�??The devil is in the details�?? must be among the most overused phrases in the English language. But only because it�?Ts so true. And the phrase aptly describes five �??little things�?? companies can do to accomplish much better corporate alignment with customers.

Now, I must forewarn you that these deeds may not seem so small to you. However, I describe them in the diminutive because the majority of companies claiming progress towards aligning strategy with customers, process with strategy and technology with process routinely brush them off as inconsequential factors. But if your company takes these five steps, you�?Tll likely leapfrog over competitors that have been at the customer-alignment game much longer than you.

1.�������� While engaged in strategic planning, let your �??inner customer�?? drive your agenda:�� The purpose of customer alignment is to create new value for customers in ways that will add new value back to the company. But most of us start the planning process with unconsciously self-serving perspectives regarding what customers want and what will trigger their buying from you (the concept that �??brand�?? delivers value to customers is one hideous example). Consequently, we do a lousy job exploring ways to add new value to customers, followed by a superb job of exploring ways customers can deliver new value back to us. The antidote? Come to planning sessions pretending you�?Tre your own customer and, as a customer, tell your company what to do and how to do it to win and keep your business. Nothing more than role-playing, really. But devastatingly effective when done right. In fact, when we facilitate Hyper-planning sessions, we start off playing the customer role, which many groups initially view as adversarial until they start �??hearing�?? the customer, and they join in.

2.�������� When redesigning business process to align with customer-centric strategies, ignore process efficiency completely.�� You�?Tll be amazed at what happens. If you focus process design around efficiency, you�?Tll certainly achieve some, chipping away at process defects here and there. But if you focus on adding value to customers with each activity, step and task, instead of chipping away at process defects you�?Tll wash away entire flows and processes �?’ and often eliminate layers of supervision that interfere with empowerment of customer-facing employees. This outcome occurs because almost every company�?Ts processes are designed from a functional silo perspective with self-justification in mind. But when we strip away work that�?Ts not adding value, we achieve much greater efficiencies than by trying to be efficient.
3.�������� When analyzing and designing your business process, uncouple workflow from work process and couple workflow and information flow.�� These are the roots of our Visual Workflow approach to process design. In a variable work (non-manufacturing) environment, workflow - how work moves from function to function or stakeholder to stakeholder - is joined at the hip with information flow. Unfortunately, manufacturing-based process approaches such as Six Sigma and Lean don�?Tt consider information flow until after the fact, if at all, which obscures scads of opportunities to add value to customers by better synchronizing workflow and information flow and by implementing a whole range of automation support tools. And in a variable environment, work process - which is how individuals do their work �?’ is totally subordinate to workflow, whereas Six Sigma in particular starts at the wok process level. That�?Ts putting the cart ahead of the horse in CRM.
4.�������� When selecting any type of automation technology, especially CRM software, map your workflow and work process and make vendors demonstrate their level of support.�� Of, how most vendors like to come in to snow potential customers with dog and pony shows, bells and whistles demonstrations and only tangential treatment of customer requirements. Actually, an advance hint as to how well you�?Tll work with a vendor is how well it responds to receiving your �??process book�?? with instructions to demonstrate what you want to see. Good vendors will appreciate your specificity (which may warn them off pitching business they can�?Tt or shouldn�?Tt win), while others will bob and weave and even tell you their software will �??adapt to anything.�?? I only know two top quality CRM packages that bear any resemblance to silly putty, and even these have limitations and boundaries.
5.�������� Before you make major changes, develop a comprehensive project plan and load it on a professional project management tool. ��Customer alignment itself isn�?Tt a project, it has no end. And many companies and consultants as well use that as an excuse for using �??project management light�?? when aligning with customers or implementing CRM. But the initial implementation of customer-alignment principles is a massive project affecting the majority of most companies. The stronger your project management approach, the more likely you are to succeed. And you should manage your project using an automation tool powerful and sophisticated enough to keep you and key managers on top of everything all the time. We use Ace Project out of Quebec �?’ a hosted solution �?’ but there other options as well. Unfortunately, none of these options go by the name �??Microsoft Project,�?? which is a dinosaur of the tallest order.
That�?Ts it. �??Five easy pieces.�?? You can do them, and you really should.

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CRM attracts big thinkers – people attracted to “big change.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that drilling down into minutia doesn’t rank high on most CRM folks’ hit lists. However, as companies realize that customers are demanding more and more employee empowerment, that customers are getting pickier and pickier about how, when and what we communicate to them, and that large buyers are starting to influence or even control production and delivery schedules  – the need to get elbow deep in managing messy details increases from several perspectives.

First, companies can’t empower employees without incurring more risk. Hence, empowerment must be accompanied by risk management, which must be provided by carefully scripted logic built into our automation tools. And this stuff can get more than a little complex, as in the case of bank lending officers who need a carefully crafted framework from which they can make variable decisions without crossing over into high risk territory. Far from “making it up as they go along,” loan officers have to process a range of inputs – including their intuitive sense of the customer – before flexing policies to accommodate individual cases without crossing the line. And if you want proof of that, just look at the mortgage industry today. What’s behind the mess there, other than greed? Lack of process control providing decision logic.

