Aligning Customer Journey Management with Business Process Management Transforming into a Customer Focused Organization

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Masters Thesis

Master Information Studies: Business Information Systems

University of Amsterdam

Aligning Customer Journey Management

with Business Process Management

Transforming into a Customer Focused Organization

Jakob Straßer

UvA Student Number: 11119381 VU Student Number: 2587332

June 2016

Supervisors

ir. Han van der Aa (VU University) Prof. dr. ir. Hajo A. Reijers (VU University)

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Abstract

Purpose Customer Journey Management (CJM) and Business Process Manage-ment (BPM) are useful concepts for increasing an organization’s ability to achieve high customer loyalty. However, the two efforts are often poorly aligned, leading to opposing efforts. Therefore, a descriptive and prescriptive maturity model is developed to help organizations overcome such misalignment and deliver excellent experiences for the customer.

Methodology The maturity model is developed by combining findings from exist-ing literature about model matchexist-ing and silo-breakexist-ing with insights gained durexist-ing seven interviews with representatives of large Dutch organizations. This model is validated and improved together with a panel of experts.

Maturity Model The developed descriptive maturity model consists of five di-mensions: (i) CJM maturity, (ii) BPM maturity, (iii) the awareness about links between Customer Journeys (CJs) and business processes, (iv) the cooperation of functional silos, and (v) the company vision & culture. Within these dimensions, five maturity levels are defined: level 0 / greenfield, level 1 / defined, level 2 / setup, level 3 / partial customer-centricity, and level 4 / full customer centricity.

Findings Five measures are identified that can help organizations with improving their CJM/BPM alignment: (i) model linking & mediation, (ii) training & ed-ucation, (iii) cross-departmental workshops, (iv) organizational restructuring, and (v) customer feedback handling. The descriptive model is applied to the interviewed organization and recommendations are made for ways in which they could further improve their CJM/BPM alignment.

Limitations The sample of organizations that forms the foundation of this research only consists of seven companies, making the developed model prone to overfitting and incompleteness. It should be applied to more organizations and validated with a larger panel of experts to overcome these problems. Also, the descriptive aspect of the developed model is abstract. It should be further developed into concrete and objective criteria that can be used to rate a company’s maturity in the model. Originality/Value Few maturity models exist in the field of BPM that include customer focus as a goal. This gap is filled by the research project presented here. Furthermore, existing approaches still rely on business process modeling to achieve customer focus. CJ mapping is a fairly new specialized tool developed for this specific purpose, distinct from business process modeling. This paper presents an analysis of how this tool can be applied and integrated in order to achieve high customer satisfaction and loyalty and is thus a valuable addition to existing literature. Keywords: Business Process Management, Customer Journeys, Prescriptive Ma-turity Models, Guidelines

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C.2 Interview Guideline for Interviews with Alignment Solution Providers . . . 57 D Interview Summaries . . . 59 D.1 Comm’ant . . . 59 D.2 USoft . . . 61 D.3 Company A . . . 63 D.4 Company B . . . 64 D.5 Company E . . . 66 D.6 Company D . . . 67 D.7 Company E . . . 69 E Interview Transcripts . . . 71 E.1 Comm’ant . . . 71 E.2 USoft . . . 82 E.3 Company A . . . 92 E.4 Company B . . . 97 E.5 Company C . . . 104 E.6 Company D . . . 109 E.7 Company E . . . 118

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List of Figures

1.1 Thesis Outline . . . 4

2.1 The BPM lifecycle [1] . . . 6

2.2 Interconnections between Business Processes and Customer Journeys [2] 9 3.1 Approach Outline . . . 18

A.1 Customer Journey Map Example 1 [3] . . . 51

B.1 Preliminary CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Model . . . 54

List of Tables

4.1 CJM/BPM Use and Alignment Maturity Levels & Dimensions . . . . 25

5.1 Improvements per Approach and Dimension . . . 31

5.2 CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Assessment per Dimension . . . 38

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Acronyms

BPM Business Process Management.

BPMMM Business Process Management Maturity Model. BPMN Business Process Model and Notation.

BPMS Business Process Management System. CJ Customer Journey.

CJM Customer Journey Management. CLC Customer Lifecycle.

KPI Key Performance Indicator. MofT Moment of Truth.

PEMM Process and Enterprise Maturity Model. PPI Process Performance Indicator.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

Moving towards an experience economy [6], organizations are becoming more and more focused on the customer as a strategy for success. In management and cus-tomer handling, the concept of Cuscus-tomer Journeys (CJs) has become a core instru-ment. CJ maps are a representation of the interactions (touch points) a customer has with an organization [7]. Companies can use such models of customer inter-actions to gain insights into the interinter-actions which left their customers unsatisfied. CJs are a new way for companies to take an outside-in perspective. Organizations should begin to view their processes from a customer’s point of view, as customer processes instead of business processes. Customer Journey Management (CJM) pro-vides a way of analyzing and improving such end-to-end processes. It can be used to create a better experience for customers by improving the quality of interactions with the them.

On the other hand, efficient business processes are also critical to achieving high customer satisfaction. Business Process Management (BPM) is a well-established field in management science, which can give companies insights into their inner work processes. This highlights opportunities to restructure and improve these processes in order to remain and become even more competitive. BPM is thus a way for companies to look at themselves from the inside. It should be used to achieve high efficiency and product quality, which are also necessary for a customer satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, every customer interaction is part of at least one business process, meaning that changes in CJs depend on changes in business processes. As a consequence, CJM and BPM should be used in combination for an organization to create outstanding customer experiences and simultaneously achieve operational excellence.

However, the heavy focus on the customer’s perspective is a relatively new experi-ence for companies, which often have well-established functional departments. As

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2 Chapter 1. Introduction a result, the task of internally representing the customer’s needs often falls to one such department (e.g. the marketing department), whose goal it is to create an ex-cellent customer experience. Depending on the organization, BPM tasks are either carried out by another dedicated group (e.g. a BPM department) or by internal or external cross-departmental consultants [8]. In most cases, these actors mainly strive for efficient processes [8]. This separation of CJM and BPM tasks can lead to misalignment between them. For instance, marketeers might develop excellent improvements of CJs which are never actually implemented. Similarly, customer ex-perience might vary greatly across processes, hampering an organization’s capability to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

An ideal situation for customer excellence would be one where the customer’s point of view is always taken into account when (re)designing business processes. However, reaching such a situation is not a trivial task for organizations. Nevertheless, it is critical for companies to accomplish this objective if they want to achieve customer excellence.

1.1 Research Goal

The main goal of this thesis is to provide measures and guidelines for organizations to take and follow in order to use and align CJM and BPM for becoming a customer-centric company. For this, organizations must first determine their “as-is” situation so that they can take adequate improvement measures.

