Bart Delmulle: How to Improve Customer Episodes

When companies decide to radically simplify and digitalize their core business, they often struggle with how to start the process. Bart Delmulle, a partner with Bain's Customer Strategy & Marketing practice, explains how redesigning customer episodes one by one and taking advantage of the Agile process to continuously improve each journey can maximize the benefits for the company and the customer.

Read the Bain Brief: Firing Up the Customer Experience Factory

Read the transcript below.

BART DELMULLE: Many companies decide to radically simplify and digitize their core business because there's many benefits, both for customers, but also for the companies themselves. Many of our clients, when they start it, they ask themselves a question, where do I start? Do I start by simplifying my products? Do I start by shifting towards digital channels? Do I rethink the interactions that I have with my customers? Do I revamp my IT? Do I change the way we work?

Companies that get it right really start from the customer episodes. Because in the end, a company is the sum of all the episodes you do with them—joining, using, paying, and so forth. And so you can take those journeys, episodes, and redesign them by one by one and end up with a company that's very different, much more simple and much more digital.

We help our clients with the customer experience factory, which is a very industrialized approach to tackle the journeys one by one and completely rethink them from the future-back to make them radically simple and radically digital. When we started, we typically prioritize where we start. We should do both on where does the complexity and the cost sit? And where is the most pain for the customers?

So we take the performer point of view and the customer point of view, and have a clear logic in where we start and where we end. And we do that with a very standardized approach in steps. But every journey or episode is done by different team. And that team works in a very Agile manner, very end-to-end.

Where you have people involved from the products, from the marketing, from operations and IT, so that we get everything right from the start to design and deliver. So what does it mean? It means for customers, more personalized, simplified and digitized interactions. And for companies? More cost-efficient and effective processes.

Read the Bain Brief

Firing Up the Customer Experience Factory

How to create experiences that are simple, digital and tuned to what customers value.