Qualtec's Business Performance Improvement Blog

Designing a product and designing services have many similarities but also key differences.  Both need clean VOC, clear definition of CTQs, stakeholder input and intelligent tollgates.  But the differences in the design process for the two are far greater.  And those differences are defined by the nature of products versus the nature of services.  So here are the top ten differences in their nature.

How do these attributes change the design process?  Well imagine how difficult it is to know if you have the right design if you can’t easily measure different attempts since repeatability and storability are issues.  And you really aren’t sure what you can measure since quality is defined by the customer’s experience of an outcome more than measuring the attributes of output.  And imagine what happens to multi-generational planning when you have to factor in how difficult it is to maintain your moat of defensibility for a new service without the right of a patent. Time and again basic elements of a design process are scraped or reinvented in an attempt to build a proxy for what is normally taught and practiced as good design principles.

In the end, you essentially have to nearly start over n building your design process for a service.  Basics are retained but new elements must be introduced or emphasized.  In a recent blog post, I point out how the basic principle of tollgates must be retained but mapping becomes the foundation to test, validate and repeat due to the absence of data.

a short presentation on Service Blueprinting now ……..

At Qualtec, we’ve built a new design process or roadmap and established a set of tools to support each step of the way.  We will continue to write about this subject as we find there is a real dearth of information available.  But we also welcome your input and so if you’d like to discuss the differences and how to adapt to them, we invite you to contact us.

A service provider seeking to grow by innovating new services must have a competitive advantage versus existing service providers, whether internal or external, when positioning new services.  In services, with its low barriers to entry, it’s not good enough to simply say I’m the largest.  And when perceived quality is the final measure it is also not good enough to say I’m the cheapest.  A service provider must be able to provide a good value for the best work. And to meet that sort of test, it must design processes to do jobs and achieve outcomes better than whoever is doing them today.

Service and/or process design is a core capability that can be built. With stronger process design, companies can offer better deliverables at a lower price.  If gaining scale is one of the service designers goals, process design can produce more scalable services since an element of scalability is consistency which can be enhanced with better process design.  Process design is also an easier core capability to develop than many others because it can be contained in a small group of people that are leveraged across an entire organization.  It is the service business equivalent of an R&D function whose output is leveraged by manufacturing, sales, marketing and distribution.

It is also the building of such a capability that can be promoted to change a company’s brand image.  Many equipment manufacturers provide services in conjunction with equipment sales.  However, they are still viewed by their clients, employees and, most importantly, customers as equipment makers.   If the vision is to move from being an equipment maker, with all its inherent cycles, to a service provider that has greater stability and growth, expertise is designing and executing services is a key roadmap.

a short .ppt on service innovation ….

In a previous post, I wrote how service innovation is different from service excellence.  The latter requires knowledge of your processes while the former requires you to know your client’s and/or competitor’s processes.  I also wrote how even though you must have service excellence to establish the credibility to be given the opportunity to provide new services, expertise in delivery isn’t a guarantee to be able to define and design solutions that ensure better outcomes.  This article adds that one of the two basis on which you can differentiate yourself as a service provider is to design better solutions.

If you’d like to speak more about this, feel free to contact me.

Service organizations must grow by offering new solutions to customer needs.  The trust needed for a consumer of services to buy a new offering is obviously highly dependent on their perception of the service quality they are experiencing on current services.  If the customer has issues with service delivery on existing services, it is no surprise there will be a lack of confidence in buying new services.  However, service delivery excellence, while critical to successfully expanding new services, is a different capability from service innovation.

Successful service innovation depends on (i) defining unmet VOC for which the customer has not contracted as they currently are doing it themselves or have other vendors doing it and (ii) the ability to design better processes as measured by the customer than the customer or an existing third party provider can design.  Service delivery is about executing against customer expectations on existing contracts and internal processes.    Improving service delivery is about understanding the service provider’s processes.  Succeeding with new services about understanding the customer’s or a third parties processes.

a short overview of our service innovation approach ….

Never assume excellent service delivery ensures the ability to define, design and deliver new services.  In the end, the muscle tissue a service organization builds by improving service delivery will improve perception for new services but not necessarily the ability to define, design and deliver new services or to innovate. Service innovation must be addressed separately from Service delivery.  The upside of building service innovation ability is that if the service provider succeeds it will be able to extend beyond providing existing services.

If you’d like to speak more about this, feel free to contact me.

We’ve been working with a number of customers of late that are trying to improve service delivery processes, and move into the differentiating realm of service innovation.  In these very large enterprises, it’s always a challenge to get organizations to change behavior.  Immediately, voices start rising, touting the need for change management.

