Treat your customer like king and stay in control? This is how you do it

Of course, in any organisation, the customer is king. At the same time, in organisations with large numbers of customers, this principle can lead to many exceptions and special ‘cases’. This is not so much to do with your customer as with the system you work with. This can create hefty limitations when it comes to processing customer requests quickly, properly and efficiently. In this blog, Jan Willem van Asperen, sales director at BPM Company, discusses two common situations and how to tackle them.

1. Systems allow too few exceptions

Many applications are focused and built on the ‘happy flow’, based on the steps in the process when everything is standard. This is dominated by the idea that we all get the same customers, products and requests that all fit neatly into that pre-conceived process. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Many of these applications – especially the older ones – are also far from flexible. If they are also built with outdated technology, you can almost guarantee that every adjustment will lead to a major disruption. Of course, nobody wants that. Adaptations are postponed, causing the number of exceptions – which would never have become exceptions in a flexible environment – to pile up. To deal with those exceptions anyway, a vibrant ‘office IT’ emerges. Read: a jungle of self-imposed tools, such as dreadful Excel sheets.

2. Systems allow too many exceptions

We also see the opposite. Applications that handle customisation and exceptions very flexibly. We often see this in systems that are data-driven, without any further process support. They are often little more than UI shells on a database with some additional functionality, such as performing calculations. Employees know in no time how to ‘cram’ every exception back into the system, just to serve and keep the customer happy.

Go back to basics

Both situations create unmanageable processes, lack of control and high operational costs. The threshold to address this seems to be getting higher and higher. But with the right approach and support, that threshold is not so high at all. First, go back to the basics of the process. Who are your customers? What do they want? How do you design your process accordingly? Who do you need to execute that process? So what are the happy flows and what are the unhappy flows?

Customer king again

With the Pega platform, you kill several birds with one stone. Pega, as a low-code case management platform, is very strong in process and workflow automation, in the associated audit trail and offers high flexibility. In Pega, you can very easily design and implement both happy flow and unhappy flow. This makes all those ‘special cases’ disappear. Customers become ordinary customers again and work becomes ordinary work again. As an employee, you can once again treat your customer as king instead of as a special case.

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Curious how Pega can help your organisation stay in control? Feel free to contact us!