Last week, I was expecting a parcel to be shipped to my place. I received the call, [FOREIGN], here's the shipping company. Could you please let us know when you would like to receive your parcel? I said, hello, thanks for calling, it would be great if you could deliver it this Saturday. I'm sorry, the person said, that we deliver only on Monday to Friday, all right, all right, I said, okay. Please deliver it on Monday at 1 PM, I'll set up my agenda so that I can be at home. And the answer was, sorry again, we cannot fix the time, it is going to be on Monday sometime between 9 AM and 6 PM. Now, how do you think I felt as a customer? I was upset, I felt a lack of respect to my person, and my job. I felt frustrated because I couldn't say, you know what, in that case, you don't need to deliver at all, I'll hire your competitor to do it. And guess what? Of course, nobody asked me how satisfied I was with the service. Now, imagine that you are the operations manager of this same shipping company, and that your bonus is based on your ability to manage costs. Which metrics would you set up to manage your team of planners and drivers? Probably, number of parcels delivered per day, or number of kilometers traveled per parcel delivered, or number of parcels delivered on the planned day. It is obvious that these metrics can be easily optimized with daily, rather than hourly appointment slots. Because planners can set up more appointment, and the driver can organize their part over the entire day. The point is that these metrics are internal process metrics, and drive employee-centric behaviors. While customer metrics such as customer satisfaction, and advocacy index would drive customer-centric processes, and enjoyable customer journeys. Let me tell you another story from the time I was working for a network clinics in Europe. There was a huge difference of the percentage of the patient no shows between two hospitals. In the one hospital, the percentage amounted to 20%, wasting time of doctors, in the other hospital, the percentage was close to zero. Our first and natural reaction was to think that the second hospital was performing better. However, looking closely, realized that this hospital didn't have a daily agenda. So, patients were accepted in a first come, first served order. As a result, some of them waited up to two hours but for that, doctors were busy the entire day. That it shows that reality is more complex. One hospital was efficient but employee-centric, while the other was inefficient but customer-centric. As you can see by these two examples, a customer-centric mindset may appear in tension with efficiency. And this is true in some extents because total customer satisfaction leads to bankruptcy. But adding the customer journey perspective to your operational value stream promotes innovation, and improves customer retention. So, what does it mean concretely? As you remember from previous lessons, the customer journey is the sequence of interactions between customers and the company. These interactions are called customer touches. When you want to insure your car, your customer journey starts with a search of information about different contract features. And continue so with the issue of the policy, the reception of the vignette, and many other touches. Particularly important are those touches that are moment of truth. The touches that have a big impact on customer loyalty. In the case of a car insurance, that could be how an accident is being handled, how quickly you are reimbursed, and how easily you can prove your rights. The value stream is the process to create that value that the companies deliver in customer touches. So, if we take at the same example, it is the series of activities to inform the customer about the contract features. Or the series of activities from the accident to the reimbursement. As you may guess it is fundamental that the operation design value streams with the customer journey perspective. Because if they do so, they generate more transparent, streamlined, and customer friendly processes. Let me give you an example about this point. In an automotive company used to have two different commercial teams for selling new cars, and trading the used cars. As a result, they also had the two different websites, one dedicated to new cars, and other one dedicated to used cars. The problem was that selling an old car very likely happened at the same time than buying a new one in the customer journey. So the fact that the customer had to navigate between the two websites, that were almost not connected to each other resulted in a bad customer experience. Lets recap the differences between employee-centric, and customer-centric mindset. On the one hand, the employee-centric organization have more silos, and the processes within those silos are designed with the little customer interaction. On the other hand, customer-centric organization have a better interdepartment cooperation, and they processes are design based on end-to-end value stream, and customer journey. Metrics and dashboards in employee-centric organization tend to measure department performances. Often, with the stronger focus on productivity, while the customer-centric organization measure customer-facing the indicators such as customer waiting time, level of advocacy. A frequent paradox is to have all department metrics positive, and customer metrics negative. The employee-centric mindset is frequent in monopolies like public administration, or capital-intensive businesses, while the customer-centric mindset is quite frequent in high competitive markets. Last but not the least, employee-centric organization may generate short-term benefits. But the customer-centric organization usually experiences sustainable growth.
