Framework for Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) Management

Building Blocks that Support your Customer Measurement System, Changing Goals, Processes, and Executives’ Practices

December 20, 2001

A Customer Flight Deck^SM is the surest way to make your organization’s culture more customer-centric. These metrics don’t replace existing measurements, but they put a customer focus in your company’s management decisions. Once you’ve convinced yourself of the value of measuring and monitoring what matters most to customers, and you’ve identified your metrics, how do you create your own living, breathing Customer Flight Deck? We offer an architectural framework for dealing with data collection, Customer Flight Deck presentation, and the layers in between.

NETTING IT OUT

Most companies manage around products and operations, so becoming customer focused requires a shift in culture. The surest path to changing corporate culture is to establish a set of measurements that define your customer goals and progress towards them. Our Customer Flight Deck^SM presents the most rigorous approach to managing the delivery of what matters most to customers.

Establishing the right set of customer experience metrics is an executive exercise. Creating the framework for gathering the measurement data and presenting the metrics in an effective format is a non-trivial exercise for IT, involving data, application, and operations specialists.

Executives and IT will both find that the exercises don't end: your Customer Flight Deck will keep changing. The major drivers of change are customers and business operations.

To ensure that your Customer Flight Deck system is responsive to change, you need to establish a flexible architecture. We recommend designing an architecture that separates data collection, event management, analysis, business rules, and presentation. We have identified the following key architecture layers:

Presentation and notification management
Notification engine
Data analysis
Data repository
Data correlation
Data collection

These architectural elements will be handling a myriad of data sources for your Customer Flight Deck. The main sources are:

Customer survey data
Reporting by employees, partners, etc
Analytic applications
Application reporting and events
Business process monitoring
Systems and event management systems

You probably already own the software building blocks for your Customer Flight Deck system. These building blocks include enterprise management systems, middleware, and business intelligence systems.

We'll continue delving into MotorMan's customer scenario involving Sal and Jerry to present an example of how QCE metrics are collected and used.

Because of the effort involved, you'll probably want to take a step-by-step approach to building your Customer Flight Deck. We recommend nailing at least one line-of-sight series and tracking all outcomes for one customer segment. This will help your organization make progress in improving QCE as well as make the executive team believers in the Customer-Flight-Deck approach.

MEASURING QCE

The surest way to make your organization's culture more customer-centric is to implement a set of measurements that tell everyone how well the company is delivering what matters most to customers. These measurements don't replace existing measurements, but they put a customer focus in your company's management decisions.

The most effective series of customer metrics for your company are represented by the Customer Flight Deck^SM, described in detail in Patricia B. Seybold's book, The Customer Revolution.

Once you've convinced yourself of the value of measuring and monitoring what matters most to customers, and once you've identified what those metrics are, someone in your company owns a perplexing problem. Where does the Customer Flight Deck data come from, how is it collected, and how is it presented?

SOURCES OF MEASUREMENT DATA

There are myriad sources of data for QCE measurements. They range from manual reporting to application data to system error events. The main sources are as follows:

Customer Survey. Direct customer survey produces the customer satisfaction data. Survey may be the only way to know whether customers achieve their outcomes—for example, having machines in production on schedule.
Reporting by Employees and Trading Partners. There are some events or steps that can only be observed or reported by people. This is especially true of customer outcomes. For example, only your customer can give you the time stamp for the moment that the first widgets roll out of the new production machine he bought from you.
Data Warehouse. Data warehouses are typically the enterprise's repository for synthesized information.
Business Intelligence. Business intelligence systems typically include event recognition and forwarding, as well as providing metadata that provides context for the enterprise information. Business intelligence systems also perform measurement data analysis and reporting.
Applications. Application programs already provide reports and perhaps already generate business events and exception events. We include Web site statistics in the application category.
Middleware. For many companies, middleware is the business process nervous system. Middleware can recognize and report intermediate steps in business processes.
Business Process Management. This class of software, also including business process automation, records completion of workflow steps and transactions.
Enterprise Systems Management. Enterprise systems management detects and forwards IT and systems events that impact customer-critical processes.