Maturity models provide a way to to assess an organization’s current situation and make recommendations for improvement, making them a suitable tool for achieving the above goal. As a result, the desired outcome of this research project should be a maturity model that describes how well CJM and BPM efforts are aligned in an organization. In addition, prescriptive measures with which companies can improve their CJM/BPM alignment should be identified and analyzed.

1.1.1 Research Questions

The following main research questions (RQs) are established to fulfill the goal of this project:

RQ1. How can the current state of CJM/BPM alignment be measured in organiza-tions?

The answer to this research question provides the basis for a descriptive ma-turity model. The question can be divided into two subquestions (SQs).

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1.2. Scientific Rationale & Related Work 3 SQ1. Which organizational characteristics can be used to determine and

eval-uate an organization’s current level of CJM/BPM alignment?

The aim of this subquestion is to identify what organizational character-istics are central to CJM/BPM alignment, making a company’s maturity easier to assess.

SQ2. Which levels of CJM/BPM alignment can be found in organizations? This second subquestion serves the purpose of demonstrating which paths an organization can take towards optimal CJM/BPM alignment. At the same time, the answer to this subquestion allows companies to identify which stage of alignment they are currently at.

RQ2. What measures can companies take to improve their CJM/BPM alignment? The goal of this second main research question is to identify several key pre-scriptive measures that companies can follow to improve their CJM/BPM alignment.

1.1.2 Research Method

The research questions are answered through the development of a CJM/BPM use and alignment maturity model, including both descriptive characteristics and pre-scriptive measures that organizations can apply and follow. This model is developed in four broad steps:

1. Scientific and managerial literature is examined and analyzed to (a) define the problem more clearly and (b) determine some initial reference points for reaching the research goal.

2. Explorative interviews are held with multiple organizations to find answers to the research questions established above.

3. The interview findings are combined into a descriptive CJM/BPM use and alignment maturity model.

4. Finally, prescriptive measures for improving CJM/BPM alignment are identi-fied, cross-referenced with existing literature and conceptually validated.

1.2 Scientific Rationale & Related Work

Many maturity models already exist in the BPM field. Yet, out of the ten models presented in [9], only one includes alignment with customer processes (i.e. CJs) as

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4 Chapter 1. Introduction a major element in its highest level of maturity [10]. This shows that creating a customer-centric mentality in BPM is often a low priority, which is a gap that is filled by the research project presented here.

Furthermore, existing approaches still rely on business process modeling to achieve customer focus. CJ mapping is a fairly new specialized method developed for this specific purpose, distinct from business process modeling. This paper presents an analysis of how CJM can be applied and integrated in order to achieve high customer satisfaction and loyalty and is thus a valuable addition to existing literature.

1.3 Thesis Outline

This thesis is structured as shown in Figure 1.1: Chapter 2 gives a conceptual overview of the problem domain and provides first insights into selected aspects of the solution domain. Chapter 3 describes the individual stages of this research project and how they build on each other in greater detail. This leads to a better understanding of the methodology that yielded answers to the research questions described above. Chapter 4 presents a descriptive maturity model for assessing how well an organization’s CJM and BPM are aligned. In Chapter 5, the individual findings of the interviews are then used to enhance the descriptive model by pre-scriptive element, outlining what measures companies should undertake to improve this alignment. Additionally, the research findings are discussed and the maturity model is applied to the examined organizations to assess its validity. After having presented and discussed these findings, Chapter 6 summarizes and concludes the thesis. It outlines limitations of the research and gives recommendations on future work to build on this project.

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Chapter 2 Background

This chapter examines the current state of the art of scientific literature on the research subject in order to gain a conceptual overview of the topic. Section 2.1 defines and describes the two main concepts used in this paper. Section 2.2 outlines why improving alignment between CJM and BPM is desirable for organizations and analyzes reasons for misalignment between them. Section 2.3 provides insights into related fields that provide initial reference points for answers to the established research questions.

2.1 Definitions of Concepts

This section defines the two big concepts that form the basis of this paper: CJM and BPM. Together with defining them, their most important elements are explained briefly.

2.1.1 Business Process Management

BPM can be considered as “the art and science of overseeing how work is performed in an organization to ensure consistent outcomes and to take advantage of improve-ment opportunities” [1, p. 1]. As such, it comprises different activities:

(i) identifying processes in an organization, (ii) discovering (exploring and modeling) certain ones which are deemed most important, (iii) analyzing these, (iv) redesigning them and implementing this redesigned version, (v) eventually monitoring them, and (vi) starting again with discovering the processes. Together, these six steps make up the BPM lifecycle as depicted in Figure 2.1.

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6 Chapter 2. Background

Figure 2.1: The BPM lifecycle [1]

Business processes can be modeled in business process models. In many cases, companies manage their business process models in what are known as process model repositories [1]. These repositories support the maintenance of process models and provide an overview over all modeled processes in an organization. Furthermore, a model repository can be a part of a Business Process Management System (BPMS) that is used to actively manage business processes in an organization.

2.1.2 Customer Journey Management

An end-to-end view on customer processes can be reached by analyzing sequences of customer experiences and interactions with an organization. These sequences are called CJs, and models depicting CJs are known as CJ maps. In short, these maps show “the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination” [7]. CJs consist of multiple touchpoints where the customer engages with the organization. The most important of these, both for the company and the customer, are called Moments of Truth (MofTs), e.g. when a customer first tries out a new product or when an order is placed. These MofTs are key elements when trying to improve customer satisfaction [2]. In order to enhance customer the experience, interactions across all channels of interaction should be harmonized [11]. CJ maps help businesses understand how clients interact with them (and vice-versa) and what opportunities for improvement present themselves in each step along the

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2.2. Problem Domain 7 journey. A CJ map can vary in size, from only few touchpoints of a short interaction with the customer, up to long sequences of interaction. The highest level of abstrac-tion and length is formed by the Customer Lifecycle (CLC). This cycle contains all individual journeys from the beginning until the end of a customer’s interactions with a company.

Existing literature mainly explains CJ mapping as a method to gain insights into customer processes and experiences. However, CJ maps also form the foundation for process change based on insights gained during their creation. This requires multiple steps in addition to mapping out the CJs, and CJM is thus defined as the following:

Definition 1. Customer Journey Management (CJM) is defined as the collection of activities that lead to improved CJs. Analogue to the BPM lifecycle, CJM entails (i) the identification of CJs that customers can have with an organization, (ii) the prioritization of the CJs that are most important to the customer and the orga-nization, (iii) mapping these CJs, (iv) redesigning them to improve the customer experience, (v) implementing the planned changes, and (vi) re-evaluating and mon-itoring the CJs after the changes have been carried out.

2.2 Problem Domain

This section analyzes the problem domain to gain initial insights into the field of CJM/BPM alignment. Section 2.2.1 describes why alignment between CJM and BPM is a desirable goal for organizations. Section 2.2.2 identifies reasons for mis-alignment between them. The field of CJM is a rather new one and with strong practical roots and thus often lacks scientific discussion. Due to this, managerial sources are also taken into consideration for the purpose of this review.

