments of dialogue that checkpoint meetings and other steering committees pretend to be. It is only in an environment where there is a permanent concern for the business as a whole (and not only for the own discipline) that project management and change management can naturally act together and achieve a common goal.
Rule #3: Recognise the importance of sustainable adoption
A technical development or a new process is never a solution on its own; it is only a part of it. Without sustainable adoption of the solution or process, the only place where you will see the impact of your project will be in the depreciation section of your balance sheet. You will never get an increase in effectiveness, speed, customer satisfaction or cost efficiency without sustainable adoption by the employees who will have to use the technical solution or follow the new process. One simple way to do this is to request that all project induction documents address the approach for sustainable adoption as from the very beginning.
Rule #4: Have a relevant and shared definition of results for accountability
It is common to define results and accountability in a very restrictive way. Project managers will often focus on deadlines, milestones, go-live dates. They are important, but they are not relevant as such for your business. The same goes for the indicators on which change managers will be accountable: is it really the number of communications they issued or the number of people that got training that will be relevant? Quality, effectiveness and sustainable integration of the solution are much more relevant to the organisation and should be the main indicators for which both project managers and change managers should be held accountable. For this rule as well, create à PID template which contains the right and relevant KPI's that will foster this shared accountability.
Rule #5: Hire the right profiles
Project managers tend to be selected on their certifications in a number of methodologies or on their knowledge of specific technical environments. Change managers are expected to be good at interviews and presentations, transforming the business reality into an appealing story. But as demonstrated above, there is a need for project managers and change managers willing to focus, not on a go-live date or on the number of training sessions, but on maximizing the chances that projects or initiatives will deliver the intended results and outcomes for the business as a whole.
Where will this get you?
Integrating change management into your project management from the early start will dramatically reduce the risks and uncertainties of your transformation projects. But you will have to create the right conditions for it to happen: ensure real dialogue between all the stakeholders, define relevant indicators for accountability and get the right profiles on board for both project and change management. If you pay enough attention to these critical success factors, you will maximize the chances that your transformation projects will lead to an effective change and to tangible and sustainable results for your organisation.