How to Transform the Customer Journey with Collaborative Process Modeling

In part two of this series on how financial institutions gain competitive advantage through process modeling, we'll look at how Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and CSAA Insurance Group are transforming the customer journey.

Process modeling is a team sport.

As in most team sports, each player has a specific role and individual players have unique combinations of knowledge, skill and experience. In the sport of process modeling it is very rare for a single player to be able to successfully understand and document all aspects of a process without direct engagement from other members of the team.

What makes process modeling successful is the collaboration between subject matter experts who C O L L E C T I V E L Y understand all the considerations that must be taken into account. These considerations include roles, responsibilities, inputs, outputs, customers, suppliers, tasks, procedures, systems, regulations, policies, laws, decisions, problems and a myriad of other details. For example, the compliance expert is almost definitely not the marketing expert, and the person who understands how the tax code works is rarely the person who understands how sales operations works.

It is the importance of this cross-functional and cross-divisional collaboration that makes a shared multi-user environment critical to successful process modeling. In contrast to a single-user tool like Visio, collaborative applications like IBM Blueworks Live provide a multi-user process modeling environment built around a shared team workspace. When one person makes a change, everybody with the appropriate permission sees that change immediately. Teams can even collaborate across continents without a web meeting, since each user will see on his or her screen, in real time, the changes made by the other members of the account.

Blueworks Live includes numerous collaboration features made possible by its multi-user architecture. For example, users can 'follow' the processes and other artifacts they’re interested in, just like on a social media site, and be notified when any changes are made to those items. They can use the 'commenting' feature to post questions or share ideas, and then easily follow the threads of the ensuing conversations. They can see which of their colleagues are online, and use the built-in chat feature to communicate with them directly in the context of the process modeling environment. According to CSAA Insurance Group:

"There are two key things that get our users excited. The first thing is how easy the tool is to use. But after they get started, what excites them is the collaboration…  that   you can easily share your models in the cloud, that other people can look at the processes you’ve designed, that people can post comments .” (Pat Sannerud, Business Architect, CSAA Insurance Group)

Financial organizations tend to be organized in silos, yet customer journeys inevitably cross multiple departments and lines of business. It's important for diverse groups of business people to be able to work together in a shared environment to represent the role their department or function plays in the end-to-end process. Even more crucial is the ability to have an end-to-end customer view of what it's like to do business with your company. According to Barclays, a leading financial institution that uses Blueworks Live to document business processes and customer journeys:

"Typically in operations you have a series of processes that when you put them together, you get the customer outcome. But we never stood back and looked at what that end-to-end customer journey looked like and how we get to the right outcome for the customer. With Blueworks Live,  you can document end-to-end processes or customer journeys... that's been really powerful for us ." (Mike Gamble, Managing Director of Operations, Barclays Bank, UK)

 When you look at your end-to-end processes through the eyes of your customers, you begin to have an understanding of what it means to do business with your company. Customers don’t care that your company is organized in silos; they consider that to be your problem, not theirs. Their decision to award you their business is based on how easy you are to do business with. Without a mechanism to promote cross-divisional collaboration, there is no effective way to understand or improve your customers’ journey. A multi-user process modeling environment is needed in order to achieve this critical end-to-end view. According to Royal Bank of Scotland:

“Before Blueworks Live, processes were modeled and analyzed using a variety of approaches, depending upon the context. We were looking for a new and innovative approach to meet the challenge of providing a consistent, end-to-end and clear single view of our processes .” (Martin Saich, Senior Solutions Consultant, Royal Bank of Scotland)

Cross-divisional thinking is very difficult for many companies to achieve because employees tend to focus on the business unit that writes their paycheck. A multi-user process modeling environment provides a way for organizations to transcend this siloed thinking and see their business through the eyes of their customers. Collaborative process modeling may be the most powerful tool companies have to transform the customer journey.

Blueworks Live provides a shared multi-user environment with extensive collaboration features, such as the comment stream shown on the right side of this screen.

The real-world impact of a multi-user process modeling environment

If you think about your own company, how successful are you at understanding the customer journey? Do people from your various functions and divisions work together in a collaborative way to produce well-documented, end-to-end process models? Do your people use single-user, desktop tools or do they have access to a multi-user, collaborative environment?

In today’s hyper-competitive market, is there anything more important than understanding the journey your customers travel as they engage with the various departments and functions of your company? By giving your teams a shared environment in which to collaborate on an accurate view of this end-to-end journey, you’ll stand a much better chance of truly integrating the silos that stand in the way of delivering the world-class experience your customers demand.

Part 2 of a three-part series.

Part 1: How Leading Financial Institutions Use Process Modeling for Competitive Advantage 

Part 3: How a Consistent Approach to Process Modeling Improves Customer Satisfaction and Reduces Risk