2.2.1 CJM/BPM Alignment for Customer Centricity

Already in 1993, Rust and Zahorik proposed the notion that high customer satis-faction is linked to “individual loyalty, aggregate retention rate, market share, and profits” [12, p. 212]. In addition to retaining existing clients, customer satisfaction and loyalty also lead to new clients brought in by existing ones [13]. This means that it is advantageous for firms to focus on their customers’ satisfaction and not only on internal process optimization.

CJM provides a way to analyze and improve end-to-end processes from a customer’s point of view. This can create a better experience for customers by improving

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8 Chapter 2. Background the quality of their interactions with a company. Such customer processes are not limited by departmental boundaries and need an end-to-end picture of the business processes in an organization.

Nevertheless, this increased focus on customer processes does not mean that BPM should be disregarded for achieving customer excellence. BPM is a critical element in achieving customer satisfaction as well [14]. Since each interaction with a customer is part of at least one business process, BPM is needed to create excellent customer experiences.

However, when the goals of creating great customer experiences and increasing pro-cess efficiency are pursued simultaneously by different departments which do not cooperate well, contradicting measures might be carried out. This can mean that none of the two sides achieve their goal while wasting valuable organizational re-sources. As a consequence, it is desirable for organizations to have well-aligned efforts of achieving both goals at the same time.

2.2.2 Reasons for Misalignment

This section describes six key problems that cause misalignment between CJM and BPM. These problems are stated and then described in more detail with references to existing literature.

Problem 1 BPM is too focused on reducing cost and improving efficiency and ne-glects customer interactions.

Business processes can be optimized along the four dimensions (i) time, (ii) flexibil-ity, (iii) cost, and (iv) quality [1], taking trade-offs between them into consideration. Optimizing business processes for customer satisfaction would fall into the quality dimension, more specifically external quality. This dimension can be described as “the extent to which a client feels that the specifications or expectations are met by the delivered product” [1, p. 215]. It is typically measured with the “amount, relevance, quality, and timeliness of the information that a client receives during execution on the progress being made” [1, p. 215]. This means that BPM in theory already includes the idea of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Nevertheless, improvements along the quality dimension are often neglected in real-ity. On paper, the second-biggest driver of business process change in 2016 was the desire to improve customer satisfaction, with 46% of companies stating it a major driver for BPM in their organization [8]. However, this push for customer focus is not reflected in the job functions of most BPM practitioners. None of the descrip-tions listed in [8] hint at any kind of customer focus. Additionally, 53% of companies

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2.2. Problem Domain 9 name cost as a major business driver for business process change [8]. This indicates that the focus on process optimization along the cost dimension still eclipses the desire for customer satisfaction.

BPM also includes the concept of end-to-end processes that transcend functional boundaries. One example for this is the value chain, which includes all activities from production to the delivery of a product [15]. However, even with such cross-departmental perspectives, processes are still viewed in terms of business processes (i.e. what the company does) instead of customer processes (i.e. what the cus-tomer does) [16]. As a result, BPM needs to be more concerned with the cuscus-tomer interactions that occur in business processes.

Problem 2 CJM is too focused on customer interactions and neglects internal pro-cesses.

CJM suffers from the inverse problem of BPM. Since it only focuses on the interac-tions a customer has with a company and the emointerac-tions during these interacinterac-tions, it disregards how the internal processes of an organization are executed. As a result, many improvements are planned, but never carried out due to being unfeasible in the current organizational context. Furthermore, the different focus of CJM and BPM can lead to a cultural shock when professionals from the two fields interact with each other.

Problem 3 Interconnections between CJs and business processes are not well known. Given the knowledge introduced above about business processes and CJs, another reason for misalignment between the two becomes apparent. A company has pri-vate processes which are only visible to its members and not part of the customer perceived cycle. In addition, it has public processes, which are perceived by the customer during touchpoints (see Figure 2.2). This is corroborated in [17], where it is stated that service operations are split up into two parts: the part which involves customer contact and the part which does not.

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10 Chapter 2. Background Without knowing about the links between their CJs and their public (and conse-quently also private) business processes, a company forfeits a valuable source of feedback for optimizing their processes. It does not know which business processes create what kind of customer experiences. Additionally, it does not know which effects a process redesign will have on customer experience. Davis [2, p. 2] states that “as well as worrying about how we design a good process [...] we now also have to worry about the CJ that we are creating for the customer”. This involves aspects and characteristics such as emotions and previous experiences, that are different from those of traditional business processes, e.g. effectiveness and efficiency. As a result, not knowing the links between CJs and business processes leads to poor alignment during the phases of discovery, analysis and redesign in the CJM and BPM lifecycle.

Problem 4 CJ maps are not standardized.

Many CJ maps share common features such as multiple phases, various touchpoints, a depiction of good and bad experiences, and multiple channels through which the customer-firm interactions take place. Common phases are e.g. awareness of a prod-uct/brand/company, evaluation of different options, purchase of a good or service and use of said product/service [7]. Touchpoints within these phases could be e.g. the point where the client receives and opens the product he ordered, or a call to the service hotline.

Despite these commonalities, unlike for business process modeling [8], there is no widely accepted standard or notation for customer journey maps. Richardson states that “there is no single right way to create a customer journey, and your own or-ganization will need to find what works best for your particular situation” [7, p. 4]. As a result, customer journey maps can take a variety of forms and shapes (some examples are included in Appendix A). The multitude of ways in which CJs can be mapped makes it difficult to automatically link touchpoints in a CJ map to elements or sections in a business process model.

Problem 5 Functional silos do not cooperate well.

Even if a company knows the connections between its CJs and business processes, it does not always mean that the two are well aligned. Due to the presence of organizational silos, problems can occur in cases where end-to-end processes run across multiple departments [18], which CJs do in most cases. Improvements in CJs often rely on changes in business processes, but due to silo thinking, such dependencies are often not communicated well and the necessary changes are not always carried out. This is a problem in the implementation phase of the CJM and BPM lifecycle.

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2.3. Solution Domain 11 Problem 6 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) between departments are mis-aligned.

Building on problem 5, even if communication between functional departments is strong, they might still have different Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), meaning that each of them, although being aware of the other’s need, choose to optimize their own performance instead [18]. This problem can mainly be classified in the stage of monitoring and controlling in the CJM and BPM lifecycle.

The six problems described here are impeding an organizations ability to use CJM and BPM to their full potential for reaching customer excellence. Consequently, they must be addressed when trying to achieve this goal. Furthermore, these problems forms the basis for defining different dimensions of CJM/BPM alignment maturity.

2.3 Solution Domain

This section presents initial reference points for approaches to improve CJM/BPM alignment. Section 2.3.1 examines literature from the field of process model match-ing and querymatch-ing, while Section 2.3.2 analyzes literature about breakmatch-ing organi-zational silos. Furthermore, Section 2.3.3 examines a related maturity model to identify more possible characteristics of CJM/BPM alignment.

