Behavior Modeling: The Key Missing Context in Processes

There needs to be a shift in an organizations attitude towards customers, if happy customers are the goal. Of course, happy customers will do more business with you yielding revenue increases. Traditional thinking says that the easier you make it for customers to do business with you, the happier customers will be. There is a shift to also anticipate customers needs based on their situation and context to accelerate customer satisfaction, usually measured through scores.

Predicting the State of the Customer:

Knowing about the customer history is a help, but understanding the customer at a specific point in time can help the situation. If your web site has been down or your management has changed a policy affecting certain kinds of customers. Certainly every organization has classes of customers based on past activities, but some times this is a limited view. Having a current state on your client is important and this can be helped by real time analysis leveraging current event patterns and data.

Predicting the Response of the Customer:

Knowing how a customer is likely to respond based on their history, temperament, goals and passions, This is rarely surveyed or modeled thus creating a gap in our understanding our customers. Anticipating is important as we all respond differently based on normal state versus being under duress or pressure. We all have different motivation points based on ease and incentives.

Adjusting Your Actions: 

Based on what we know about the state of a customer and their expected response, processes have to adjust to optimize your organizations advantage at a specific point in time. While you can build all the possible paths into your processes, it might be better to have behavioral context models linked to the processes that custom assemble the proper path for the circumstances at hand. Process technologies are not yet equipped to handle to link to context models yet. See the blog below

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-missing-models-in-process.html


A Hypothetical  Example:

Imagine traveling with a small child arriving late to a hotel because of flight delays. The baby is cranky. Mom is dead tired. Dad is stressed out as after all it is his responsibility to take keep it all together. Imagine the hotel check-in person providing a room upgrade and automatically ordering a bottle of warm milk, a pacifier and a small bottle of campaign for the room. How delighted would this couple be?


Net; Net:

Of course there are organizations whose processes make it more difficult for customers, so that they don't create any transactions. These are organizations usually driven by cost containment.  You can get both revenue increases and cost containment with intelligent processes. Let's start including behavior contexts in processes and anticipating customers needs