Customer Experience Driven Process Design

In today’s digital world, where many of our interactions happen through screens, having a smooth customer experience is incredibly important.

My own recent experience with a broker's Know Your Customer (KYC) process is an example case. It started with an email notification that my ID was expired, which could affect my trading activities. I followed a link in the email, took pictures of my ID and myself, and submitted them, expecting a quick verification. Instead, I found myself waiting indefinitely, with the process seemingly stuck, displaying a spinning icon and a message like "We are checking your documents, please wait".

After a few minutes, I went back to the page, only to be welcomed by the same message and the spinning icon. Even an hour later, nothing had changed.. I think it'll be reasonable to speculate that the delay was caused by an asynchronous API call to a KYC provider, which failed and subsequently halted the entire process. Despite my multiple retries, the process only succeeded the following day, likely due to a batch operation that cleared pending verifications. This situation left me, the customer, very frustrated, and the brokerage may have lost money because they stopped me from being able to trade.

This example shows the necessity of analyzing and understanding the business processes, especially those directly interacting with customers. In the context of a KYC Renewal Process, the processes might look something like this (I am over simplifying the processes and their flow; the actual process on the brokerage side may be much more complex.)

After identifying the processes, the next important step is to find which parts of the process directly affect the customer experience. For example, the way the system communicates with the KYC provider and the initial process of capturing the picture are crucial. On the other hand, the final step of sending a notification email, while important, doesn’t have the same immediate impact on the customer's experience.

After identifying these critical components, it’s now essential to figure out which steps can be skipped or modified without negatively impacting the customer. If there's an issue with sending an email, should we halt the process or create confusion and frustration by telling the customer about the difficulty? A better approach is to bypass this minor issue, promptly inform the customer of their successful KYC verification, and try to resolve the email notification issue in the background or not to send at all in some cases, as delivering an email after hours of the happening can also lead to negative customer experience.

This approach of breaking down and rethinking business processes with a focus on customer experience helps in reaching a sound and robust business architecture. It guides technical teams in designing their applications with built-in strategies for bypassing non-critical failures and automatically retrying processes that directly impact customers, from the very beginning.

Focusing on customer experience in our process modelling and reflecting these insights onto your business architectures is critical. It helps and directs application teams in creating resilient, forward-thinking solutions that are less likely to need major refactoring at later stages. By prioritizing their customer's experience in every interaction, businesses not only enhance customer satisfaction but also create a more adaptable, long-lasting and future-proof operational framework. In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, where customer expectations grow daily, integrating these practices into our designs is more than just beneficial, it’s essential!