2.3.1 Linking Customer Journey Maps to Business Process

Models

To overcome the problem of unknown links between CJs and business processes, process model querying techniques (e.g. [19, 20]) could be applied. In companies with large model repositories, this method would be useful to find process models that might be contributing to a certain CJ. However, such an approach requires up-to-date process models with well-defined metadata to find relevant matches [20], which is not always the case [8].

Furthermore, when CJ maps follow a predefined structure, approaches from the re-lated field of process model matching could be used as well (e.g. [21, 22, 23]). These methods link elements of different models in two ways: (a) structural matching, finding similarities between models based on structural characteristics, and (b) se-mantic matching, comparing individual elements (element-level matching) or entire subgraphs (structure-level matching) of a model via their labels.

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12 Chapter 2. Background CJ maps are generally more abstract than process models. This means that potential links which could be found between the two types of models are most likely between touchpoints in a customer journey and whole sections of business processes. The latter can of course also have a high-level perspective, but are often more detailed for operational purposes [8]. However, given their unstructured nature, mapping the touchpoints in CJ maps to business process models most likely has to be done manually (see problem 4 above).

Nevertheless, despite the high degree of structural variety found in CJ maps, some similarities with business process models can be found. Most CJ maps contain a combination of the following main components: (a) touchpoints, (b) phases, (c) a flow of touchpoints, (d) channels, and (e) an indication of the customer’s emotion during touchpoints. The actors in a customer journey map are always the customer and the company. Business processes on the other hand are mostly modeled in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) [8]. Among others, these models are made up of the following key elements: (a) swimlanes/actors (often including the customer), (b) activities, (c) events, (d) a logical flow, (e) flow branching, and (f) sub-processes.

These main components provide some insights into how CJ maps and business pro-cesses models could be linked together automatically. When modeled correctly, touchpoints in CJ maps should correspond to events or activities in BPMN models. This is due to the fact that every interaction a company has with the customer is also part of at least one business process. Additionally, since both types of models follow a certain flow, once a link has been found between a touchpoint in a CJ and an element in a business process, the order of activities and touchpoints can give further insights about the connection between subsequent elements in both models. As a result, methods from process model querying and matching could be used by companies to identify the points where CJs and business processes interlink. De-pending on the structure of a company’s CJ maps and business process model repos-itory, finding these links can be done (semi-)automatically. Applying the technology presented in this section can reduce problem 3 above.

2.3.2 Removing Organizational Silos

Another problem hampering the alignment of CJM and BPM are functional silos that hardly interact, let alone coordinate, with one another (see problem 5 above). Dismantling such silos can improve CJM/BPM alignment. Dell [18] proposes mul-tiple steps to removing organizational silos, which can be combined with the ones proposed by Koenig [24]. When applied with the specific goal of reducing organiza-tional silos to improve CJM/BPM alignment, six steps are identified.

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2.3. Solution Domain 13 1. A company should establish a common vision and communicate this vision to all employees. This leads departments towards working for a common goal, resulting in an improved alignment of their efforts. For CJM/BPM alignment, this common vision should be customer centricity. It would result in both CJ managers and business process managers working towards the same goal and improve coordination.

2. An organization should then try to identify its end-to-end processes. An com-pany that analyzes its CJs already takes this step.

3. Processes should be prioritized for improvement. An organization that em-ploys BPM should already take this step in the process discovery phase of the BPM lifecycle.

4. Process owners who are responsible for the design of end-to-end processes should be assigned. Since CJs are end-to-end processes, these process owners should also be the owner of the corresponding CJs.

5. The achievement of company-wide targets should be rewarded to push depart-ments even more towards working for a common goal. As for the first step, this common goal should be customer centricity. Introducing well-aligned company-wide targets would also remove the problem of misaligned perfor-mance measures (problem 6).

6. A company should bring employees from different professions together in teams instead of splitting them up in functional silos. Applied to CJM/BPM align-ment, this would mean bringing marketeers and business process experts to-gether into one team. In theory, such a combination should remove most misalignment between them.

The six steps presented here can help remove organizational silos and should also be found to some extent in the improvement methods encountered during this project.

2.3.3 The Process and Enterprise Maturity Model

One related maturity model already exists in the BPM field: the Process and En-terprise Maturity Model (PEMM) [10]. The focus of this model is on how hav-ing end-to-end processes can lead to major performance increases in organizations. Such a focus on performance is not entirely in line with the goal of becoming a truly customer-centric organization. Furthermore, the model is mostly descriptive in nature, giving companies a multitude of characteristics to identify their process and enterprise maturity. It also includes a certain prescriptive element by showing

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14 Chapter 2. Background organizations which characteristics they are still lacking and consequently which ones they should improve upon. However, no concrete measures are proposed to improve these characteristics. This stands in contrast to the strong prescriptive element which forms the foundation of this thesis.

Despite these differences, many commonalities can be found with the PEMM. Cus-tomer focus is one sub-characteristic in the model, as is (cross-functional) teamwork and having cross-process metrics. As a consequence, the other dimensions of ma-turity in the PEMM might also be relevant to the research at hand. Given this, the PEMM is examined in more detail to gain insights into the solution domain. The key elements presented in [10] are outlined hereafter and suggestions are made about how they might apply for a CJM/BPM alignment maturity model.

The PEMM is structured around two sets of characteristics: (a) process enablers, which concern how well processes will perform over time, and (b) enterprise capa-bilities to put these process enablers into place. The following five characteristics are process enablers [10]:

1. Design specifies how well processes are designed. In a customer centric orga-nization, processes should be designed to fit well with CJs.

2. Performers are the employees who actually execute the processes. In general, performers should be able to identify opportunities for process change. In a customer centric organization, these opportunities should stem from interac-tions with the customer.

3. Owner concerns who owns business processes. To increase performance, pro-cess owners should be senior managers who have strong authority over the processes and their related aspects such as budget. In a customer-centric or-ganization, process owners should also have the necessary authority to carry out changes in CJs.

4. Infrastructure refers mainly to information systems that support processes. For high performance, there should be an integrated system which supports interdepartmental collaboration. To maximize customer satisfaction, such a system should deliver a harmonized experience for the customer across all functional domains.

5. Metrics define how process performance is quantified in the organization. These should be derived from a higher strategy. In a customer centric organi-zation, this strategy should include customer satisfaction and loyalty, together with corresponding performance metrics.

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2.3. Solution Domain 15 On the other hand, enterprise capabilities include the following four characteristics: 1. Leadership refers to how involved senior executives are in process transforma-tion and how process-oriented they are themselves. They should not lead their employees through control, but through inspiration and vision. In a customer-centric organization, this vision should also focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Culture concerns a variety of aspects like teamwork, mission and focus. For customer centricity, employees should see customer excellence as their mission and carry out their work with this goal in mind.

