Customer Centric Processes: How to Implement them using BPM

The modern understanding of business processes is focused on the customer. It seems strange to say this, but most organizations are still focused on production processes, or the way things are done, and not the perception of the customer. To migrate from production focused processes to customer-centric processes (focused on the end client), one needs a whole cultural change in the company, involving new attitudes and ways of thinking, both on the part of managers and employees in general.

In this context, BPM can play a crucial role in providing this change. Shifting the focus to the customer would be a huge evolution for most companies. Ease of communication, a flow of ideas, transparency of information, process redesigned with a new focus, all of this can be provided by a good BPM tool.

With the focus on the end customer, we need to understand consumer demands and create processes where customer satisfaction becomes aligned with the needs of the company. After all, it is to the customer that the processes are designed, it is the customer who will realize the value at the end of the production chain and decide if it is worth shelling out some money for that product or service.

But the reasoning behind the actions of many organizations has been the reverse. When instead of creating customer-centric processes, focused on meeting customer needs and leaving them satisfied, some companies insist on focusing on its internal production processes, optimizing them, meeting the operating needs, and only after that, giving a thought to transforming what they deliver to their customers in a satisfactory way.
Having said this, it’s easy to see why there is a cultural change challenge involved in the adoption of customer-centric processes.

Learn more: BPM vs. Workflow.

Characteristics of customer-centric processes

Companies that care about meeting customer needs, develop a series of characteristics that favor the adoption of customer-centric processes, as follows:

• They understand what the customer sees as a satisfactory final product and so design processes for this purpose.
• Their employees develop a new way of thinking in which each phase of the operation has the customer’s wishes in mind.
• BPM software is used to model ideas to come up with this new way of “customer centric” thinking, turning them into operational realities that work.
• The BPM tool becomes a fundamental element in this process of cultural change.
• The effectiveness and efficiency of the newly created process bring confidence to reviewers, who overcome the “fear of change”.
• Positive results are proof that management can validate the continued use of customer-centric processes with higher strategic level management.

In short, the implementation of good BPM software increases engagement and promotes the integration of customer-centric processes throughout the company, making it very easy to facilitate cultural change, seeking a new mental model and a new organizational attitude.

See also: Business Process Design Principles

Benefits of customer-centric process implementation

After overcoming cultural change barriers, some benefits will be noticed by the company and, best of all, add value to products and services that customers seek. See:

• More flexibility to meet and manage the changing needs of customers.
• The organizational objectives or business goals, become clearer and more measurable.
• The focus becomes finding the solutions to ingrain those goals.
• The innovation to meet this search can come from redesigning processes, such as the creation of new products or the improvement of customer experiences.
• All of this constant innovation brings more visibility to the company.
• You gain a lot of speed and time, especially if the BPM software offers the ability to create the necessary tools for everyone by practical innovation.
• And with more tools, there will be more transparency, information sharing, and control.

Thus, the culture of customer-centric processes ends up generating a virtuous cycle, where new possibilities for understanding how to satisfy the customer are discovered easily, leading back to the process of value creation and the definition of the organization’s objectives.

Check out: Definition of BPM: Learn how to add value to your business.

Also, see how to model business processes in your company with some techniques.