We have heard it all before. The customer is always right and what the customer says ¦ goes! Yeah well, that is true ¦ to a point. We will do whatever it takes to make the customer happy, but we are not going to change our core operational process because that is what made our company successful. Does this mantra sound familiar?

Changing the Customer Experience

It should sound familiar, because it is what we do. We address customer concerns and bend over backwards to make them happy, in that specific situation. Then, we go right back to doing what we did before. Core policies and processes rarely change, no matter how many customer concerns are focused on them. The view is typical, since the C-Suite understands the deepest detail of what goes on in the business, customers may be complaining, but they are really out of touch with their expectations. In the dance of customer service, we continue to waltz with our customers to make them happy, without changing what is truly making them unhappy.

The fact is, that if we want to make real, substantive change with the customer experience, we must hear the customers and be willing to make changes to our deepest core processes. Sound like a simple thing? Well, it should be, but making it happen is significantly more difficult. Businesses, no matter the size or the years established, must be willing to change things that just irk our customers. Not listening and making real changes costs businesses in many ways. It significantly frustrates and disenfranchises customers in slow moving herds. As the customers move away, businesses then start to feel the financial impact on their bottom line. Lavishing unhappy customers with deals, discounts and groveling is actually a temporary fix to a long term problem. Before you know it, the customer will be tired of your lip service and the freebies you provide just won’t retain their loyalty.

Making Lasting Change

It is time that business must embrace real change when dealing with their customer experience. That transformation must come through deep and significant change happening with core operational processes. A structured VoC (Voice of the Customer) program, SIPOC diagram or Customer Journey Map, managed by trained and experienced Lean Six Sigma professionals, can achieve the desired results.

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The food service industry is tough. The challenges of the industry range from food costs and quality, to customer service and effectively using labor. To create the perfect experience, owners must find a delicate balance with these challenges. But to add to those challenges, in today’s digital environment, customers are engaging with social media, which has its own challenges. As an example, the industry estimates customers add approximately 45 minutes to their dining experience through the use of their smartphone. Waitstaff are delayed taking orders because customers are answering emails or texts. The meal time after being served is extended because customers like to take and share images of their meals on social media. Then after the meal, there is another round of texting, emailing and interacting on social media. These delays are expected to increase.

Six Sigma Serves Up Quality For Food Service

Now, if you stop and thinking for a moment, these challenges in the food service industry are really no different than any other industry. They all revolve around product costs, labor challenges and customer service. Just like any other industry that has experienced great success with Six Sigma practices, the food service industry can achieve resolution to their buffet of challenges. From kitchen to table, food service is about process and procedures.

Preparing the food revolves around exact recipes and precise skills used to prepare the food. There are food costs involved and they must be precisely managed. They also require precision and accuracy in recipe measurements, oven temperatures, cook times, food temperature, and discipline around hygiene and health standards.

This also applies to the preparation and service of beverages. Getting the right mixtures for alcoholic drinks, and getting the right sugar and cream mixture in coffee can make or break the customer experience.

If you look at the front of the house, from door to table, it is all about customer experience and service. There are processes and procedures involved that impact every second of the customer experience. Forecasting the number of customers that will arrive each hour and day of the week, along with predicting what they will order can make the most experienced Black Belt throw up their hands in frustration.

Just like other Six Sigma industries, food service requires precision and attention to every detail.

Success For The Future

Food service professionals are starting to embrace Six Sigma practices to create a better industry for their customers and employees. Leaders must look at the core practices and understand how easily they can benefit from Six Sigma.

One of the most crucial opportunities for food service in their customer experience is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs. Every second a customer spends in a restaurant is an absolute opportunity for success or failure. If they find service, food and the environment exceptional, their digital raving will bring success. If they fail at any point in the customer experience, that digital transmission will cause significant pain to the business.

One of the templates we offer for free is the Customer Journey Map, which helps you capture the process, moments of truth, and emotional dimension of the customer’s journey.

These food service professionals must find ways to deal with their routine challenges of their industry, along with the new environment of the digital age. Six Sigma can bring great relief and success to this industry.

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Lean was born out of manufacturing practices, but in recent times, has transformed the world of knowledge work and management. It encourages the practice of continuous improvement and is based on the fundamental idea of respect for people. Womack and Jones defined the five principles of Lean manufacturing in their book The Machine That Changed the World. Take some time and listen to Womack discuss the five principles of lean.

The post [VIDEO] Lean Thinking Principles appeared first on 6sigma.

