“Why do companies invest in business process design if they don’t focus first on the processes that impact customer experience?,” Andrew Spanyi asked when we met by phone. Andrew Spanyi is a business process design, operational leadership, and performance management consultant. He has been helping large and mid-size organizations overhaul their business processes and re-align their strategies for most of his career. “I won’t work with companies that don’t start from the outside in, from the customer’s point of view,” he told me.  That was music to my ears. We proceeded to have a lively discussion swapping war stories about all the clients we’d each worked with who professed to being “customer-focused,” but whose key performance metrics were bottom-line focused, not customer-experience driven. Somehow, the leadership teams in these firms missed the point that if you don’t attend to customer experience first, you won’t have any customers to bring in revenues, and your costs-to-serve will skyrocket because your business processes are optimized to make money, not to make it easy for customers to get things done.

Andrew firmly believes that, if you first identify the customer-critical vital signs for your organization, only then are you in the position to begin to streamline your business processes. You want to optimize those business processes to deliver great consistent, operational performance, but do it by focusing from the outside in, not from the inside out.

Assessing Customer Experience from the Outside In
What Are Your Customer Experience Vital Signs?
By Andrew Spanyi, Guest Author, February 27, 2014