How to extract maximum value from a zero-based design approach to
customer journeys
Companies finding success in transforming
their customer journeys are discovering that four practices are critical.
In recent years, the business landscape has undergone massive
changes thanks to shifting economic conditions, heightened customer
expectations, and technological innovation. This reality has put additional
pressure on businesses to improve performance and redesign their products, services,
and even organizations. Zero-based design has emerged as a potent approach.
If done right, the principles of
zero-based design—which essentially encourages people to cast aside assumptions
to expand the scope of discovery—will help organizations achieve step changes
in performance compared with traditional approaches. Typical results include an
increase of 30 to 50 percent in operational productivity and a rise of 10 to 20
points in customer-satisfaction scores, fueled by enhanced responsiveness of up
to 80 percent.
Given that impact, many organizations in
the financial-services industry have tried to use zero-based design to
transform customer journeys. But in practice, those efforts have often fallen
short of their full value potential because organizations tend to narrowly
define what zero-based design actually is. For this reason, they do not put in
place the necessary building blocks so that great ideas lead to great
solutions.
In our experience, four
issues are the primary culprits: incomplete or unclear definitions of end-to-end journeys (both
customer facing and internal), lack of the right skill sets on the
journey-redesign team, constrained ideation, and regimented and inflexible ways
of working.
To address these issues, we find it
helpful to ask the following questions.
1. Are
all processes in your organization mapped against end-to-end customer journeys?
Companies often believe they’ve worked
across departments to define end-to-end customer journeys by assembling members
of different departments or aligning the organization to resolve a single pain
point. This approach, however, doesn’t provide the necessary clarity needed to
define an end-to-end journey. What’s needed is for companies to identify and
reframe all processes throughout the organization into a comprehensive set of
end-to-end journeys. This means accounting for processes that directly touch
the customer as well as the supporting middle- and back-office functions. This
is crucial because it is important to have the right definition of journeys to
which the zero-based design approach can be applied. Otherwise, companies will
risk delivering incomplete and inconsistent experiences to their customers.
A good journey definition includes the
following:
·
Places the customer at
the center and uses the customer’s language.Taking
this perspective will help the journey team work with the customer in mind. For
example, an insurance sales customer’s journey definition might be, “I want to
protect myself from the unexpected.”
·
Identifies a clear
beginning and end. Defining the outlines of the
customer journey will force the team to think holistically about the customer
experience instead of trying to arrive at point-by-point solutions. In
insurance, a sales journey may start when a customer begins to evaluate options
and end when he or she receives the policy.
·
Crosses departmental
boundaries. By considering the multiple
functional groups that touch the customer journey, teams can solve for the
customer’s integrated experience. In the insurance sales example, the journey
will involve a minimum of the sales, pricing, policy-issuance, and even claims
departments.
To define a set of end-to-end customer
journeys, teams will need to invest significant effort and apply the right
resources and capabilities, such as analytics and workforce management. When
properly done, the outcome will be unprecedented visibility into every aspect
of the customer journey. For example, a personal lines property-and-casualty
(P&C) carrier defining its end-to-end journeys would quickly realize that a
customer who has been in an accident and is now recovering from an injury and
getting his or her vehicle repaired would perceive that entire experience as a
single journey. Therefore, even if the carrier’s claims organization separates
the vehicle-damage and injury adjustors into two different groups, they will
need to come together to redesign the claims-customer journey.
2. Do
you have people with diverse skill sets on your journey-redesign teams?
Many organizations bring together IT
employees and business experts to redesign customer journeys. This
collaboration helps, but it is not enough.
The success of a zero-based design effort
depends on the journey team having a mix of skill sets to help generate ideas,
create prototypes, test them, and then iterate on them. Following are two
nontraditional but critical roles that need to be part of those teams:
·
Experienced designers are
adept at interpreting multiple stakeholder perspectives and translating them
into an optimized possible journey design for the customer.
·
Customer anthropologists can help the team understand customer insights
more deeply. They interpret quantitative and qualitative research data and
reconcile nonintuitive inputs to form a coherent narrative around the customer
experience.
Financial-services firms and traditional
organizations don’t necessarily have such nontraditional skills in-house. When
they do exist, the skills can vary significantly, and attracting the right
external talent is a challenge. Companies that are serious about pursuing
zero-based design must invest in updated, innovative recruiting strategies to
identify, hire, and develop employees with the right skill sets for these
nontraditional roles.
3. Are
your ideation sessions sparking true innovation or derivative ideas?
Many proactive organizations are learning
the basics of design thinking and ideation sessions. Companies often start with
inspiring videos, integrate customer perspectives into ideation sessions, and
include subject-matter experts in them as well.
While these steps are an important start,
they don’t maximize the potential of zero-based design. An “art of the
possible” approach can amplify creative thinking by releasing participants from
constraints and inspiring them with possibilities.1 An effective ideation session should
include four critical elements (for more, see sidebar, “Applying the ‘art of
the possible’ with ideation sessions”):
·
A clear, bold aspiration
in line with the company’s overall strategy.Members
of the ideation team must have complete clarity on the company’s overall
vision, strategy, and goals (both financial and nonfinancial) that they are
addressing. To achieve this clarity, senior leaders must be present at ideation
sessions to articulate and credibly communicate the vision.
·
Inspiration from outside
innovators. Cross-functional teams that are
exposed to examples of creative thinking in action from other sectors are more
likely to challenge their own insular thinking and produce creative ideas.
·
Next-generation
capabilities. Zero-based design participants who
become familiar with new capabilities such as automation, advanced analytics,
and digital are better able to make connections between potential innovative solutions and existing
business problems. As a result, “art of
the possible” workshops frequently incorporate overviews of advanced
capabilities and other relevant educational programming.
·
Ideation in rapid
sprints. All zero-based design sessions
require team members to brainstorm. However, “art of the possible” workshops
jump-start the process by leading participants through a series of rapid-fire
exercises designed to challenge them to take on different points of view. The
result is an exciting environment that stimulates creative visions of
redesigned journeys.
4. Is
your organization as agile as your journey team?
Many organizations that apply zero-based
design believe it is sufficient for just their journey-redesign teams to adopt
an agile way of working. To get results, however, the entire organization needs
to adapt to the pace, flexibility, autonomy, and transparency of the journey
teams.
Organizations can achieve the full
potential of zero-based design only if they evolve their governance models and
infrastructure to enable fast-paced, distributed, and accessible decision
making. Successful organizations adopt a test-and-learn mind-set and diligently
measure success by results and outcomes. Companies that have been successful at
zero-based design share some common traits:
·
Leadership updates and steering-committee
meetings that focus on discussions and demonstrations in the work area instead
of presentations in boardrooms.
·
Frequent and rapid investment decisions
based on start-up-like pitches supported by rigorous but not cumbersome
business cases that can be evaluated and approved to keep pace with the
ideation team.
·
Adoption of “agile” routines such as
regular huddles, brief work sprints focused on output, and regular
retrospective evaluations. This mode of working allows organizations to be
nimble and respond to market changes quickly.
A fundamental redesign of end-to-end
customer journeys is not the place for half measures. Zero-based design can
help organizations transform processes, mind-sets, and operations, but only if
they fully commit to four essential areas where organizations have
traditionally missed the mark.
By JP Higgins, Elixabete Larrea, Swapnil
Prabha, Alex Singla,
and Rohit Sood
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/how-to-extract-maximum-value-from-a-zero-based-design-approach-to-customer-journeys?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=2089ec365db34dfcb7b663b46eabd7f6&hctky=1627601&hdpid=8e0f133f-4cb5-4f3c-8183-8cdda5d02e37
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