This kind of bold self-awareness is a hallmark of great leaders. Admitting there’s room for growth takes courage, but it’s a necessary step toward lasting improvement.

“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize,” is attributed to Shigeo Shingo, a prominent figure in the field of Lean Manufacturing.

Here are four critical questions to help you evaluate your processes and customer experience:

1. When was the last time we thoroughly evaluated what our customers go through to do business with us?
2. Is our process easy and seamless, or does it present unnecessary hurdles?
3. How have we differentiated ourselves—not through our products or services—but through the way we onboard clients, deliver, and administer those offerings?
4. What have we done recently to create a competitive advantage in this area?

At TSI, we thrive on solving these challenges—whether they’re big or small. As process improvement experts, we are excited to help businesses transform how they operate and deliver value to customers.

If these questions resonate with you, we’d love to explore how we can help you create a smoother, more competitive process. Reach out to us today!

– written by: Dan Feely, TSI’s President and Founder – Visit The TSI Team page for more information on Dan and his talented team.

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Five years ago, we reported that according to Gartner, “89% of companies surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience”. According to Oracle, the percentage is even higher. 

Since our pandemic started in March of 2020 in the US, the need to pay attention to how we are serving our customers from the time we begin in the business development areas – contracting, “getting to a yes“, service and/or product delivery, invoicing, customer support and on – has never been more critical. Few professionals would argue that the emphasis on an organization’s Customer Experience, (i.e., CX is the product of interaction, including the resulting perceptions, between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship) is not simply a fad, but an important tool to achieve what industry leaders like Seth Godin and Clay Hebert (among many others), recommend connecting to those vital to that organization.

As Ian Altman says in Forbes:

“it has become clear that we are in a Connection Economy.“

As we say at TSI, “the Customer Experience is the manifestation of your processes, technology, organizational chart, staffing levels, and culture. Whether it is good or not, it all comes out in the customer experience.”

Recently, it seems that there is something incongruent with the articles and statistics I read and the experiences we have with our clients and other organizations contemplating new strategies in this area. Perhaps it is just what we are seeing here, as I would posit that it appears many companies and higher education institutions are simply going through the motions in this area.

A few key questions to ask:

1. Is your organization at 89% or 11%? 
2. How are you approaching this change?
3. How are you truly enhancing your customer experience?

Here are three points that will have a big impact on your organization in enhancing your customer experience:

1. Start by honing your CX awareness skills. You will see a payoff if you are planning to enhance or improve the customer experience within your organization.

2. Rather than simply going through the motions, use CX to create a real, legit, unfair advantage for your organization.

3. Expect the journey to be difficult, but prepare to persevere.

Hone your CX awareness skills

I challenge you to book your next business trip, make a doctor’s appointment, plan a vacation, buy a car, take out a mortgage (or refinance your existing one), drive a car in Mexico (that’s a story for another day), or enroll in a college course.

After completing one of these, reflect and assess how these experiences were in terms of the following:

1. How easy to do business with was this organization or process? What best reflects the impression the vendor left on you? To further understand, ask yourself the following:

• Do they care about your business?
• Would they rather maximize profit on one transaction, or have you become a loyal customer for a lifetime?
• Does your time matter to them?
• How would you rate the experience overall?

2. Aside from the efficiency and effectiveness aspect of the transaction, did the transaction have any emotional connection that left you with a memory that was more positive, neutral, or negative in nature?

Many of the readers of this likely saw the video from a United flight when a ticketed passenger was removed against his will, simply because the plane was over-booked, and members of the United crew had no room to board. Based on the reaction by United’s CEO, that was not the intended emotional connection the organization was hoping to achieve. Although this example can be seen as an outlier, both in terms of how ridiculous the situation and how publicized the customer’s ‘experience’ was, consider the financial effects alone. Fortune reports that United Airlines’ stock dropped $1.4 Billion shortly after this controversy took place!

In each of these examples, the business or higher education institution on the other end of the transaction would accurately tell you that they are in a very competitive industry. Yet, at the risk of generalizing, each of these examples is opportunity-rich concerning how they often fail to create a memorable, meaningful, and intentional moment that matters to the customer. Or in the United Airlines’ example, just the opposite.

So what should you do? Become a CX Jedi warrior and develop awareness skills that you can apply in your organization.

