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1. So You Want To Keep Your Customers?
Here's How BPM Can Help
Customer Experience can be defined as sum of all
interactions and experiences that a customer has with a
company, writes contributor Rohan Bhattacharjee. Want to
improve your customers’ experience with your company?
Here’s how “value-based” BPM can help.
FREE White Paper:
http://tiny.cc/7agubw
Customers are always interacting with your organization - and not only during the actual
‘buying’ process. They are interacting with your company when they visit your website,
for instance, call your telephone helplines(contact center), visit one of your retail outlets,
use a self-service kiosk, use your product, respond to your email promotions – and the
list can go on. Each one of these interactions are “moments of truth” where a customer
forms their perceptions about your company, your business practices, service quality,
etc.
Customer Experience can be defined as sum of all these interactions and experiences
that a customer has throughout their “relationship” with a company. Each of those
interactions is critical because they define how a customer perceives their interactions
with a company and that ‘perception’ will determine how long a customer stays with an
existing provider / supplier.
So if you want to keep your existing customers and attract new ones, it pays to improve
the customer experience. Here are some of the key challenges faced by companies
(including Retail, Telecom, Financial Services, and Energy):
Active Customer Experience Management
Active Customer Experience Management refers to the method of proactively managing
the customer experience by identifying the most important business processes in a
customer life cycle, developing alerts against most important events and then creating an

2. action plan for pro-active and re-active contact with the customer. This helps in
managing the customer facing business processes effectively, thus leading to improved
overall customer experience.
The below figure shows the key elements of Active Customer Experience Management:
Step 1: Identify the Customer Lifecycle Stage
The customer lifecycle consists of several stages right from the first time the customer is
reached as a lead till the time he stops being a customer anymore. It may also be the
case that the customer never leaves the company and instead becomes a strong
advocate of the products and services, thus helping to bring in more customers. The
typical customer life cycle stages are - Reach, Acquire, Develop, Retain, and Inspire. It is
extremely useful to be able to classify and group customers into each of these stages as
the needs and expectations of the customers are very different at each stage. Thus, the
customer facing business processes that are deemed to be most important by customers
also vary depending on which stage of the lifecycle they are in.
Step 2: Determine the Customer Facing Business Processes
Customer Facing Business Processes are essentially those processes that may or may
not require a direct contact with the customer, but the customer is definitely impacted by
these processes. These processes are bound to vary for different industries and in turn
for different companies. They include the building of a single view of the customer across
all contact channels and the distribution of customer intelligence to all customer-facing
functions like Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service.
Business Process Management can help in developing a systematic structure to manage
customer relationship initiation, maintenance, and termination; across all customer
contact points to maximize the value of the relationship portfolio.
The figure shows a sample structure for Customer Facing Business Processes:

3. BPM can help identify the most critical customer facing business processes for an
organization by careful analysis of the industry, company and customer segments.
Depending on the Customer Life Cycle stage, the criticality and importance of the
business processes are bound to vary.
Step 3: Identify Key Events for Customer Facing Processes
The critical customer facing business processes are analyzed to identify the key events
that affect the customer. Active Customer Experience Management provides the ability
to use customer insights, to proactively relate to an organization’s targeted customer
segments, as well as provide advice and assistance around a number of key events, that
can influence the customer’s experience and opinion about the organization, in the
customer’s lifecycle.
Events can be classified in two major categories: Events for proactive contact (Retention,
Up/Cross-Sell, Risk Mitigation), and Events for reactive contact (Service Recovery,
Growth)
BPM takes the lead in providing the insight into these critical customer processes that
allows a company to turn potentially difficult events in a customer’s lifecycle into a
positive customer experiences. Identifying the key events and charting out an action plan
are the key to improving the customer experience.

4. For instance, a large Australian Energy and Utilities retailer utilized BPM to gather
customer insights to manage some key events in their customer facing processes. They
found out that about 80% of their customers shifted to a different service provider at the
end of their lease period. As part of their account management process, they gathered
data from all existing and new customers pertaining to their lease agreement. They
configured a ‘Transfer Out’ event alert, so that a message from the distributor telling the
company that a "transfer" out is due for the customer, acts as a trigger to pro-actively
contact the customer that is moving out, in order to retain them as a customer in their
future address.
Step 4: Configure and Manage Alerts
Alerts need to be developed for all the key events to help identify that an event has taken
place. Alerts also help to identify and take appropriate action associated with that
particular event in the customer life cycle. Each ‘alert’ needs to have a few
characteristics as detailed below:
Alert Characteristic Definition
This is the source of the alert. It could either be a data source
Source generated from system, or it could also be a process source
as identified from a process
An alert is generated for proactive contact when a tolerance
Threshold
level is broken. This tolerance level would be the threshold
Every alert can have an allocated impact with respect to the
customer experience category it’s trying to influence. They
Impact
could be Retention and Service Delivery, Risk Mitigation, or
Growth
Customer Life Cycle stage and associated Customer
Customer Type Segment would help identify the type of pro-active action to
be taken
Every alert will have a priority assigned to get actioned out,
Priority
along with a validity period for the same
Every alert would have a possible list of activities that a
company would carry out. These would be in co-relation to
Possible Action
the impact of the alert and to the customer life cycle stage as
well as a customer segment tagging
Step 5: Develop A Customer Action Plan
A detailed action plan needs to be developed against each ‘alert’ identified for improving
the customer experience. With the help of active business rules as specified in BPM,
these actions can be configured so that they are initiated as and when an alert is
triggered.

5. As there is a substantial cost associated with Active Customer Experience Management,
it is important to avoid the risk of ‘over-serve’ to low potential customers and ‘under-
serve’ to high valued customers.
Considerations while developing the Customer Action Plan are:
• Type of Customer
• Stage in customer life cycle
• Customer segment
Based on the above, organizations can decide on their action plan with typically 3 levels
of service categories as described below:
Business Benefits
Typical business benefits include:
Active Customer Experience Management driven by BPM can have direct impact on the
customer lifetime value, thus impacting both the top line and bottom line of any
organization.

6. About the Author Rohan Bhattacharjee
Rohan Bhattacharjee works for a major consultancy in the Business
Process Management-Lifecycle (BPM-L) Practice, based in Asia-Pacific.
He has extensive experience in Global Business Transformation,
Business Process Re-engineering Improvement, BPM Strategy,
Business Process Framework (e-TOM, SCOR) implementation,
Balanced Scorecard Development, Customer Experience Management,
and Change Management. He has led and executed engagements for a wide range of
industries including Telecom, Energy & Utilities, Airline, Public Services, Hi-Tech and
Manufacturing; across multiple geographies including US, UK, Europe, India, and
Australia.
Rohan is a Certified PRINCE 2 Practitioner, Certified Process Professional, and also has
certifications in e-TOM Business Process Framework and Statistical Process Control. He
holds both an MBA-International Business and a Bachelor of Technology degree.
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