3. Expertise is equal to how skilled employees are. They should be skilled in process redesign and implementation. In a company focused on customer excellence, they should also be skilled in CJM.

4. Governance specifies how well processes are interconnected with each other. In a customer-centric organization, it is important that business processes are well connected to CJs too.

The characteristics of the PEMM only refer to business processes. However, CJM offers new possibilities for achieving customer excellence. At the same time, it introduces new problems (as described in Section 2.2). The characteristics of the PEMM thus have to be adapted to take into consideration how CJM and BPM can be used together to achieve the highest level of customer loyalty. It is necessary to define new sub-dimensions or combinations of these characteristics that can help identify how well an organization is using and aligning CJM and BPM to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, the characteristics explained in the PEMM can all be related to customer centricity. As a result, they should also be used as the base for a new maturity model.

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Chapter 3 Methodology

This chapter describes the methodology that was applied to answer the research questions established in this thesis. Section 3.1 outlines the six stage approach that is chosen. Section 3.2 specifies the structure of the interviews that are carried out, while Section 3.3 introduces the interviewed organizations. Section 3.4 describes the structure of the expert panel session that is carried out after the interviews have been conducted.

3.1 Approach Phases

Since the field of CJM is rather new and undefined, an explorative approach is used to identify the stages of CJM/BPM alignment maturity and the ways of transitioning between them. This explorative approach consists of six phases (see Figure 3.1):

1. In the first phase, existing literature and information was examined in order to find orientation and starting points for the subsequent stages (see Chapter 2). 2. After having examined previous research and literature, semi-structured inter-views are carried out with five organizations that are actively working with CJM and BPM and trying to improve alignment between the two. Addition-ally, two organizations that offer solutions for improving CJM/BPM alignment are interviewed.

3. After having conducted the first five interviews, the findings are combined into a preliminary maturity model.

4. This rough outline of the model is then presented to an expert panel. The goal of this session is to gather more details about which dimensions and improve-ment approaches should exist in it. Additionally, the remaining interviews

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18 Chapter 3. Methodology

Figure 3.1: Approach Outline

with organizations are used to validate the preliminary model and find further possibilities for improvement.

5. According to the findings from step 4, the preliminary model is then adapted and enhanced into a maturity model which companies can use to (a) identify their own CJM/BPM alignment maturity and (b) determine in which dimen-sions of it they perform poorly.

6. This descriptive maturity model is enhanced by a prescriptive component, describing measures companies can take to increase each dimension. Following this, it applied to the interviewed organizations for validation and to make managerial recommendations.

3.2 Interview Structure

Seeing as the research conducted during this project is of an explorative nature, a semi-structured approach to conducting the interviews is chosen [25]. Consistent with the established research questions, these interviews aim to:

• Identify organizational characteristics which can be used to classify an orga-nization’s CJM/BPM alignment maturity, and

• Discover and explore each organization’s approach to improving this align-ment.

The interviews begin with general questions about the topic (as to provide an in-troduction for the interviewees) and then move towards more specific questions.

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3.3. Examined Organizations 19 This progression is done in several question blocks, each being more specific than the previous. This supports the subsequent coding and analysis of the results, as similar questions are already grouped together beforehand. The detailed interview guidelines can be found in Appendix C. The interviews are structured in five blocks: 1. The first question block acts as an introduction to the interviewee and allows them to provide some background about their organization. This facilitates the comparison with other interviewed companies and provides characteristics which are of value for assessing an organization’s current level of CJM/BPM alignment (RQ1).

2. The second set of questions aims to find out details about the measures each organization has taken to improve alignment between its CJs and BPM, and discover how exactly these measures work (RQ2).

3. The third question block aims at identifying the scientific or organizational foundation of the approach an organization is following to form an under-standing of the underlying sources for it.

4. The last set of main questions serves the purpose of gathering insights into the benefits and problems each organization faces with its approach. These insights are necessary in order to be able to compare and evaluate the different methods for stage 3 of the approach.

5. The final block of questions wraps up the interviews and tries to determine if there are any open questions at the end.

By following this structure, the interviews provide insights into each organization’s context and suggested measures to improve CJM/BPM alignment. These findings can then be used to develop a descriptive and prescriptive maturity model.

3.3 Examined Organizations

The organizations that are examined during this research project are identified and contacted in cooperation with the Dutch IT consultancy Sogeti. Among others fields, Sogeti’s Business Technology department is concerned with the topic of CJs. During their work at various client companies, it became noticeable that in many cases, these companies were trying (and often struggling) to align their CJM with their BPM. As such, this thesis falls into Sogeti’s area of expertise and they provided their contacts and support in solving the problem discussed here.

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20 Chapter 3. Methodology The interviews are carried out with seven companies in total, of which five are seeking to improve CJM/BPM alignment in their own organizations (Companies A to E) and two provide solutions to help their clients do the same (Comm’ant and USoft). Most of these organizations would prefer not to be named and have thus been anonymized. The following organizations are interviewed (in chronological order of the interviews):

• Comm’ant is an organization that offers both a software solution for manag-ing business processes, as well as correspondmanag-ing trainmanag-ing and consultmanag-ing to help clients shift their organizational mentality towards “Community, Commitment and Communication” [26];

• USoft is a software provider, which, among other products, offers a software suite that can be extended and used by its clients to link customer journey maps to BPMN models [27];

• Company A is a large Dutch telecommunications provider; • Company B is a Dutch public transport organization; • Company C is a large Dutch bank;

• Company D is a semi-governmental Dutch utility company;

• Company E is a multinational insurance provider called AEGON [28]. These seven companies provide a variety of organizational contexts and can give insights into multiple different measures that should be taken to improve CJM/BPM alignment.

3.4 Expert Panel

For stage 4 of the approach, a rough outline of the proposed maturity model is presented to a panel of four experts from Sogeti, some of which are also interviewed during stage 2. The goal of this session is to (a) validate the preliminary model and identify areas of improvement, (b) gather more information about the model’s individual aspects, and (c) determine in greater detail which organizational charac-teristics can be used to assess an organization’s CJM/BPM alignment maturity. The session begins with an unstructured description of each level in the preliminary model, together with an explanation of transition approaches that were encountered during the interviews of stage 2. The entire model is then presented to the expert

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3.4. Expert Panel 21 panel in graphical form. To assess the validity of the preliminary maturity model, the experts are asked to evaluate the model along six criteria. These criteria are based on the work of Beecham et al. [29] who also used an expert panel to validate a maturity model, making their approach applicable to the research at hand. The following criteria are selected:

Limited Scope Is the scope of the model limited enough to be a proper abstraction of the reality it represents? Is its scope too restrictive? The model should include all necessary elements, while not including any unnecessary ones.

Consistency Is the model consistent within itself? Is the vocabulary applied con-sistent across all levels? Is the level of granularity concon-sistent for each level of the model? The model should be as consistent as possible.