This is another of those terms that can have a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people.  Wikipedia defines change management as a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. If you google “change management”, you really enter the swamp.   Even if we narrow change management to the business / process improvement world that we at SSQ live in, there is still a lot of confusion.  How do you sort it all out?

our BPM Overview presentation

In the CI world, companies want and need to markedly improve their value-generating processes (value stream), but the question becomes how do you get people to embrace the changes that come as part of improving?  How do we get them to embrace the overall effort to improve processes, and theoretically improve service delivery?  Do we really have to indoctrinate them into some new philosophy of change?

Personally, I don’t think so.  I think that many times change management becomes a problem because people don’t have a clear picture of 3 simple (not really) things:

1. where they are now,
2. where they need to be
3. why they need to get there.

Most organizations have plenty of smart people (I know … there are exceptions!)  .  The fundamental trick to change management really boils down to getting all those smart people pulling in the same direction.   If you can get clarity around the 3 simple things above, you might be surprised to see that change management is not the big issue you thought it was.

I’ve used the term simple to describe these three things above, but getting there can be anything but.  With our engagements, we spend significant time on the front ending trying to get these answers, and I can assure you that it can be challenging.  But, we get there, and I firmly believe our success rates with business improvement efforts are better because of it.

There are other ways I’m sure, but we use a structured approach that attacks the problem by:

1. Understanding, for both the customer (voice of the customer) and the business (voice of the business), what constitutes high-performance and turning that into clearly defined metrics (efficiency and effectiveness).  We are looking for gaps in these indicators, between current state and where we need to be.
2. Understanding the top-level value stream from a process perspective (not function), the things that have to happen to deliver your services or products, and create customer and business value
3. Identifying metrics at the process level (VOP), and making sure they are aligned with top level VOB and VOC (#1).  Like #1, we are looking for the gaps.
4. Defining an objective prioritization scheme based on voice of the customer and voice of the business.
5. Identifying improvement ideas from the gaps, and evaluating and prioritizing those ideas objectively based on #4.  A prioritized project pipeline.
6. Turning high-value project ideas (business cases) into tightly scoped improvement projects that are clearly aligned with very visible objectives (#1)

Of course, this is over simplified. There’s a lot of work happening between the spaces, but think about it and ask … Is change management really as simple as being able to see clearly? As always, I welcome your thoughts on this.  Comment or contact me directly if you prefer.

Capturing Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a critical first step in aligning your product or service delivery organization to the real needs, wants, and desires of your customer. Pretty common sense, right? But, when someone says “I’ve captured the voice of the customer”, what does that really mean?

Any interaction with the customer is an opportunity to capture VOC, but I would argue that a more proactive and structured approach may yield more useful and actionable information from the customer. Understand what’s important, from the customer’s perspective, clearly define it and make it measurable, then measure your performance. Sounds simple, right?

a short module on understanding customer requirements and the Kano Model

Well, not so fast. The relationship between how you perform and what the customer sees as real value is not always simple or direct. Many times, organizations are left utterly bewildered after making some “major” performance improvement only to find that the customer never even noticed! I’ve even seen a case where a business process outsourcer assumed an agreed upon SLA was their VOC, met every single measure in that “VOC”, and then lost the customer! How could this happen? Well, the customer expected them to optimize and improve the process for them, not just run it at current performance levels and meet the SLA. Their ideas of “Value” were very different.

One good way to look at customer requirements is through the lens of the “Kano Model”. Dr. Kano developed a model of the relationship between service or product delivery performance on the one hand, and value as perceived by the customer on the other. It is very simple and can be extremely useful in understanding the relationship between what you do and how that relates to what the customer perceives as value. The model defines 3 categories of customer requirements: basic, performance, and excitement.

Basic. These are the requirements that are just taken for granted. Customers will rarely mention them, because they are just expected. In the airline industry, getting to your destination in one piece is an example of a basic requirement. No matter how well you deliver on basic requirements, your customer will never be more than neutral in terms of satisfaction or perceived value. But fail to deliver one of these requirements and you can bet you’ll have a very dissatisfied customer, one that is likely to be out the door.

Bottom Line: Basic requirements are really only noticed when they aren’t met …..

Performance. These are the things that customers want, but don’t necessarily expect in all cases. They are the things that usually make up a service level agreement (SLA). Performance characteristics include faster service, lower cost, higher reliability, etc. They are usually stated by the customer, in some detail, and meeting them will drive customer satisfaction to some degree, and sales. But they do not guarantee customer loyalty (e.g. earlier example of business process outsourcer that lost customer after meeting SLA).

