Customer Journey Mapping — Where to begin — Part 4 Process Improvement
Having completed part 3, you now have clear data points that identify specific pain points and bottlenecks within your internal processes. These will be the target of our improvement projects, both Process Improvement and Experience or Journey Improvement. In this article we will start with Process Improvement.
Focus on Process Improvement
To do this you may decide to use a variety of different methodologies. These may include:
- Six Sigma
- Lean Manufacturing
- Lean Six Sigma
- Theory of Constraints
- TQM
- ISO
Regardless of what you choose, they all share the philosophy that processes can almost always be improved, and the assumption of measurements and data will be key to that improvement. This will mean that all require you to have something to baseline against which means you need to capture and define your processes and understand their current behavior. This was touched on in Part 3 of this series.
Having completed step 2, you also you will now understand the relationships between the customers journey and your internal business processes, systems and resources required to support them. This will help you to grasp the full impact of any proposed change to your business process or the underlying architecture. Additionally, if you are using the iGrafx Platform, you can also identify gaps in risk, compliance, and ownership, as well as see which journeys are directly aligned to the overall corporate strategy.
The whole point of mapping the customer journey, is to help bring prioritization and visibility to where your process improvement and transformation efforts must be focused. That will be the topic of our final part in this series.