Customer Journeys to Reduce Waste and Risk in Value Streams
With the complexity and geographic dispersion of internal organizational processes, managers of global organizations no longer have the luxury of going down the hall and doing the “gemba walk” to review the effectiveness of the overall value stream to improve customer experience. We now have value streams, value chains, and highly complex internal processes, multitude of adjacent requirements such as security, compliance, brand recognition, follow the sun models - which all require a lot of navigation before they can collectively meet the needs of internal and external customers. In this new complex dynamic, we see the need to combine the customer journey with the service production value stream to identify the hotspots and key pain points within the value stream that may not be the most inefficient, but may cause the most pain and user experience impairment. The proposed novel approach creates fundamentally new opportunities leading to additional value creation, movement, and progress in terms of understanding the value proposition of a process or a system. And so, being able to take the value stream and walk the customers through and have them identify where they're hurting.For organizations mapping the value stream could be a big breakthrough for understanding what processes, procedures, and systems are involved in bringing value to their customers, and which are not. The customer journey mapping exercises have become a staple of technology organizations to understand how their customers interact with their products and services. Mapping both customer pain points and touch points adds another element of an analysis that can really bring the value stream to life. Recently, our team had the ability to look at how our teams flowed through our global technology processes and answer the following key questions:
•Where did our customers experience the most pain points?
•Where did our customers see the most touch points?
•How do we make the value stream operate more efficiently?
One critical game changer we found was that during developments when additional teams identified what they needed and had to reopen development. It was a taboo dissatisfaction because by that time, they were usually out of budget and the business team was yelling at them asking for their application, creating a double layer of dissatisfaction. That puts the imperative on getting in front of the process or getting in front of the problem. This workshop will show practitioners how to identify critical considerations of the customer when doing the journey map.
Overall, the customer journey finds improvement opportunities by allowing organizations to understand how their customers flow through their processes, how many touch points they have, and how they feel when they move through the organization.. In addition, the risk conversation can identify not only cyber and service delivery risks but also other organizational risks. In addition, not every process has to be streamlined. Some people are willing to take a little bit more time working through the processes or at least certain stages of a process. If they're guaranteed value or if there's some unstated need to be met overall. Understanding the customer's journey and how people move through the value stream can add a lot of value to your organization. This workshop will help you to identify which stages of the process are most important or critical to the overall value stream and which ones are inherently risky. In this workshop you will get:
•An approach to quickly identify, map, and socialize the value stream
•Customer Journey Templates to move different customer types through the value stream
•A best practices tip sheet to avoid some common pitfalls of process mapping
