Re-imagining BPM for the Next Level in End-Customer Impact

Let’s be honest: “My mess for less” as a client expectation is officially dead. Instead, providers now have a seat at the table as partners. This is a tremendous opportunity for providers and clients alike to re-think what they want from the Business Process Management (BPM) relationship, and how they are going to set about achieving it.

How do we work together to meet these radically altered expectations? One possibility is to begin by re-imagining BPM with the end-customer in mind. That is very different from the traditional process-centric approach that has—admittedly— been extremely successful in bringing the BPM from the fringes to the center of global business. However, asking providers to implement solutions to fix specific problems and processes can only get one so far. To attain the next level in impact, participants need to understand that value is not created exclusively by perfecting the known, but also by imperfectly seizing the unknown.

That means acknowledging that the provider-client engagement needs to center not just around business processes but also the needs of end-customers. Here is a list of five ways that we could re-define the relationship and therefore its value potential based on end-customer centricity:

• Re-imagine customer outcomes: Providers and clients could try and move beyond customer satisfaction to focusing on the end-customer experience. In hospitality, for instance, this would mean going beyond delivering a great hotel product to delivering a great vacation experience.
• Re-imagine partnerships: Tactical, metric-driven risk and reward models are already shifting towards transformative business value-based relationships. This evolution needs to continue, with end-customer value firmly in its sights.
• Re-imagine analytics: From answering “what happened and why did it happen?” to a predictive analytics-driven “what will happen, when it will happen and why it will happen?” view is a game changer. It could also help companies create compelling end-customer propositions and improve engagement.
• Re-imagine benchmarking: In the future, the BPM relationship can and should break the vicious cycle of competitive benchmarking and instead move towards creating valuable end-customer differentiators.
• Re-imagine processes: Thinking about processes in terms of inputs and outputs has worked well thus far. Now, clients and providers should think in terms of the larger end-customer journey, which may well traverse multiple processes.