Bottom Line: Meeting performance requirements will drive near term customer satisfaction and sales, but will not guarantee customer loyalty.

Excitement (Wow). Excitement attributes are unspoken and mostly unexpected by customers but can result in extremely high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Their absence doesn’t lead to overt dissatisfaction. Excitement attributes often satisfy latent needs – real needs of which customers are currently unaware. In an ultra-competitive marketplace where multiple vendors’ offerings provide similar levels of performance, delivering on excitement attributes that address “unknown needs” can provide a competitive advantage.

Bottom Line: Delivering on Excitement attributes drives customer satisfaction, new sales, and and customer loyalty. It enables the charging of a premium for goods and services.

One final thing to keep in mind is that this is a moving target. Today’s wow factors will soon become just basic requirements. Think about what was a “wow” factor on a mobile phone just a few years ago, and where things are today. Don’t sit still. Getting VOC is never a one-and-done.

Feel free to contact me directly to discuss how you might improve your efforts to capture voice of the customer (VOC).

For service organizations seeking to grow, excellent service delivery of existing offerings instills trust with the customer. That trust is the cornerstone to successfully launching new services. But the goodwill of that trust can only be leveraged if new service offerings provide NEW value. And excellence in what you do doesn’t guarantee providing that new value. To put it another way, doing something well for someone doesn’t mean you will add value in everything new you can think of or be asked to do for them in the future.
What is common between delivering on current services and new services is the ability to execute. What is different is that the Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) is well defined in the former case and has yet to be defined in the latter. Defining VOC well is a function of listening well. Execution and listening are critical to both situations. Execution has the same definition in both cases. But the two situations call for two different types of listening.

How does the listening differ? Well, in Service Delivery the target had been acquired at the time of the sale. Therefore, you are listening to determine if you are hitting the target and, if not, how you’re missing and by how much.  In the case of new service design, you are trying to acquire the target. When delivering existing services, customer requirements are well known and VOC must be collected on how well you are performing vis a vis those requirements. With new services, you are more heavily involved in defining customer requirements.

a short training module that discusses Critical to Customer Requirements

Too often, I see companies launch new services with confidence based on their ability to stay tuned to a specific target and hit it consistently only to fail with a new service launch. The reason they failed is that they never properly defined the new target. Staying on a target and finding a new target are really very different.

For Service Delivery, the primary “listening” or “targeting” challenge is how to (i) monitor VOC and (ii) convert VOC to Critical to Quality. To launch new services, the primary “listening” or “targeting” challenge is to define the value to be delivered per the customer or define Critical to Customer Requirements.

In the end, service delivery VOC is about how to understand your processes while the VOC needed to successfully launch new services is about understanding the customer’s unexpressed needs.

If you would like to discuss, contact me directly.

Verizon Wireless “Can you hear me now?” commercials hit home because in our increasingly mobile connected lives we live that moment so many times. Verizon’s implicit message is that not only will you be heard on their network but that they hear you.  We all want to be heard and we are frustrated when ignored.

We live that moment when we question whether we are being heard in many other ways including as consumers and business customers.    How often do we feel as if we are asking the people from whom we buy goods and services both personally and professionally “Can you hear me now?”  How often do we feel as if we are ignored, misunderstood or altogether treated like a dropped call!  What do we do when we feel that way?  I know what I do.  I move to another network.  I move to one that will listen to me.

Let’s now reverse the question.  As a product or service provider, ow well do we listen?  Are we so busy with what we wish to accomplish that we are forget our goal in business, which is to meet client or customer requirements.  I recently heard an individual involved in a performance improvement program discussing the need for Voice of the Customer, VOC, as he explained his management scorecard and projects.  When asked if he’d reviewed either with a major customer, he replied that they’d given him a scorecard but he’d neither used it or presented his because his system was still immature.  I took a double-take.  He’d been handed the VOC he sought but failed to realize it as such as he was focused on his ability to execute.  Tell me – would a hunter increase the amount of venison he had for the winter if he could shoot straight but couldn’t find his quarry?  I think he’d have a cold, hungry winter. Good VOC helps your business see the target.

a short training module that discusses Critical to Customer Requirements

If you want to judge the ability to execute, we have lots of qualitative observations and quantitative measures with which to make an assessment.  Do you have the same so as to assess your ability to listen?   Do you know whether or not you are really listening to the voice of the customer?  We feel that just as there is a maturity model for the ability to execute improvement, there is a maturity model for the ability to listen.  If you’d like to hear more and discuss how you listen to your customer, please contact me.  We always like to listen to you.