Consider Your Actual Unfair Advantage

When we consult with our clients or lead CX training workshops on the topic of developing an improved customer experience, we emphasize the notion of creating the organization’s unfair advantage (UA). Yes, it sounds like defining your own superpower. Organizationally, this is exactly what it is. What do you want to be known for? What will you be famous for?

We look at it this way – your UA is a function of your organization’s:

Quality x Originality/Uniqueness x Service x Convenience/Comfort/Location x Price

There is a lot to unpack in this formula and you and your colleagues could easily spend a few focused work sessions on this topic. Do not expect to nail it the first time. However, if you can understand what the moments that matter is – from your customer’s perspective – and define your unfair advantage, that provides a unique and memorable customer experience.

Yes, it’s hard, but Worth it!

In short, a positively memorable customer experience matters! It is a logical leap to think that a customer who has an excellent experience remembers it. Because of one positive experience, they can tell others about it; sometimes even becoming mini marketers for that product or service. Along with this, those who are loyal and have a positive experience are retained: becoming much more likely to buy a product or service over and over.

Consider the following: Studies[1] by Bain & Company, along with Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School, have shown that even a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits of between 25 and 95 percent.

There are several reasons why this small increase in retention can have such a substantial impact on profits:

1. Customers are likely to spend more time (and spend more $) with companies they’ve already done business with. Particularly with small businesses that do not have a lot of brand recognition, a customer’s first purchase or two can be considered somewhat of a risk. These individuals are more likely to keep spending relatively small and then increase it as the relationship grows.

2. Repeat customers are more likely to refer others. Bain & Company’s research showed that after just one purchase from an online apparel retailer, an average shopper was likely to refer three other people to the site. But a customer that made ten purchases from an online apparel retailer was likely to refer seven different people to the site.

Creating a positively memorable experience is difficult! Especially for an organization that has any degree of complexity around the following:

• The types of products/services your customers want
• How easy or hard, fast or slow, manual or automated, simple or cumbersome it is for you to quote/price the right products/services
• How easy or hard, fast or slow, manual or automated, simple or cumbersome it is for them to order it, receive it, process the invoice, and actually pay for it
• What about the delivery, set up/configuration, training, etc., how seamless are these processes?
• Do you have numerous people involved, sometimes with “less than ideal” coordination when you think about those involved from contracting, pricing, order processing/execution, set up, training, implementation touchpoints?

Closing Thoughts on Customer Experience

I urge you to start this journey today. Waiting for tomorrow only lets your competition gain ground on you.

Start your journey today by following these three steps:

1. Hone your CX awareness skills – these will pay off for you as you can be the CX Jedi that designs amazing and enhanced customer experiences for your organization.

2. Use CX to create a real, legit unfair advantage for your organization – consider how your organization can effectively compete largely on the basis of experience.

3. Expect the journey to be difficult and prepare to persevere – consider TSI’s Change Readiness Survey as a tool to assess your organization’s readiness to change.

As you know, TSI is always happy to discuss your situation, should you need any assistance enhancing your Customer Experience. Regardless, please give us feedback; we love hearing from you! Contact us via our website, or reach out via social media.

[1] https://smallbiztrends.com, 2014

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A few of TSI’s favorite Harvard Business Review articles come to us from over the years, focused on a number of organizational topics, from transformational leadership to machine intelligence; even how to talk to your boss about the possibility of working from home. The following list is comprised of seven intriguing articles we’ve found recently, that are still trending today. Below each link is an interesting highlight from the article’s content. 

Check out our favorite Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles below (they are listed in no particular order), and let us know your thoughts! 

What the Best Transformational Leaders Do, by Scott Anthony and Evan I. Schwartz

Quite possibly the most critical of which are the tendency to “Develop a Road Map Before Disruption Takes Hold”, and the ability to “Communicate Powerful Narratives About the Future”. (Anthony & Schwartz, 2017)

The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World, by Sunny Giles

When the top 10 leadership competencies were grouped into 5 themes, the most common theme was noted to involve strong ethics & safety within the organization: “This theme combines two of the three most highly rated attributes: “high ethical and moral standards” (67% selected it as one of the most important) and “communicating clear expectations” (56%).” (Giles, 2016)

The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence, by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

Disruption in the way of machine intelligence proves the ever-changing dynamic of business process and automation: “As machine intelligence improves, the value of human prediction skills will decrease because machine prediction will provide a cheaper and better substitute for human prediction, just as machines did for arithmetic.” (Agrawal, et al., 2016)

