I bet that you came up with a big number? Some people I ask sit down and scratch their head and then start listing all of the products and services their companies offer. After a while most folks just give up, overwhelmed by the scale of the simple question I have asked. Try it for yourself and see what I mean, go and ask your work colleagues for the answer.

If you really sit down and think hard about it, apply ruthless simplification and focus though a customer experience lens, I would contend that you can’t come up with more than three things that businesses actually do. In fact these three things are exactly the same regardless of the business you are in.

So what are these three basic things or processes that all businesses have and all businesses can use to simplify the way they think about themselves and the way that customers experience them?

Lead to Cash – the customer journey from being a sales prospect all the way through to paying the bill for product or service rendered.

Concept to Market – the journey from an initial idea for a product or service to delivering that product or service to customers.

Trouble to Resolve – the customer journey of experiencing a problem to having the problem resolved.

OK – so I have just described a really neat way of thinking about and analyzing business in a simple way, how can we apply this to obtain competitive advantage?

Up front I said that the key to understanding this process simplification was seeing business through a customer experience lens. By simplifying the processes that impact Customer Experience we can deliver standardization, that is deliver the same Customer Experience for everything we do. Think about this, think about the implications of being able to turn the hundreds of ways we interact with customers into three simplified processes.

By simplifying to three standard processes we can invest in continuous process improvement, in automation, in driving quality and repeatability. Process quality improvements can be derived from two basic measures, Cycle Time and Right First Time. 

By shortening Cycle Time and improving the Right First Time for these three Customer Experience processes we can transform our business, drive profitability and improve customer retention.

The picture above shows how the Lead to Cash Customer Journey is mapped and RFT and CT metrics calculated to show the overall impact on Customer Experience. By applying Lean approaches to stripping out non-value-add steps and improving Right First Time at each step dramatic improvements can be made to the Customer Experience.