Leveraging Customer Voices in Business Process Management: A Novel Approach for Service Industries


Learn about a cutting-edge approach in Business Process Management that uses the voice of call center customers to pinpoint and solve process issues in the service industry, including sectors like life insurance.


In today's service-driven economy, the quality of service provided by an organization directly affects customer satisfaction and business success. Unlike the manufacturing industry, where the quality control of final products is well-established, managing the quality of services, especially in industries like life insurance, requires careful attention to internal business processes. Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a solution to this challenge, aiming to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability of business processes.

The application of BPM in the service industry, however, faces some significant challenges:

  • Defining Processes: Unlike the clear-cut processes in manufacturing, service processes are often hard to define and map, making quality control more complex.
  • Measuring Performance: The performance of processes is often difficult to quantify in the service industry, further complicating the evaluation and improvement.
  • Uncontrollable Factors: Factors such as customer behavior, which can be noisy or uncontrollable, can influence service processes, making consistent management difficult.
  • Lack of a Comprehensive Framework: Existing BPM packages primarily focus on aspects such as design, configuration, and process enactment. There is a lack of an overall structure that supports improvements based on data about performance, and existing methods often don't consider non-measurable factors like customer feedback.

These problems lead to a scenario where non-value-added processes might be over-controlled, and key opportunities for improvement might be missed.

To tackle these challenges, a novel approach has been developed that leverages the voice of call center customers (VOC) as a data source for BPM in the service industry. This approach includes:

  • VOC Management Framework: This framework acquires data about business process performance and quality of services. It uses statistical and data mining techniques to identify customer voice patterns and pinpoint problematic areas within processes.
  • Web-based Analysis System: Implemented for a leading life insurance company, this system helps decision-makers understand customer needs better and make consistent decisions regarding customer support. It analyzes VOC and identifies the root causes of problems.
  • Conversion of VOC: VOC, being from the customer-side view, must be converted to the company-side view. This allows the insights from customer messages (including asking, claiming, complaining, and commending) to be effectively utilized in process improvement.
  • Family Of Measurements (FOM): The performance of business processes is measured using a newly devised FOM, applied within the financial industry.

The integration of VOC into BPM offers a transformative solution to the unique challenges faced by the service industry. By incorporating real customer feedback and developing sophisticated tools to analyze and apply this information, companies can detect internal business process issues and find effective ways to enhance service quality. This represents not just a theoretical advancement but a practical tool that has been proven effective in a real-world setting, offering valuable lessons for any organization aiming to excel in today's competitive and customer-centric market.

The approach of using VOC in BPM presents a pioneering path that CIOs can follow. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of customer needs, a focus on continuous process improvement, and a realignment of IT strategies to be more customer-centric. By incorporating these learnings into the daily functions of the IT department, CIOs can ensure that technology becomes a strategic enabler to achieve broader business goals.




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