But, an important step in developing Customer Journey Maps is to first gain an understand of who the customer is.

What is a Customer Persona

Without probably even realizing it, you have uttered phrases that come from the field of customer personas. Reflect on these statements:

1. “soccer mom”
2. “ophrah book club member”
3. “jerry springer audience”

These phrases describe a fictional character but represents a broad array of actual people or customers. These customer markers become a single and identifiable fictional character across a company. They work well because they are convenient and also descriptive.

How To Create Customer Personas

There are various ways to develop customer personas. Here are a few approaches:

• Use existing segmentation and demographic data obtained from internal or market resources (primary or secondary research).
• Use any existing survey data that tell us something about customer needs, desires, wants, pain points, preferences, etc.
• Use any qualitative or focus group data that tell us something about customer goals, hobbies, what makes them happy, what makes them upset, books or magazines they read, or other psychographic data.
• In general, we want behavioral segments and attitudinal segments that tell us much more about the group of customers we’re attempting to describe.

Customer Personas is not Customer Segmentation

Traditional market research customer segmentation allows us to “bucketize” a group based on variables such as age, income, purchase patterns, etc. Customer Segmentation tells us that a discrete and unique group exists, but segmentation doesn’t tell us the qualitative aspects of that group. That’s where Customer Personas become helpful.

Customer Personas Help Us Understand Intangible Aspects

Some intangible aspects that customer personas help us understand are the following:

• Who the Customer is: What are the demographics, attitudes, lifestyle, and behavior?
• What are Customer Pain Points: Problems, complaints, dissatisfiers.
• What are Customer Triggers: Identify events, special occasions, where her engagement with the company, service, or product begin and why.
• What are the Needs of the Customer: Here we’re interested in the emotional needs – what the customer needs versus what they receive from the product, service, or company. I’m not speaking about functional needs – I’m focused here on the emotional aspect. For example, in calling customer service, the customer might want relief, but instead the customer receives more anxiety from the company. That sort of intangible aspect is key in this type of work.

There are other items, but in general this is the general approach and how customer personas can be helpful to us.

Develop Customer Personas to Create Customer Journey Maps

Customer personas will have a finite set of elements that describe them. Here are some, typically in a form of a customer narrative or story. Suppose there are 5 customer pesonas your company has identified. Each one can have the following elements:

1. Fictional Character Name: descriptive name that describes gender and activity. “Soccer Mom” is an example.
2. Age
3. Perhaps a customer quote that describes the fictional character in general. For example, suppose a persona is a college student, member of fraternity, and drinks on the weekends. His quote might be “I try to coast through class; can’t wait for the weekend to hang with my buddies and feel part of a family”.
4. A customer narrative, in the form of a story showing goals, needs, and general attitude. Pain points and preferences are also important here.

Once customer personas are developed, we can then use them to do the following:

1. Take Each Customer Persona Through Scenarios

You can take a given customer persona through a scenario. For example, suppose “soccer mom” was a customer persona and the company or service she’s engaged with is an automotive company that makes minivans. One scenario is:

• Wake up early on Saturday morning
• Make sure kids are fed and dressed in soccer uniforms
• Get in the van in time to drive to game
• Make sure to bring snacks for the other kids, water, and lawn chairs for the game
• Don’t forget sunscreen and sunglasses
• Drive to game
• Park, get out of van, hold kids hands, walk to field
• Find spot, unfold lawn chairs, set up camp
• Watch game
• etc…

This scenario and the persona combine to create a customer journey map showing the steps, pain points, and also the emotional aspects. What I shared with the soccer mom are just the steps, but what the customer journey map will show are the emotional aspects of the soccer mom’s journey. For example, while the soccer mom finds parking, she might feel anxious about being late, parking too far from the field, and maybe concerned that the van is too wide to be able to park in a standard parking space. These emotional aspects matter.

2. Take Each Scenario and Map the Steps

3. On Each Main Step, Gauge the Personas happiness level

This one of the main parts of the journey. This can be done with a Mood Wheel or with a simple thermometer scale with one side as happy and the other side not happy, or a combination of other variables that matter for your particular study.

Conclusion

Customer Personas can be a very helpful tool to better understand the customer. Using it in combination with Customer Journey Maps leads to a very effective approach to improve the customer experience and to innovate on their behalf.

