When discussing business strategies, whether these be for CRM, CEM, or just plain BPM, organizations try to understand and plan for every eventuality using processes. Flowcharts and call scripts are the answer to all conversations with the customers.
Lets look at the some basic customer conversations. Starting with product design and development, we rely on surveys and focus groups working on a scripted and finite set of questions. Marketing, sets up automated campaigns to generate leads. Sales scripts have always been infamous for stereotyping customers. Customer services and support processes are optimized using scripted IVRs.
Now consider this, the number of people which access to the internet was approximately 2.2 billion as of 2011, according to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/). Even if we consider the internet channel, which is just a part of the overall consumer ecosystem, that number means a potential 2.2 billion different conversations. How do you plan for and script more than 2 billion potentially different conversations?
80% of all these conversations may be predictable. With the consumer ecosystem shifting from a organization focus to customer focus, it means the customer demands will keep becoming more and more unpredictable. How do we adapt to this? Will we always just react to the customer demands then?
To handle the exponential growth in variety, we need to be creative in our conversations. Whether it is in product design, marketing, sales, services through any customer touchpoint. The challenge in front of organizations today is how to innovate in business processes to achieve a balance between scripting the predictable conversations and encouraging individual creativity in the face of those unpredictable ones.
How specific are your business processes? Do they cultivate innovation or spurn it?
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