Four Tips for Better Strategic Planning, by Ron Ashkenas

Ashkenas details four key steps to follow in order to improve your organization’s strategic planning capabilities, as well as execution, as follows:

1. Insist on experiments to test the assumptions you’ve made
2. Banish fuzzy language
3. Escape from template tyranny
4. Ask provocative questions (Ashkenas, 2013)

A Healthier Approach to Business Travel, by Peter Bregman

“Although business travel can be exciting and even fun, it is a surprisingly profound stressor on the body, mind, emotions, and spirit.” (Bergman, 2015)

The Truth About Customer Experience, by Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan, and Conor Jones

Customer experience can often be overlooked due to the multitude of tasks and projects underway, but the authors describe the overall benefits of effectively managing your customer experience by stating: “In our research and consulting on customer journeys, we’ve found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction. They also discover more-effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, a process that delivers gains throughout the company.” (Rawson, et al., 2013)

How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home, by Rebecca Knight

Knight’s list of “Do’s” when attempting to convince your boss to let you work from home:

• “Be honest with yourself about your motivations for wanting to work from home
• Make your case with empirical evidence. It’s hard to argue with someone who is reasonable and prepared
• Experiment with a three- or six-month test run, after which you and your boss discuss what went well and what needs fine-tuning” (Knight, 2017)

TSI’s Resource Library:

TSI also has a comprehensive resource library, comprised of Blogs, Case Studies, and White Papers. See our expert team’s thoughts on various industry trends and other important content related to technology strategy, process improvement, organizational change management, business transformation, management consulting, and much more here.

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Why a Positively Memorable Customer Experience (CX) Matters

A positively memorable Customer Experience can mean the difference between retaining a customer for years to come, or losing them forever due to issues that may have been easily overlooked. Click Here to read more of Dan Feely’s latest blog on this exact topic.

Our events’ details can be found in Dan’s latest blog, as well as on our Customer Experience Training page. If you have any further questions, you can reach Dan directly at dfeely@transforming.com or (847) 705-0960 x202.

Five Critical Success Factors for Shared Services Optimization

Over the last couple of decades, organizations have made significant progress utilizing shared services and outsourcing to optimize and improve performance. Over this time period and even in a more accelerated manner in the past 5 years, Shared Service Centers (SSCs) have tended to become more global, multi-functional, virtual and cross-organizational (i.e., operated by more than one entity/business partner) … Click Here to read more.

Top Three Future Technology Disrupters for 2017 and Beyond

We live in fascinating times, where the pace of change and innovation never slows down and continues to accelerate and disrupt our world in ways we couldn’t imagine a short decade ago. It is only fitting as 2016 comes to an end, that I share my Top 3 Future Technology Disrupters … Click Here to read more.

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Unsubstantiated quote attributed to

Charles Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899

Having spent some time in the Intellectual Property arena, the above fictional quote attributed to Charles Duell, the patent office commissioner at the turn of the 19^th century, is one of my favorites. I like it in part because my maternal grandparents were both born in 1898. Looking back over their lives, they witnessed mind-boggling technical advances such as the automobile, airplane, landing of a man on the moon and disposable diapers (I’ll never forget my grandmother’s dismay when she first saw me change one). I wonder what they would have thought of smartphones, the cloud, 3D printing, gene therapy and the multitude of other innovations that have emerged after their lives.

We live in fascinating times, where the pace of change and innovation never slows down and continues to accelerate and disrupt our world in ways we couldn’t imagine a short decade ago. It is only fitting as 2016 comes to an end, that I share my Top 3 Future Technology Disrupters. There are dozens to choose from and I’m interested in hearing from many of you about your favorites.

Here goes…

1. Self-Driving or Autonomous Vehicles

In the 1900’s we removed the horse from the equation and a little over a hundred years later we are ready to remove the human driver.  The potential for autonomous vehicles to drive major transformation on many fronts is enormous. Thinking back to my time in the Property and Casualty sector, I can only assume traditional auto insurance executives, repair shop owners and parts manufacturers are quaking in their boots. How will policies be rated and priced? Will premium levels sustain the current level of insurance company overhead (hint, no)? Who will be held liable and responsible in a driverless accident? Ok, Stephen Babcock Partners personal injury lawyer is here, but what about all the rest? How will bodily injury attorneys replace lots of lost billable hours? How much will demand for auto parts decline when accidents decrease? How will health care costs be impacted? Get ready for some unexpected major consequences across this massive sector of our economy, including potentially millions of lives being saved and injuries avoided.

