Tag: Business Process Mapping

This blog article was updated on 8th August 2019

Buying a house may be an emotional rollercoaster but for the Construction industry itself there are just as many highs and lows.

Customer expectations mean organisations must look at improving customer experience and sales management if they want to survive. It’s not just sales data that will make the difference but the way the organisation harmonises and coordinates its processes.

The construction industry is changing.

If you’re in the business of selling new homes, you will be acutely aware of how changes in consumer expectations within the retail sector, are now reflected in the expectations of home buyers. Consumers are no longer willing to ‘hope’ for a good experience, it is expected and public interest means complaints are well documented and publicised.

Yet despite this sales teams are still often relying on backward looking metrics to measure success and manage customer experience: 

Number of completions, revenue and profit are all important measures, but they can only be measured AFTER the event.

At the other end of the sales process is the opportunity pipeline containing potential buyers who have shown a real interest and ‘qualify’ as an opportunity. Sales targets may often be calculated on this and the historical sales data.

Reflect on the past but FIX the future

What neither of these actually do, is measure anything which might predict if something is about to go wrong during the sales cycle. For most organisations the first indication is typically when the buyer raises an objection, or it becomes clear the build won’t be delivered on time. By now the damage is done, it’s too late to mitigate the issue and your only option is to try and appease your buyer. How much better would the experience be for all if this could be predicted?

Revolutionise your processes to transform your customer experience

So how can you move from Historian to Visionary and identify measures that will tell you when something might go wrong before it does? 

The build process is complex and, typically, out of control of the sales team. However, having an integrated, end-to-end view of the whole process allows everyone, including your sales team, to see the key stages along the way.

How can your organisation sense and respond to potential issues, address them early and provide a better customer experience throughout the process?

Organisations should be building an integrated model in a way that is easy for everyone to follow and understand. By bringing different but related teams together organisations can clarify who does what and when key handovers of responsibility occur. Skore’s Digital Discovery Platform ensures the whole process is transparent and can identify points of critical, mutual communication. This is when the change will happen. The points where potential issues in the build process should be communicated to the sales team early enough for them to do something about it, before the customer experience fails. 

Measure what matters

In addition it is important to focus on the value added by each step of a process. These are the steps which often make great performance measurement points as they occur throughout the process and not just at the end. 

Identifying and measuring indicators of success throughout the process means that you look to the future outcomes much sooner.

Using this approach, when certain parts of the process aren’t delivering as expected, means these measures will act as an early warning of a potential problems. These can be investigated and resolved and gives the sales team a heads up to communicate with the customer and manage their expectations.

The Skore Digital Discovery Platform enables you to map processes, deliver instant insights and identify process improvements. A live workshop tool it encourages collaboration and sharing within teams. It’s easy to use interface and reporting functions produce eye catching and informative dashboards and reports to easily measure, distribute and value your business processes. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Skore to build a sense and respond organisation and deliver a better customer experience, get in touch.

This blog article was last updated on 22nd October 2019

If your relationship between head office and the business is causing problems then perhaps it is time to go back to basics and rediscover your processes. Solving Communication failures with process mapping allows you to listen to your organisation and engage with the people who enable your business.

Communication Issues

Often we hear it in a shop where the stock levels are inconsistent. Or by a service provider where the member of staff isn’t empowered to make the changes that would improve customer experiences?

“WE KNOW THIS DOESN’T WORK WELL BUT HEAD OFFICE MAKE THE RULES AND DON’T LISTEN TO US”

In fact, communication breakdowns aren’t just restricted to multi-site businesses. The problem can easily happen between teams on the same site. Or between the business and its suppliers and/or customers.

It’s a frequent factor in companies that are growing rapidly, where each team is focused on a specific objective or companies that haven’t changed in a long time even though the environment around them has.

When communication breaks down, or is perceived to have broken down, the result is a duplication of effort, rework, mistakes and a general lack of trust. All in all, not a recipe for a high performing business.However before you jump ahead and start looking at which of the many available solutions you are going to use to improve collaboration, and therefore communication, STOP! Look into solving your communications failures with process mapping.

It is critical that you understand the root cause of the problem first. Once you have done this, the solution may be far simpler, and therefore less expensive to implement, than it initially appears.

Finding a solution

A recent Skore client had two teams doing the work that really belonged to one. Team A was the rightful owner of the work yet nearly 50% of it was done by Team B.

Team B weren’t properly trained in the task and lacked time. When things went wrong, Team A often got the blame. In addition there was duplication.

When Skore was engaged trust was at dangerously low levels and adversely impacting their effectiveness. The first step was to map out the end to end work that both teams were doing.

Using a simple approach, the teams described the key activities, who owned them and the value each activity brought to the process.

These sessions were immensely powerful in stripping out any emotion attached to the inter-team relationships and allowed everyone to describe the work as it should be done. As the steps and interactions were captured, ownership was clarified as was, more importantly, the key interfaces and what was expected of each team.

Communication is key

The client had initially engaged Skore to help them capture requirements for an upgrade to one of their systems. A change that would alter the way aspects of their business processes worked. Using Skore enabled them to capture the necessary requirements, realign the teams’ processes, roles and responsibilities

More importantly it demonstrated to them the value of allowing employees the time to go back to basics, to understand their roles/responsibilities and others and then collectively to start the healing process. Positive and effective communication grows from understanding and trust, when that is lacking no manner of communication tools will solve the situation. 

Using the Skore approach it is common to identify hidden problems in a business. Once a problem is identified you’re halfway to a solution. However, when people are unable to articulate the problem, can’t see the root cause clearly, or aren’t empowered to challenge, problems will often be put down to communication and trust issues. In turn this can lead to accusations of poor workmanship when in fact it’s simply a broken process

Skore Digital Discovery is a process mapping, improvements and insights software platform. With live workshop functionality it enables you to engage with your employees instantly and provides a lasting interactive record of your people, processes and tools.