Have you ever tried to map a lending decision process? If you’re implementing CRM at a financial institution, you have no choice but to map it in order to mitigate risk. Despite the fact that mapping lending process  takes gobs of time and incredible attention to detail. But you can’t accurately map something this complex by lining a conference room’s walls with brown craft paper and drawing lines and boxes. Or even by skipping the paper routine and drawing boxes and lines in Visio. You really should use a decision mapping automation tool – which, unfortunately, many CRM practitioners don’t possess or even vaguely understand how to use.

Let’s keep the lending example and look at it from another angle. What if you’re approving credit online, without human intervention, where there’s risk of being either too stringent or not stringent enough? If you apply too restrictive standards, you risk alienating good customers. But if you’re too lax, you’ll wind up replicating the mortgage mess. To find a happy medium, you have to carefully prioritize and weight factors, a seemingly endless list of factors, which requires a “logic tree” than can span many, many pages of intricate process maps. Again, you can’t do it with brown paper (or flip charts) and magic markers – or with Visio. You virtually have to sit down at a computer with process automation software and carefully and methodically design the decision logic. Unfortunately, the more typical case is the business side handing IT some rough guidlines and saying, “Program it.” And then we wonder why we wind up denying credit to the credit-worthy while loaning big bucks to high risk customers.

But financial services is hardly the only business sector where CRM has to get “down and dirty” to support complex processes. Companies with high value customers that are trying to manage complex opt-in/opt-out scenarios with numerous “exceptions to the rules” have these issues. So do B2B companies forced by market conditions to manage complex pricing/discount schedules. As do MTO (make-to-order) manufacturers with defined capacity that have to allocate scarce resources among competing customers – and do it on a more thought-through level than “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” or “first in/first out.”

We could go on and on with examples. But bottom line, it’s time for CRM and CRM practitioners to start applying and automating sophisticated business rule sets – and start using much more sophisticated tools and approaches. Or more in the vernacular, “Slop time is over.” CRM has a growing number of serious responsibilities, and we’re all going to have to “get dirty” doing them.

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What we now call “customer-centricity”- among numerous other names – really does remind me of puppy love. It’s like adolescent infatuation – all the right intentions but only an inch deep. Unfortunately, among the numerous other names commonly used in place of “customer-centricity” is “customer-alignment,” as occurred in a blog post yesterday. Incorrectamundo. The difference between the two terms is far more than semantic.

Customer-centricity goes to intent and motives. Companies – smart companies at least – aspire to be “customer-centric.” Customer-centricity is rapidly becoming a widely applauded business goal, whereas just a few years ago most business execs considered it a second cousin to suicide, or perhaps a first cousin. However, intent and motives readily become warm fuzzies. Stuff we talk about incessantly but never really get around to doing. Like losing weight. Or quitting smoking. Or giving up “push” marketing or primary reliance on branding. Which is why every time I hear or read “customer-centricity,” my bovine waste matter detector springs into action, and my thoughts go to, “Yeah, like you really mean it?” Or, “What do you really mean?”

Customer-alignment – in contrast – is neither intent nor motive and especially not a goal. It’s the blood sweat and tears without which customer-centricity never becomes a reality. Think of customer alignment this way: 1.) A company starts with customer-centric business strategies, the cornerstone of customer-centricity; 2.) Realizing that trying to adopt new strategies without changing how work is done represents “doing the same things over and over again but expecting different outcomes,” the company realigns business process, how work is done, to support customer-centric strategies; and 3.) recognizing that in-place technologies won’t properly support new process, the company adapts system architecture and adopts new automation software to support new, customer-centric process.

Greatly resembles the difference between surface emotions and all the work involved in building and maintaining mature relationships. Companies (and individuals) have affairs with customer-centricity, most of them fleeting. But you know they’re serious when they dig down deep and start customer alignment.  So let’s stop confusing the two, which I confess I’ve lapsed into when writing in order to avoid too many repetitions of “customer-alignment” or “customer-aligned.” We all, myself included, need to be much more careful not to confuse commitment with infatuation.

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Honestly – we feel jilted. After my wife and I and our respective businesses spent years trying to cultivate a relationship with you, Wells Fargo, you took a page from Paul Simon’s song, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and left us. Yeah, “Hop on the bus, Gus,” “Make a new plan, Stan,” “Don’t need to be coy, Roy,” and the other 47. Now you didn’t tell us to go elsewhere. You just made it plain that we were unwanted - our long-time “Preferred Customer” (private banking) status and multiple accounts, some with high average balances, plus a sizeable mortgage notwithstanding. Heck, we even tried to give you all our retirement savings, but after your “retirement planner” couldn’t find time to develop a plan in three months, we did “cheat.” We committed an act of customer infidelity and went elsewhere.