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In a prior post, I discussed how most Lean practitioners focus primarily on the mechanical aspects of a process and often ignore the emotions of the customer. In other words, one can improve the process, but with complete disregard for the customer’s feelings as they go through the process. To be fair, they can be mutually exclusive. Therein lies the opportunity.

In this post, I’ll explain (1) What is a Customer Journey Map, show the process of (2) Customer Experience Mapping, (3) it’s role in continuous improvement, (4) show several examples of customer journey maps, and (5) provide a free customer journey map template that you can download.

What I’m arguing for is the opportunity to add the customer’s emotions in our approach to process improvement. To be clear, the processes and context for which I’m describing is relevant are processes that touch the customer – healthcare delivery, retail, customer service, and likely non-manufacturing processes.

Lean Uses Maps – Many of Them

So, in Lean, there are many maps. We use a Value Stream Map, a Process Map, a Spaghetti Diagram, a Consumption Map. What all of these have in common is that they highlight the process, time, inventory levels, and the actors. And, one key variable they all fail to take into account is the customer’s emotions as the customer walk through the process.

So, what ought we do about it?

Customer Journey Map

Well, a map – of any type – is really just a visualization of several variables. Can’t emotion be another variable? Sure, but it’s much more.

Let’s define a Customer Journey Map:

A Customer Journey Map is a document that visually illustrate customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their relationships with a company, or service(s).

It is primarily an outside-in approach, taking the journey from the perspective of a customer. This approach is important for a few reasons:

1. A “normal” map is navel gazing and self-centered, often focusing only on process and other mechanical variables.
2. Often, customer’s needs are not represented. And, their emotions are often unarticulated in most map models.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Here are a few steps that I’ve taken to effectively create an actionable Customer Journey Map.

1. Identify all the customer touchpoints, actors, and silos. Often, this exercise is called “Touchpoint Inventory”.
2. Synthesize current thinking from all stakeholders involved in the Customer Journey.
3. Map the process – but not like a normal map used in continuous improvement. This time, map the process from their perspective. This is an important distinction. Here’s an example of a process step that I’m describing:
   • “Press button” versus “I need to press a button. But which button – the red or green?”
   • Notice the difference? In this type of map, we’re actually highlighting the internal dialogue of the customer, and not just the process steps. This approach is much richer, but also more complicated.
   • Needs, Perceptions, Key Moments of Truth, and Wants must be known by this point in the process.
4. Create the Customer Journey Map.
5. Have stakeholders review it and validate or invalidate your initial hypothesis.

Actionable Items from a Customer Journey Map

Since a map is a model of an experience, the end goal of a map is two-fold:

1. Gain empathy and clarity on exactly what our customers go through when they interact with our service.
2. Identify key areas where we can improve their experience.

Improving the experience is often almost dictated by their emotions. So, the key is to identify the times when the customer is feeling anxiety, unhappy, frustrated – those are signals where an improvement must be made in order to improve the customer experience.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

Below are several examples of Customer Journey Maps. Attribution is on the image itself.

Legowheel Experience Map

Starbucks Experience Map

Customer Journey Airport Experience

Customer Journey Map, Service Operation

Zynga, Social Gaming Customer Experience

Customer Journey Example, with Emotion

Customer Blueprint, Example

Customer Journey Map Template

Go here to view a customer journey map video explanation and download a free template.

The post Visualizing the Customer Experience: Customer Journey Map and Continuous Improvement appeared first on 6sigma.

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A SIPOC can also help us identify the metrics that matter. To learn more about how a SIPOC can help us do that, this premium member-only article on SIPOC Metrics can help.

Here’s presupposition: Quality is judged based on the output of a process. The quality is improved by analyzing inputs and process variables.

How To Create a SIPOC Diagram

1. Create an area that will allow the team to post additions to the SIPOC diagram.
2. Begin with the Process. Map it in four to five high level steps.
3. Identify the Outputs of this Process.
4. Identify the Customers that will receive the Outputs of this Process.
5. Identify the Inputs required for the Process to function properly.
6. Identify the Suppliers of the Inputs that are required by the Process.
7. Optional: Identify the preliminary requirements of the Customers. This will be verified during a later step of the Six Sigma measurement phase.

Once you have your SIPOC diagram, it will give you a visual indication of the high level issues that need to be addressed and stakeholders that might be involved.

SIPOC Diagram and SIPOC Video Tutorial

Building upon my prior article on Lean for Service Operations, here’s an example of a SIPOC Process Map is provided below, followed by a SIPOC Video Tutorial:

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