Understandable Do the experts understand the model? Do they agree on its meaning? Is the goal of the model clear? The maturity model should be unambigu-ous and give clear definitions.

Ease of use Is the model simple to apply to reality? Is it overly complex? Would extensive training be needed to use the model? A good model should have a very high usability.

Tailorable Can the model be changed and extended easily? Can it be adapted to fit specific organizational contexts? The model should allow for this to be considered high quality.

Since the maturity model presented to the panel of experts is a preliminary one, it will naturally be lacking in most of the above criteria. However, the goal of this expert panel session is to determine which changes are necessary to improve the model’s quality.

In addition to these semi-structured quality characteristics, the experts are also asked to reflect on aspects concerning the goals of the session in an unstructured manner. The purpose of this reflection is to support further refinement of the ma-turity model.

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Chapter 4 Maturity Model

This chapter presents the proposed maturity model for CJM/BPM alignment. Sec-tion 4.1 describes general characteristics that the model should fulfill. SecSec-tion 4.2 presents a maturity model for CJM/BPM alignment. This model answers the ques-tion of how the current state of CJM/BPM alignment can be measured in organiza-tions (RQ1). In addition, it forms the basis for identifying and classifying measures that companies can take to improve their CJM/BPM alignment (RQ2).

4.1 Maturity Models

A maturity model is generally “a sequence of levels (or stages) that together form an anticipated, desired, or logical path from an initial state to maturity” [30, p. 2]. Maturity in the context of this paper is seen as a situation where CJM and BPM work together in harmony to achieve the best experience for customers. The maturity model developed here can be classified as a process maturity model (as opposed to a BPM maturity model) as it concerns “the condition of processes in general or distinct process types” [9, p. 3]. Since multiple facets of misalignment (and consequently also alignment) were already identified in the previous section, the proposed maturity model is multi-dimensional, having a certain granularity at which maturity is defined.

RQ1 is of a descriptive nature and the maturity model should thus also have a descriptive element. This allows organizations to determine their own current and desired level of CJM/BPM alignment maturity. Building on this, the answer to RQ2 is prescriptive, meaning that the model should also include prescriptive elements. As such, the maturity model should consist of three categories: (a) basic elements, (b) descriptive elements, and (c) prescriptive elements. Basic elements are defined

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24 Chapter 4. Maturity Model in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. The model’s descriptive and prescriptive elements are discussed in this chapter and Chapter 5. The model developed here should follow the guidelines and structure presented in [30] in order to be of high usefulness to organizations.

4.2 CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Model

Based on the insights gained during the first five interviews (Comm’ant, USoft, and companies A to C), a rough outline of the CJM/BPM alignment maturity model was developed. This model is built around the approaches chosen by the interviewed organizations, together with the organizational context before and after the transformation is completed. It was evaluated together with the expert panel and by examining how companies D and E would fit into it. During this evaluation, the need for a multi-dimensional model was confirmed. Additionally, more possible characteristics that could be included in these dimensions were identified:

• Whether or not processes are seen from a customer point of view instead of a business point of view;

• Whether or not customer focus is present at every decision;

• How free process and product owners are of external dependencies, i.e. how much power they have over changing their processes;

• How the CJM and BPM teams are organized (in functional silos or integrated with each other);

• How the ownership of end-to-end processes is managed; • The way employees cooperate in the organization; • How customer feedback is included in process design;

• How well customer centricity is embedded in the company culture.

Together with the reasons for misalignment outlined in Section 2.2.2 and the di-mensions of the PEMM described in Section 2.3.3, these characteristics form the basis for the dimensions of a CJM/BPM alignment maturity model. The descrip-tive component of this model is summarized in Table 4.1 and its individual aspects are outlined in this section.

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4.2. CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Model 25 T able 4.1: CJM/BPM Use and Alignmen t Maturit y Lev els & Dimensions Dimension Lev el 0 Lev el 1 Lev el 2 Lev el 3 Lev el 4 Greenfield Defined Setup P artial Customer Cen tricit y F ull C ustomer C en tricit y 1 CJM Maturit y No CJ Mapping CJs are mapp ed CJs are impro v ed, but impro v emen ts not carried out CJs are impro v ed and impro v emen ts carried out CLC is activ ely managed, harmonized CJs 2 BPM Maturit y Initial State Defined Rep eatable Managed Optimized 3 CJ /Business Pro cess Links Unkno wn P artially kno wn Kno wn, but not acte d up on Kno wn and partially acted up on Kno wn and acted up on 4 CJM / BPM F unctional Silos Almost no co ordination b et w een departmen ts Ad-ho c co ordination b et w een departmen ts P erio dic co ordination b et w een departmen ts Ev eryda y co ordination b et w een departmen ts End-to-end pro cess resp onsibilit y 5 Compan y Vision & Culture No customer fo cus Customer fo cus formally presen t, but not v alued Customer fo cus presen t and v alued Customer fo cus is ma jor elemen t Customer fo cus is cen tral elemen t, presen t at ev ery decision

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26 Chapter 4. Maturity Model

4.2.1 Maturity Dimensions

Based on the insights gained during the previous stages of this project, the following five dimensions of CJM/BPM use alignment maturity are proposed:

CJM Maturity The first dimension describes how well CJs are managed in an or-ganization. Without CJM, there can evidently be no alignment with it. A company needs to start managing its CJs before it can even think about aligning them with its business processes.

Since CJM is not defined in existing literature, there is also no existing definition of its maturity. For this reason, CJM maturity is herewith defined as being concerned with the following questions: Are CJs managed at all? Are they mapped out? Are there active attempts to improve them? Are these improvements actually carried out? Does the customer experience differ across different CJs? The more of these questions can be answered positively, the higher is a companies CJM maturity. This dimension includes the aforementioned aspect of whether or not processes are seen from a customer point of view instead of a business point of view.

BPM Maturity The second dimension on the other hand refers to a well-defined concept, for which a variety of models exist [9]. As with CJM maturity, the necessity of this dimension is self-evident because and organization that does not employ BPM cannot improve its alignment with CJM.

In the context of the model developed here, BPM maturity as defined in the Business Process Management Maturity Model (BPMMM) is used. The BPMMM is mainly concerned with actual business processes and does not include a strong customer focus component already. This makes it well-suited for differentiating BPM maturity from CJM maturity.

According to the BPMMM, BPM maturity ranges from an initial state to an opti-mized state. The lowest level is one where BPM projects are reactive, un-coordinated and isolated. At the highest level, proactive BPM activities are coordinated organi-zation wide and high performance is achieved.

CJ/Business Process Links The third dimension describes how aware an organi-zation is of the links between its CJs and business processes. At the lowest level, the links between the two are completely unknown. In contrast, at the highest maturity level, all links between CJs and business processes are known and this knowledge is used when redesigning processes and CJs.

