Customer Empowerment Jam — Part 2: Empowering Customers Through Business Process Transformation

Enterprises must empower customers to drive deeper engagement — companies ignore this new reality at their peril. But the shift to an outside-in focus brings new demands to Business Process Professionals — who are already maxed out streamlining internal processes. Responding to these new business demands requires a fundamental shift in how you: 1) organize to meet the rising expectations of empowered customers; 2) transform your strategic business processes that serve customers; 3) develop the business process management and customer experience skills of Business Process Professionals driving process transformation; and 4) manage the culture change and new skill sets of people who not only serve customers but now proactively seek to delight customers. This outside-in shift also requires the mastery of customer-centric process disciplines like Lean and Lean Six Sigma and compels you to take advantage of the flexibility provided by BPM and dynamic case management. It requires a fundamental understanding of core technologies like CRM and customer service apps, demands a deep understanding of how to tap social channels that empower customers and drive deeper engagement, and requires you to look at how data and analytics are consumed in and produced by business processes.

In this Customer Empowerment Jam, Forrester analysts William Band, Craig Le Clair, Rob Karel, Derek Miers, Kate Leggett, and Mike Gilpin engage in an expert panel discussion, led by Vice President and Research Director Connie Moore, to deliver advice on how Business Process Professionals can help their organizations truly empower customers across multiple touchpoints, drive increased engagement that produces greater customer lifetime value, and deliver better customer outcomes, such as satisfaction and loyalty.

Agenda:

• What are the most important things that Business Process Pros should do to help their organizations empower customers and drive deeper engagement?
• How can companies involve their customers in redesigning processes to better fit customer needs and expectations, through techniques like imagineering?
• What's the right way for business process change agents to engage with other executives, such as the CMO, CIO, or CPO, to help transform customer-facing processes?
• How do you make the business case for customer engagement to the CFO, who may be trying to cut costs instead? What's the value side of the equation for making investments?
• Do enterprise suites, like CRM and ERP, help transform the customer experience, or do they merely automate the status quo? How can you transform these apps to drive truly great customer engagement?
• How are companies and government agencies employing new technologies like dynamic case management, social, mobile apps, and cloud to transform customer-facing business processes?
• Can you really achieve a single view of the customer, or is it a never-ending quest? No matter how elusive, should you keep trying?
• What information assets are critical when aligning processes and data? Many times, process work and data work are done by different people; how do you make that alignment happen?
• Business change is ongoing. How do you make sure employees accept customer empowerment at the personal level — individually embracing the new approach? What techniques do you use to help employees accept change so that they recognize the "magic moment" and "moments of truth" when interacting with customers?