2. Amazon Go 

No, I do not own Amazon stock but perhaps I should have bought some a while ago. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by their vision of the retailer of the future outlined in a recent article. The concept – you walk into a grocery store (or any business), pick the items you want, and walk out the front door without waiting in line for a cashier to scan and bag your items – would have seemed like grand larceny just a few months ago. But Amazon has harnessed technology to make it happen. Not only is the consumer convenience play a huge one, but the impact on a major job category is monstrous. There are millions of cashiers and grocery baggers whose jobs are going to the place where travel agents, typists and many other obsolete careers have gone to eternal rest. I wonder if my self-driving car or drone (honorable mention – probably number 4 on my list) will be picking up my groceries? Undoubtedly drones for sale have increased over the years and the advancement of them makes me wonder how very soon tasks which seemed impossible or required a lot of wastage of funds can be simply done with the help of a drone in the near future. How can you leverage self-service and similar capabilities in your business?

3. Robotics

Here I go dating myself again, but an early favorite robot of mine was “Robot” in the 1960’s TV show Lost in Space.  Today’s robots are not your grandparents’ or parents’ robots. At the industrial level, from warehouse order picking and services listed on Industrial Auction Hub website, to assembly line manufacturing, millions of jobs will continue to be automated out of existence. At the human level, relationships and personal interactions look likely to change in ways that would have made my grandmother blush. Combined with advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, the IOT, big data analytics and other technology, this whole arena poses some big threats to our traditional notion of employable skills while presenting significant potential for improvements in our daily lives. What are your competitors doing to leverage robotics and related technologies? Stay tuned, lots of interesting change is coming here. I can hear “Robot” warning “Danger, Will Robinson.”

That’s my list. What’s on yours? At TSI, we advise our clients on how to foster innovation and effectively utilize technology to drive major performance improvement. Read more about TSI here.

Contact TSI to learn more about how TSI can help your organization stay ahead of technology in the face of major disruption.

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A traditional approach to building operating budgets involves taking the prior year spend and adjusting it for inflation. Although easier to implement than other budgeting models, the traditional approach builds in and compounds inefficiencies, grows the expense base over time and doesn’t encourage managers to explore ways to reduce costs via innovation and technology. ZBB requires managers of cost centers to justify budgets from scratch and support their budgets with Decision Packages that analyze, prioritize and rank all activities and operations within their organization and highlight areas of opportunity to innovate and apply technology to automate and streamline the business.

To effectively implement ZBB, managers can leverage Process Improvement frameworks to provide relevant information on their departmental activities, outputs produced, resources consumed, service levels provided to customers and manual steps ripe for technology enablement. The need for process-based information, metrics and cost drivers is where Process Improvement really shakes hands with ZBB.

At a high-level, Process Improvement enabled ZBB involves the following nine steps:

1. Identify the organization’s core mission/strategy and evaluate gaps between current execution and the level of execution required to serve customers and excel in chosen markets.
2. Set-up or tap into an existing enterprise-wide Process Improvement architecture.
3. Identify cost centers and all processes/activities related to each cost center.
4. Analyze time spent by personnel in each cost center (processes/activities supported and outputs produced).
5. Prepare Decision Packages for each cost center (includes justification for cost center, how current funding level supports the current strategic plan, and what budget adjustments would be necessary if the cost center was eliminated or restructured to change its mix of activities).
6. Prioritize and rank Decision Packages.
7. Reallocate resources to support the core mission/strategy and realize potential cost savings.
8. Integrate results of the ZBB exercise with the annual budgeting process, process improvement and portfolio management activities.
9. Track, measure and validate targeted cost reductions and launch the next cycle of improvement.

ZBB and Process improvement can drive major cost savings and ROI. Successful implementation requires effective organizational change management and trust at all levels of the organization. It is especially important for outsiders to an organization to review costs in an objective, non-political manner. In the end, companies that do it well will reap major competitive advantages and rewards and the CFO and Finance Team will be regarded as nothing less than magical for creating value from Zero.

To learn more about transforming your business, contact TSI. 

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