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4.2. CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Model 27 Functional Silos The fourth dimension was identified based on existing literature and consistently encountered during the interviews as well. An organization where CJM and BPM are handled in functional silos will never reach proper alignment between the two. As a result, product or process owners should exist for end-to-end processes. These owners should also have the authority and power to make signifi-cant changes to their processes in order to implement CJ improvements consistently. Company Vision & Culture The fifth dimension includes all aspects relating to customer focus in everyday work. A company that desires to be customer centric should have customer focus explicitly stated as the central element in its company vision. Furthermore, this focus should be reflected in organizational KPIs to ensure maximum collaboration towards the common goal of customer excellence.

4.2.2 Maturity Levels

To define an organization’s maturity along each of the five dimensions of alignment, five maturity levels are defined:

Level 0: Greenfield The lowest level describes a situation where neither CJM nor BPM activities are carried out. As such, there is nothing to be aligned and no links can be found. Departments are organized in silos and have poor coordination. Customer focus is completely missing in the organization’s vision and culture. Level 1: Defined This level describes an organization which has started mapping its CJs and defined its business processes, but nothing more. Links between the two are only partially known and the functional silos cooperate only on rare occasions. The organization states customer focus as one of its goals, but this does not reflect in day-to-day work.

Level 2: Setup The setup level is the stage at which a company is ready to become customer-centric. It knows where to improve its CJs, but these improvements often only exist on paper. Its business processes are defined and can be repeated, but are not improved (or the improvements are not actually implemented). Similarly, links between the organization’s CJs and business processes are known, but this knowledge is not yet used to redesign processes. The different departments start cooperating with each other more often. Customer focus is not only a formal element of the company vision, but it has also become noticeable in day-to-day work.

Level 3: Partial Customer Centricity At this level, an organization has started using CJM and BPM to become truly customer centric. Its CJs are actively man-aged and improved, and these improvements and changes are actually carried out.

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28 Chapter 4. Maturity Model Business processes are also actively managed and redesigned with customer focus in mind. This is because the links between CJs and business process are not only known, but this knowledge is actively used for redesigning processes. Different func-tional departments coordinate with each other continuously and customer focus has become a major element in the company’s vision and strategy, which is reflected in the company culture and mindset.

Level 4: Full Customer Centricity The highest level represents the final step towards CJM/BPM alignment and consequently customer centricity and excellence. The CLC is actively managed and each CJ contributes to it, delivering a harmonized and excellent experience for the customer. This is only possible because business processes are optimized for customer experience and their links to CJs are known and used. The organization has gone from functional departments to inter-professional teams, which are responsible for entire end-to-end processes and the associated CJs. With this, customer focus has become the single most important element of the company vision, being present at every non-trivial design decision. For an organiza-tion wanting to become truly customer centric, reaching level 4 should be the goal, and this can only be achieved when all five dimensions meet the standard of level 4. A company’s CJM/BPM maturity will not always be the same across all dimensions. However, the dimensions of maturity presented here are interdependent to a certain extent. For example, removing functional silos between CJM and BPM naturally leads to a better knowledge about the links between the two. Especially towards the higher levels, maturing in one dimension while others are neglected will not lead to any significant improvements in customer satisfaction. For instance, knowing links between CJs and business processes is of no use if those links cannot be put to use. This would require either strong coordination between departments or an absence of functional departments altogether (i.e. level 3 or higher in the dimension 4). Similarly, trying to dismantle organizational silos without creating the right vision and culture at the same time would not lead to meaningful increases in customer satisfaction. As a consequence, alignment efforts should focus on increasing the maturity of multiple dimensions in parallel.

The descriptive maturity model helps organizations to identify how well they use CJM and BPM and how well these are aligned. Using this information, they can determine which dimensions they should improve and thus focus upon. As a con-sequence, the model forms the basis for a classification of measures to improve CJM/BPM alignment in an organization.

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Chapter 5 Findings

This chapter presents the summarized and aggregated findings and insights gained during the interviews. More detailed summaries of all interviews can be found in Appendix D and full transcripts of each interview can be found in Appendix E. Sec-tion 5.1 connects and combines individual measures into concrete approaches that can be applied by organizations to improve their CJM/BPM alignment. Section 5.2 describes each organization’s CJM/BPM alignment maturity along the five dimen-sions and makes recommendations about which approaches they should follow to improve their alignment. Section 5.3 discusses the relevance and validity of these approaches.

5.1 Improvement Approaches

This section describes each of the approaches taken by the interviewed companies to improve their CJM/BPM alignment in detail. Each set of measures is then split into its sub-measures and linked to the maturity dimensions it improves. Furthermore, the prerequisites a company should fulfill before applying each approach are ana-lyzed. Each of the interviewed organizations employs a somewhat different approach to increase their CJM/BPM use and alignment maturity:

• Comm’ant advertises an approach based on communication. Input and output should be defined for business processes, but the actual execution of tasks should be left up to the process performer. Furthermore, management should support collaboration in processes instead of overseeing functional activities. Additionally, Comm’ant proposes designing business processes with the “wow-effect” for the customer in mind and then working backwards from that. For each step in the process, a company should determine what communication with the customer is needed to achieve this “wow-effect”.

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30 Chapter 5. Findings • USoft tries to link CJ maps to BPMN models by entering both of them into a single software tool and then letting experts draw links from touchpoints to process elements. In USoft’s tool, each CJ is placed in a comprehensive CLC, providing an overview of all CJs in an organization.

• Company A proposes similar measures to USoft, keeping their deeply rooted BPM department and customer experience team in place. At the same time, company A plans to introduce an intermediary layer that tries to translate and mediate between the two by linking models and resolving alignment issues. • Company B had neither a well developed process management, nor had they

started doing CJ mapping, so they began holding workshops with employees from a variety of different departments. During these workshops, the partici-pants map customer journeys and the corresponding business processes simul-taneously. They then try to find opportunities for improvement and reconvene after these improvements have been carried out.

• Company C took a more radical approach, restructuring large parts of its or-ganization into Agile teams who are each made up of employees from multiple professions. These teams are responsible for a certain product and the cor-responding CJs. At the same time, customer centricity became a major part of the organization’s vision. In addition to this reorganization, company C merged the tasks of CJM and BPM into a single role of customer journey experts.

• Company D started actively managing business processes in a BPMS only re-cently. Similarly, CJs and customer focus in general are new topics in their or-ganization as well. This is partly due to company D being a semi-governmental utility company that previously did not see tax payers as actual customers. Their CJ maps are produced through interviews with customers by the mar-keting department, where employees from other departments are also present. At the same time, reorganization efforts have begun to move the company to a more Agile way of working.

• Company E puts training and education in the center of its alignment ap-proach, teaching BPM experts about customer focus, and marketeers about process thinking through CJ mapping. Through this training, cooperation between the two sides should become easier.

These seven sets of measures that are applied by the companies are divided and recombined into five individual approaches that can help organizations to improve their CJM/BPM alignment. Table 5.1 gives an overview of which approach helps improve which dimension of maturity.

