Applying Process Mining to the Customer Journey

Improving operational efficiency and reducing risks deliver benefits; but those benefits are yours, not your customers’. It’s an inside-out approach that covers only half of the equation. Applying process mining to the customer journey provides a view from the outside in that further informs business strategy and ensures that the processes that work for your business also work for your customers.

This customer-centric approach can feel new for well-established brands, but digital-first, directto-consumer companies are changing customer expectations. Customers want to engage with brands, and they want those interactions to be personal and relevant. Using insights gained through process mining to enhance the customer experience can be a significant competitive advantage.

With process mining, you can connect the dots between your customer journey and the people, processes, decisions, and IT systems that drive it. This visibility provides a better understanding of how internal processes impact the customer experience. With this customer-centric view, you can improve processes to build a smooth customer journey and uncover new opportunities to delight customers along the way.

For example, one telecommunications company found an opportunity to increase efficiency and reduce customer frustration by improving a key process responsible for ensuring a customer’s availability during a technician‘s visit. The company determined that, of the 155,085 times technicians were called out to a customer address in a given year, around 9% either detected no faults or the customer was not there. That’s nearly 14,000 customers who either received an unnecessary visit or weren’t able to have their problem solved in one visit.

Process mining revealed that a single step in the process was causing the majority of unnecessary or incomplete technician visits: a handover between the team responsible for receiving notification of the potential fault and arranging the technician visit with customers and the team responsible for coordinating and dispatching technicians. The telecom company was able to solve the problem by adding a mandatory process step that ensured effective communication between these two teams.

As a result, the company saved more than $6 million in costs while drastically improving the customer experience. Far fewer customers missed their technician appointment and, therefore, were able to have their connection problems solved in a single visit. In the same way, a customer challenge identified through customer journey mapping (incorrect invoicing information, long hold times for customer service, and so on) can be a starting point for a process mining investigation to uncover the root cause of the problem.

Viewing processes end to end from the customer perspective can help you understand how internal changes impact your customers. With this information, you can improve processes from the outside in, building on process changes that have a positive impact and revisiting processes that cause friction for customers. What’s more, developing deeper empathy for customers can uncover new opportunities to delight them and lead to new products and services.