If It’s Not Revolutionary, Why Aren’t More People Doing It?

I wish we’d just stop deliv­er­ing the US Post… just make every­thing elec­tronic. Again, yes­ter­day, I get a let­ter from Ver­i­zon say­ing “Thank you for set­ting up your online account. Your tem­po­rary pass­word is XXX, you’ll need this when you login. If you’ve already logged in, please ignore this.”

Con­sid­er­ing that I logged in imme­di­ately after cre­at­ing the account, I won­der why they printed/sent this let­ter at all.

Actu­ally… here’s why, and here’s how peo­ple need to rethink BPM (Busi­ness Process Management).

It’s quite sim­ple. Verizon’s online account cre­ation process prob­a­bly ends after the account is cre­ated. At which point, they send a pass­word in the mail (which, I think I also got a txt mes­sage of on the spot — by the way, I fully real­ized txt mes­sag­ing is totally unre­li­able in the true sense of the tech­ni­cal way we think about reliable/unreliable/guaranteed messaging).

Their process is prob­a­bly called “New Cus­tomer On-Line Account Cre­ation” or some­thing, and it needed a place to end. There­fore, once the account was cre­ated, they make sure the cus­tomer gets their pass­word (even if it’s overkill… they want to make sure they’ve com­pleted the process), and they’re done. Process com­plete… imple­men­ta­tion com­plete… tick mark checked on to-do list.

I get it. It makes sense. But, it’s really funny to get let­ters that say “here’s what you need… but ignore this if you don’t need it” (it’s the sec­ond let­ter of this sort I’ve got­ten from Ver­i­zon, and I’m only a cus­tomer for 3 weeks!).

But, let’s think about the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy and approach to the process of deliv­er­ing technology.

Ver­i­zon has looked at the Busi­ness Process… but not con­sid­ered the “end-to-end expe­ri­ence”. Let’s call that “end-to-end expe­ri­ence” the trans­ac­tion. It’s the way the cus­tomer expe­ri­ences the business.

Con­sid­er­ing that I logged in imme­di­ately after get­ting the txt mes­sage of the pass­word, why didn’t Ver­i­zon know I didn’t need my (no longer valid) tem­po­rary password?

How about if I had not logged in? Why not encour­age me to do so? Or, call to see why I would go through the trou­ble of set­ting up an account but not login?

These ques­tions reflect events that affect the process and the end-to-end trans­ac­tion. These events are crit­i­cal to being respon­sive to the busi­ness. If they knew I logged in (event) they’d know that I not only setup my account (process) but started using it (trans­ac­tion) and that my expe­ri­ence was complete.

What would that save Ver­i­zon? Well… for one, they’d have a more inti­mate under­stand­ing of their cus­tomer, con­trol­ling the expe­ri­ence dur­ing the first 30 days when an account can be can­celed with­out penalty.

They wouldn’t have to print/send me a use­less let­ter that gets dumped right in the trash. Maybe that doesn’t save them much, but last time this hap­pened, they gave me a $25 gift card for “my trou­bles”. I hadn’t had any troubles.

Bring­ing together events, trans­ac­tions, AND processes is not nec­es­sar­ily rev­o­lu­tion­ary. How­ever, I can’t help but look around and won­der if it’s not rev­o­lu­tion­ary, then why aren’t there more peo­ple doing it?