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5.1. Improvement Approaches 31 Table 5.1: Improvements per Approach and Dimension

CJM Maturity BPM Maturity CJ/Business Process Links CJM/BPM Functional Silos Company Vision & Culture Model Linking & Mediation o o ++ + + Training & Education o o + ++ ++ Cross-Departmental Workshops + + ++ ++ + Organizational Restructuring + ++ ++ ++ ++ Customer Feedback Handling o o ++ o +

Legend: o Little or no improvement + Improvement

++ Major Improvement

5.1.1 Model Linking & Mediation

The approach advocated by USoft and planned in company A is to keep the or-ganizational silos of BPM and marketing departments in place, while introducing an intermediary layer in between them. This layer consists of professionals who are experience in both CJM and BPM and who form the bridge between the two departments. The unstructured CJ maps produced by marketeers are transformed into structured models, entered into a modeling tool and then linked to the BPMN models produced by the BPM department. This linking could be supported by auto-matic model matching or querying as introduced in Section 2.3.1. The intermediary layer then tries to identify misalignment and resolve it in cooperation with both departments.

This approach is especially well suited for organizations in which functional silos are very strong and deeply rooted (level 0) and a variety of BPMN models and CJ maps already exist. Employees do not have to change their way of working immediately, since the intermediary layer takes over alignment tasks, and the cultural shock is kept to a minimum. Furthermore, each department can continue specializing on what they do best and keep all of their focus on exactly that. Over time, the silos will start growing closer together as they interact more and more with the mediating layer, ideally working together very closely in the end. With this result, mediation

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32 Chapter 5. Findings would remove functional silos (dimensions 4) and give the customer a stronger focus in the company culture (dimension 5). In addition, model linking would lead to improvements in the knowledge about CJ/business process links (dimension 3). However, this approach contains many shortcomings. Firstly, in an organization that already has very strong silos, introducing a bridge between them has to be an endeavor supported by senior management (above the department level). This is due to the fact that none of the two departments profit from it directly, so none of them are willing to provide a budget.

Secondly, introducing a new layer can only improve alignment to a limited extent. When customer focus is no strong element in the company’s culture and vision and when corresponding KPIs are not put in place, both departments will still work as silos to maximize their own functional performance instead of working together. Thirdly, the tasks of the intermediary layer are very tedious ones. Since CJ maps are rarely well-structured, they have to be transformed and entered into the modeling tool manually. Moreover, when process models are not kept up to date, linking them with CJ maps does not provide much added value and consequently does not improve alignment.

To summarize, when applied in isolation, this approach does not improve CJM/BPM alignment beyond a significant level. However, in combination with other approaches it can help to increase alignment by improving dimensions 3 to 5. Furthermore, managing all CJs in a CLC, as proposed by USoft, would support the harmonization of customer experiences across different CJs.

5.1.2 Training & Education

Company E educates its BPM experts in customer centric thinking by showing them that a highly efficient process is not necessarily what is best for the organization, as it often leads to a worse experience for the customer. After these one-time training sessions, where the company vision of customer focus is communicated, BPM experts are more inclined to take the customer point of view into consideration while redesigning processes. On the other hand, customer experience and marketing teams learn to think in terms of processes through CJ mapping, where they also model processes, just from a customer’s perspective. Company D lets its employees participate or at least watch interviews with customers to make it clear to them how a customer sees the organization and its processes. Educating existing employees can of course be circumvented by hiring new and professionals which are already skilled, as companies C and D do in part. When a training & education approach

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5.1. Improvement Approaches 33 is carried out to perfection, the roles of CJM and BPM can be combined into one, as is the case at company C.

Such an educational approach can be applied by any company. It deconstructs organizational silos by creating a common mindset in its employees (dimension 5). Employees find it positive to see the company through the eyes of a customer. Ina ddition, CJM and BPM experts have an easier time collaborating with each other since they grow closer in their way of thinking (dimension 4). These improvements in dimension 4 and 5 then lead to improvements in dimensions 1 to 3.

One big problem an organization might encounter when applying this approach on its own is that, even with a similar mindset, both sides will continue pursuing their individual goals and thus create misalignment due to a lack of common goals. Additionally, employees that are not part of the training are prone to sticking with their old ways of working. This can manifest itself in CJ changes being planned, but never actually implemented in the organization due to misaligned goals. As a consequence, it is recommended to apply a training & education approach together with setting appropriate KPIs that are based on cooperation.

5.1.3 Cross-departmental Workshops

At company B, an organization that was to a large extent a greenfield (level 0) organization before, the chosen approach was to conduct periodic workshops with employees from various different departments and even actual customers. Partici-pants should range from customer feedback handlers over marketeers and IT pro-fessionals to process experts. The goal of these workshops is to map out both the customer journeys and the business processes that are linked to them. Modeling is done with the following five lanes: (a) the customer’s own process, (b) touchpoints the customer has with the organization, (c) the customer’s emotions and experiences during these touchpoints, (d) the business processes that underpin each touchpoint, and (e) the information and information systems that are needed and used for each touchpoint.

After modeling the CJ “as-is”, key improvement opportunities are identified by the participants. These improvements are then simulated in the model and the CJ is relived by the workshop participants to see if the improvements would have the desired effect. When everything is agreed upon, the participants go back to their departments and implement the planned improvements. After enough time has passed for these implementations to be carried out (company B waits three months), the participants reconvene, check if everything has improved as planned, and start the cycle anew.

Aligning Customer Journey Management with Business Process Management Transforming into a Customer Focused Organization

Masters Thesis

Master Information Studies: Business Information Systems

University of Amsterdam

Aligning Customer Journey Management

with Business Process Management

Transforming into a Customer Focused Organization

Jakob Straßer

Abstract

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acronyms

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1

Research Goal

1.1.1

Research Questions

1.1.2

Research Method

1.2

Scientific Rationale & Related Work

1.3

Thesis Outline

Chapter 2

Background

2.1

Definitions of Concepts

2.1.1

Business Process Management

2.1.2

Customer Journey Management

2.2

Problem Domain

2.2.1

CJM/BPM Alignment for Customer Centricity

2.2.2

Reasons for Misalignment

2.3

Solution Domain

2.3.1

Linking Customer Journey Maps to Business Process

Models

2.3.2

Removing Organizational Silos

2.3.3

The Process and Enterprise Maturity Model

Chapter 3

Methodology

3.1

Approach Phases

3.2

Interview Structure

3.3

Examined Organizations

3.4

Expert Panel

Chapter 4

Maturity Model

4.1

Maturity Models

4.2

CJM/BPM Alignment Maturity Model

4.2.1

Maturity Dimensions

4.2.2

Maturity Levels

Chapter 5

Findings

5.1

Improvement Approaches

5.1.1

Model Linking & Mediation

5.1.2

Training & Education

5.1.3

Cross-departmental Workshops