Who is your process written for?

I have encountered many baffling processes in businesses that leaves me wondering – who is your process written for?

You may have spent many hours performing a Digital Transformation, focusing on streamlining processes and removing paper forms and taking advantage of new technologies to automate and accelerate processes and functions that were previously manually managed. However, of these processes, what is the focus; is it on back-end efficiency or on customer experience?

I have seen many organisations who have created processes that are great for reporting against, but a nightmare for the end-user. Processes that ‘solved the problem’ of paper forms that could not be audited, but retain the complexity and unfriendliness of a generic process.

For example – how often have you called a company, and they want you to select the department for your query? You need to know the structure of their organisation… Have you ever experienced the issue where you need to either be transferred to another area, or even worse, to phone back on a different number? Is this customer focussed – or is it optimised for the business’s internal needs? Did you need to explain your issue again, after you were transferred? Perhaps you needed to re-verify your security information…

Who is your process written for

Is your process written for the customer (or the end user), or is it just a method to gather information for reporting and analysis (which may never happen)? Does it streamline the experience for many people (the customers), or for the few on the back-end?

Another example, which I am sure many have experienced, is with an expenses or timesheet system; categorisation of each transaction, selection of cost codes or other criteria that could be automated, and sometimes even obscure and hidden code numbers that must be ‘known’ or selected from a sub-screen that does not appear until after an error is displayed. Is this an efficient use of everyone’s time? Should every employee need to spend an hour or more on timesheets every week? The cost per hour of an employee finding the appropriate cost code for a $4 coffee with a customer – is it a valid trade-off?

A final example is more of a frustration – have you ever been asked to enter / provide your “Customer Reference” only to discover that it is on your paperwork as “client number” – but somehow you need to know that you drop the first two digits? Perhaps it was a “site reference code” that can be used as your “location ID”? Who are your processes actually for?