Now, ‘cause this is a blog, I’m going to skip the first 49 ways you left us, and you used them all—other than to merely mention the time you accepted a large, multi-check business deposit at your drive-up window; issued a deposit receipt from your transaction system, indicating that you’d already linked these checks to our account; then proceeded to not only “lose” the deposited checks, but tell us you wouldn’t credit the deposit until an internal review taking up to 10 business days, plus us producing copies of our clients’ cancelled checks. Despite the fact that even a transaction system run by East Elephant’s Breath Savings & Loan would spot the error immediately when your drive-in teller couldn’t balance out at end of shift. Oh, could we ever feel the customer love!

Yeah, and the timing of these events was so special, too. We discovered you’d “lost” the checks only after you bounced a series of checks written against our “Preferred Customer,” fee-laden, sub-molecular interest-bearing rate checking account, where we keep on deposit only enough to cover checks we write. And our “Preferred Customer” private banker supposedly watching over our “Preferred Customer” accounts? She must have been out to lunch that week.

But don’t get me started…

Nor will I go on and on about your incredible creativity in inventing new fees that emerge as quickly as popcorn in a microwave turned up to level 15. Nope. Nor will I eat up space describing how your online banking system repeatedly disproved the old adage that “when the bank’s balance and yours don’t agree, trust the bank.” Gonna skip all that stuff so I can focus on the 50^th “way” you left us - the one where you told us our relationship was over, done, kaput, divorce-time.

Slap number 50 came when we realized how determined you were to “play the float” with our money. Because my firm consults in the retail financial services space, we’re very familiar with a Federal Reserve Bank edict, “Reg CC,” issued to end miscreant banks’ unreasonable “extension” of check clearing time, which allowed them to earn interest on customers’ money by withholding it from customer accounts for as long as possible. Under Reg CC, barring very special circumstances the maximum time a bank is allowed to clear a local check of $5,000 or more is five days – to which a bank may add a maximum of six days for an out-of-town check. Smaller checks, of course, must be cleared faster than that. And this regulation is still so generous to you, Wells Fargo, because actual check clearing time is considerably less - typically taking two to three days for any size check, even out of town checks.

So what’s the damage to us? A few bucks interest here and there? Not hardly. Anyone who’s ever run a small business that issues relatively large invoices – where these invoices are often paid late, causing subcontractor payments to be similarly delayed – knows that long check hold times screw up cash flow to a fare-thee-well. That’s why if you’re a bank that wants to cozy up to small business customers – consultants and contractors in particular – you make funds available as soon as you receive them from the fed. Which most of your competitors do, even those not particularly customer-aligned. However, you, Wells Fargo, automatically hold funds for your own use for the legal maximum, “Preferred Customer” or not. And you know what? Your practices leave execs from other banks I’ve talked to slack-jawed in amazement at your arrogance.

But you went further. When you’re intent on dancing just within the letter of the law, it’s hard not to slip. Which you did in a most egregious manner. First, your staff gave us conflicting versions of your check-hold strategy – redrawing the $5,000 line to $3,000, and even to “any large check.” We suspected that the real threshold was whatever your customers wouldn’t object to – at least vocally. Although, how many lovers leave without ever saying why? But the endgame for us was when you placed your “automatic hold” on a check to my wife’s business for less than half the $5,000 legal threshold. Worse yet, this wasn’t any check. Not only was this check drawn on a Wells Fargo checking account, but it was on your own bill-paying account that deducts the cash the very moment your bill-payment customer makes a bill-payment request. Even if it’s a “Preferred Customer” request. So you had the cash in your pocket long before we even received the check. But you decided to keep it there as long as possible. Hey, now we could really feel the love!

Let’s make that abuse. And you know what? We’re just not the types to put up with abusive relationships. Even abusive “Preferred Customer” relationships. So, Wells Fargo, we’re sorry you assumed that banking relationships are so entangling that you can behave any way you please and hold us under your spell – or in your case, your stagecoach wheels. But you had to know we wouldn’t stay – right? Or are you totally out to lunch?

One fellow CustomerThink blogger in particular, I’m sure, is preparing to tell me I just don’t get capitalism. That I’m naïve and innocent to think you would do anything else with our money (obviously you think it’s yours). But he’ll miss the whole point. The very point you miss. This whole CRM/CEM/whatever-the-hell-we-want-to-call-it movement started not because some doo-dad filled software hit the market. It started because a whole lotta customers, including some of your customers, realized that they, not sellers, hold the balance of power. So we started standing up for ourselves saying, nay yelling, “We’re not going to take it any more.” Companies that tell us they only want a one-way relationship, and an abusive one at that, are telling us goodbye – whether their behavior is legal, or compliant, or not. Well, sayonara to you too, Wells Fargo. The last of our accounts will be transferred by week’s end. And may your future be filled with the customers you deserve – “swingers” who will leave you in a wink for a lower rate, or a bigger “free gift.” 

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