There seems to be as many maps in the Service Design world as there is time in the Lean world. Service Design has a few types of maps that they consider, Process Maps, Journey Maps, Blueprint Maps, Net-map, Offering Maps, Mind Maps, etc. Not that I don’t enjoy the tools but it gets rather confusing.
I have been spending quite a bit of time investigating and trying different software. Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss Process Mapping with Ben Graham. Ben has been helping people make sense of their processes for over thirty years. Heis President of The Ben Graham Corporation and author of the book ‘Detail Process Charting: Speaking the Language of Process; His company pioneered the field of business process improvement, and since 1953 has provided process improvement consulting, coaching and education services to organizations across North America. Ben’s Podcast is The Granularity of Process Mapping and eBook Capturing the Flow of Information.
An excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe: In the service work and the service design type things that I get involved with, there is a lot of interest in customer journey maps or service blueprinting. Are you able to use process software for that?
Ben: We don’t get into the emotion aspects of a customer journey map, but we do capture with a process map all the touch points where a customer is directly involved with a process, whether it’s an internal customer or external customer. We have a detail process map, captures all the players in the process and where their touch points are. From that aspect, they’re comparable. I think that, once again, they could work together.
Joe: You’re saying you can capture the touch points, the front stage actions, the back stage actions, and maybe even some of the support processes. But you’re lacking the emotional side?
Ben: We’re capturing reality, regardless of how people feel about it when we’re doing an as is process. We’re capturing what happens. Now, when we get into analysis and we want to improve the process, that’s where having that other map can provide some input possibly. We find out where the hurt points are and that can give us some focus on where we want to make some changes.
I have debated for a long time, whether it is better to master one or 2 process and using those the majority of the time. The problem in doing this of course is that if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail. The advantage though is the ability to distribute and explain the knowledge that is captured versus explaining the tool. There may be a significant advantage as people grow familiar with the tool and start seeing the information contained within it. In a recent article in ASQ October 12, 2012 monthly magazine an article by Brian Metz, Making Contact, Understanding the customer relationship through touch point, demonstrates theuse of our regular tool set. an excerpt from the article
Cameron, which supplies flow equipment to the oil and gas industry, figured out a way to do that using a customer touch point business model (CTPBM) that provides a systematic way to analyze all points of customer interaction throughout the relationship for impact and performance, and correlates these customer interactions to business performance. For larger organizations, it can be difficult to determine exactly how many times they interact or touch their customers throughout the life of the business relationship. The first step in the CTPBM involves creating process maps identifying all touch points during the four stages of the customer relationship:
1. Attraction—gathering new business.
2. Interaction—providing quotations and accepting customer orders.
3. Transaction—manufacturing and delivering customer orders.
4. Reaction—aftermarket care and customer follow-up.
These stages are cyclical in that a proper reaction will bring the customer back to attraction with new business opportunities.
Cameron put together touch point maps as swim-lane process maps with the organization, customer and end user—when applicable—as the different swim lanes (see Figure 2). Input from all personnel involved in the relationship, including the customer, is needed to complete a comprehensive map. When a process arrow crosses from one lane to another, a touch point exists.
Additionally, at certain steps in the processes, the customer faces decisions regarding Cameron products or services. While no direct communication with Cameron may have occurred, these are pivotal touch points in which all Cameron knowledge and reputation instilled in the customer results in the relationship continuing, slowing or even ending abruptly.
It’s imperative that these touch points, in addition to all traditional touch points, are noted and analyzed because they are just as—if not more—important to the total understanding of what drives a customer to make business decisions.
Four categories of touch points appear on the maps:
1. Indirect (blue)—touch points where pivotal decisions are made by the customer with or without Cameron’s direct involvement.
2. Double (yellow)—touch points that exist between the customer and the end user. These also are significant because they can result in changes to the customer relationship, even though they do not involve direct Cameron contact and can be easily forgotten or ignored.
3. Customer direct (red)—touch points that exist when the customer directly contacts Cameron.
4. Cameron direct (green)—touch points that exist when Cameron directly contacts the customer.
All touch points on the maps are color-coded and serialized. The serialization includes the phase in the relationship at which the touch point exists, followed by a sequential integer. For example, the first touch point in the attraction phase is labeled “A1.” This makes the touch points easy to identify when performing the impact and performance analysis in the next step.
Measuring performance
Quality function deployment (QFD) is a method to transform customer needs into engineering characteristics. Yoji Akao, who developed the model in 1966, described QFD as a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately into specific elements of the manufacturing process.”2
While QFD was initially developed with product design and reengineering in mind, it can be applied to more transactional processes. In the CTPBM, QFD is slightly transformed to quantify the interaction between customer motivators and technical requirements for each of the four phases. Each of the identified touch points is analyzed to determine an applicable customer motivator—the optimal result of the interaction in the eyes of the customer.
For example, a touch point occurring when a customer asks the inside sales department for clarification of a submitted quote might have a customer motivator defined as “the continuing accessibility of sales representatives.” A unique customer motivator may not exist for each individual touch point because some touch points might have the same underlying customer motivator.
Technical requirements for each phase include the tools and strategies involved in providing all necessary information to the customer. For example, technical requirements of the transaction phase of the customer relationship include material requirements planning software and online order tracking systems.
When completing the QFD matrix during this phase of the CTPBM, the questions you should ask are:
- How well are we satisfying this customer motivator?
- How much does this technical requirement affect the achievability of this customer motivator?
- How important is it that we increase the level at which we are meeting this customer motivator?
The output of the QFD in regards to the CTPBM is a ranked list of customer motivators and technical requirements, plus a graphical comparison of Cameron’s current proficiency at meeting each customer motivator compared to three or four of its top competitors for the product being analyzed.
Because the performance and importance of each customer motivator is ranked on a scale of one to five, any motivator with an overall weight of five or greater after calculations based on improvement and impact will be considered significant and be further analyzed. A visual representation of each segment of the QFD matrix—known as the house of quality is shown above.
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