Customer Experience Transformation with Process Mining Technology

Process mining can sometimes be mistaken for a primarily inward-looking technology. An understandable but inaccurate assessment.

Understandable because of its well-earned reputation for identifying value opportunities and eradicating productivity obstacles across core functions such as finance, IT, supply chain, and process excellence at large. Inaccurate because, while it’s getting everything under the hood sorted in an organization’s processes, process mining also has the capacity to transform customer experience (CX). In fact, a galvanizing CX transformation is only possible due to the process visibility that process mining provides.

In the era of omnichannel customer engagement, customer experience has been (and continues to be) a core commercial, differentiating battleground.   The numbers surrounding customer experience management emphasize just how impactful it is when you get it right, including:

•  As much as 94% of consumers say that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to purchase again.

• A happy customer will pay more for products and services, according to PwC. Data suggests that the payoff for delivering great customer experiences could be a 16% price premium, as well as enhanced loyalty.

For any business interested in driving transformation with process mining, especially for those already on their process mining journey but not to the benefit of CX, customer experience should be an essential focus. Let’s take a look at how process visibility and optimization fuel customer experience transformation.

Actionable insights to optimize the customer journey

Businesses looking to drive better customer experience often seek to map out the customer journey to help guide the way. Detailing each customer interaction, and then cross-referencing this customer journey map with customer feedback on specific touchpoints, can provide a level of insight into where customer needs are not being fully met.

But in isolation, such customer journey maps are of limited value. To start with, being populated with retrospective customer data, they’re almost instantly out of date. And while customer engagement issues are highlighted, customer journey maps offer nothing to help address them. They’re rather like a doctor who diagnoses an illness but offers no remedy, or a tourist in a new city being given a metro map but no key or advice to use it.

For all that you need process mining. Process mining provides fact-based customer journeys, with touchpoint data quantifying where people are running into CX problems. No more reliance on subjective interpretation of one-off workshops or haphazard interviews to gauge customer sentiment. Instead, process mining ingests process data from business systems, mapping every customer touchpoint and every end-to-end cross-business process that impacts CX. With this, organizations can identify how and where to optimize processes to transform their customer experience.

• Read more: How Process Mining Can Help Connect the Dots in Your Customer Journey

Smarter ways to stimulate CX

Celonis combines real-time system data with standardized process knowledge, plus advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, to enable business leaders to improve the customer experience. Four ways Celonis does it are:

• Simulate CX process improvements

• Measure their potential impact

• Implement best practice enhancements

• Design and implement process automations where appropriate

What’s more, Celonis ensures the customer experience transformation delivers continuous improvement. How? By measuring the impact of process improvements and changes in the business environment on an ongoing basis.  

Sort your supply chain to transform customer experience

Supply chain optimization, particularly for omnichannel retailers or CPG businesses, provides a potent use case that demonstrates how process mining can drive customer experience transformation.

In retail, customer satisfaction is currency. Every aspect of the customer journey needs to be seamless, friction-free and intuitive. Customers are unforgiving of anything less than great customer service. In terms of fulfillment of online orders, for example, customer expectations can be defined by a single term – on-time and in-full (OTIF). As many as 85% of shoppers won’t use a retailer again after a bad delivery experience.

Process mining ensures OTIF rates are maximized in a number of ways. To begin with, customers receive accurate delivery schedules based on actual supply chain data. And logistics partner performance data can be closely tracked in the Celonis platform to ensure customers consistently receive their orders on time.

At the same time, the Celonis process mining platform provides out-of-the-box applications to maximize OTIF levels, such as the Open Order Processing App. This helps create a superior customer experience by providing the means to investigate and address the causes of delayed, blocked or incomplete customer orders. Consolidating data from operational, financial, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, process mining pinpoints the impediments to the smooth completion of orders (such as delivery, invoicing, or credit issues).

Additionally, by enhancing supplier reliability and inventory management, process mining technology helps prevent CX-demolishing stockouts. It enables immediate detection of stock issues, reveals applicable substitution rules for the contract or order, and prompts actions suggesting viable alternatives for affected shipments. With process visibility, organizations can proactively intercept stock shortfalls before they happen. In this way CPG firms and retailers ensure customers always have the products they love, driving loyalty and lifetime value.  

Globus and Celonis: a real-world retail CX success story 

In the luxury sector, shoppers expect an exceptional customer experience but Globus struggled with consistent order fulfillment and cancellations. Process mining revealed several key opportunities for improvement:

• Products that had already been reserved by customers could still be put in someone else’s online basket – leading to disappointed customers and a diminished digital experience.

• Display items (such as shoes) were listed in the commercial product inventory despite not really being available for sale.

• Some orders were being fulfilled from stores rather than central warehouses leading to unforeseen delivery delays.

Globus acted quickly on these valuable process mining insights. “The devil is in the details. We found many little inefficiencies – cumulatively fixing them led to a noticeable reduction in our cancellation rate…Now, we can deliver on our promises to our customers 99.9% of the time”, said Andreas Hink, Chief Digital Officer at Globus.

Greater process visibility enabled the retailer to remove systemic customer experience pinch points, accelerate throughput times, and decrease cancellations by 20%.

• Read the full Globus story here

Getting closer to customers in finance and professional services

In the omnichannel era CX expectations are high across every industry. For example, banking customers don’t just compare the service they receive with other banks, but against every digital enterprise with which they interact. The same goes for insurance companies and other professional services organizations. Their CX and service standards are measured against what’s on offer in the digital ecosystem.

Established, ‘traditional’ businesses in this sector are under pressure from digital native newcomers, and are transforming to meet the demands of the information era. Process mining can support this transformation by integrating data from all systems to form a holistic platform for overhauling CX across a number of areas.

1.  Omnichannel integration: Process mining maps customer journeys across all channels, ensuring seamless integration of people, technologies, and processes. This enables institutions to analyze, accelerate, and streamline potential customer experience pain points – particularly those requiring manual intervention such as laborious onboarding processes, claims resolutions, declined payments, or credit applications.

2. Process performance and compliance: Where new CX-friendly processes have been put in place, process mining visualizations help track both process performance and internal compliance. 

3. Proactive engagement and problem resolution: Process mining enables automation and machine learning to group related cases, issues or engagement opportunities. This not only accelerates problem resolution but also allows for proactive, personalized customer engagement to improve CX and loyalty. 

4. Continuous transformation: By continuously analyzing and optimizing processes, banks and insurers can keep pace with digital-first institutions and meet rising customer expectations.

Explore how Degussa Bank used process mining to transform its customer onboarding and customer satisfaction. Similarly, see how insurance group ERGO uses Celonis Process Intelligence to realize its customer experience ambition to be “...as easy to deal with as Netflix”. 

Everyone can transform their CX

The truth is, every industry with customers (so… every industry), can benefit from process mining to transform CX. Process mining provides the connective tissue between people, systems, and processes that enables any organization to visualize, analyze and optimize every customer experience touchpoint. It provides the data-driven foundation on which to build services and engagement that customers will love.

For more information on customer experience transformation driven by process mining, check out our many customer success stories.

Or why not spend 60 seconds watching our Celonis for Retail Explained video?

Edward Baggaley

Content Marketing Lead

Edward writes about Celonis, its customers, partners, and product. He creates blogs - perhaps the one you’re reading - as well as ads, ebooks, keynotes, and advertorials. Newsweek, The Times, Time, and many B2B magazines have published his work.