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Lean methods are those that cut waste in human effort, time, unnecessary movement of information or physical paper or objects.
It can also mean anything that does not add value to the end customer! This is the basis of Value Stream Mapping, where you identify your internal activities that add value to the end customer, and eliminate those that do not. For example, someone bolting a door to a car in an assembly line is a value-adding activity. Them updating a sheet on a clipboard regarding their production statistics may be necessary from the company’s point of view, but not Value-Adding from the end customer’s point of view. After all, what do they get directly from something that benefits the company?
From this point of view, most Business Intelligence activities benefit only the company, providing them insights into what product is selling where, which sales person is selling what in what numbers in what regions, etc.
However, there is a new breed of Customer Intelligence solutions that provide direct value to the end customer.
On many store receipts, at the end of the purchase totals is a little section that is trying to persuade you to call a toll-free number or go to a web site and fill out a survey about your purchase when it is fresh in your mind.
I was chatting with Borge Hald, CEO of Medallia, and what they do. They provide a Software As a Service (SaaS) offering that enables these kinds of surveys to happen, collect Business Intelligence and provide insights about customer experiences to management.
But what is Lean about this is that it allows local Store managers or Hotel Managers to address the issues that the customer had with their experiences at their establishment. Often, headquarters gets summarized abstracts of this kind of intelligence, but those never are Lean in the sense it benefits the end customer much. But allowing feedback about customer experiences to be channelled to the right local establishment and allowing the local management to address them directly in a timely, relevant way, Customer Intelligence becomes Value adding and as Lean as it gets!
Now companies like Medallia are making it possible to do this even from your iPhone closing the gap in time between a customer experience and the feedback to be channelled to the right people for them to take action! After all, if you need come home, relax and start doing something else, you may never get to providing that feedback, good or bad, that you felt strongly at the location. Smartphones allow you to do that right then and there when the experience is fresh in your mind and your motivation is high!
Very interesting way to approach Business Intelligence, especially in the context of making it matter to the end customer. That’s Lean Business Intelligence!
You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes. – Denis Waitley
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