William Band:

The simple answer is yes. Many CRM applications have scripting capabilities, forward tasks on, assign tasks to others in order to resolve, they have tactical Case Management capabilities, but have limited opportunities to design business processes, (also likely to be linked to an existing BPM technology). But in total, not as robust as a full BPM and Case Management suite.

Is it not risky to empower employees?

 William Band:

Again the short answer is yes. Business don’t want to the interaction of employees with important customers left to the total discretion of employees. Currently they have SLA’s to meet and have constraints placed on what they can do. So there is risk in empowering employees. But there is even greater risk in customer dissatisfaction.

Peter Whibley:

So the benefits as such outweigh the risks.

William Band:
And the way to manage them is by creating process definitions, policies and guidelines.

 Why have organizations been slow to empower employees?

 William Band:

In many customer services environments, the imperative is to process high volumes of calls or enquiries and have specific structured processes. Companies often have highly productionized rigid processes to help manage the risks. This deals with 80% of most cases, but it is the 20% that lead to customer dissatisfaction.

 Will empowerment of employees require a cultural change?

 Yes it will. They need to move away from a production line approach, the way to change is through the right incentives, training, decisions in hiring the right people.

 Peter Whibley:

In Singularity experience, long-term, cultural change is important and one indicative example of the importance of customer satisfaction is the UK supermarket Giant ‘ Sainsbury’s – who merged their Customer Service department and HR departments together.

To help generate increased capacity sources of funding, transparency of operations is essential. Funders need to know where their money is going to and the value of the service delivered.

The integration of your organizations enterprise into a BPM and Case Management product means you can begin orchestrate your entire organization, through automating information sources, coordination of assets, prioritize projects in real-time, eliminating the need for cumbersome paper work and provides accountability and transparency for key stakeholders.

BPM enables end-to-end service delivery, from the first steps when funders and suppliers sign contracts to ground level disaster relief support. BPM provides intelligence gathering of information to help decide where funds are most needed and faster real-time availability of data, results in significant reduction of operational costs.

Case Management adds an extra dimension within the TotalAgility product by catering for the unpredictable, when exceptions happen with your business processes, you need to have the right sources of information available to empower your employees to make decisions fast, yet be accountable for their actions. Case Management provides collaboration, real-time information, goals and objectives, project milestones, historical analysis, trend and case related information to better manage business process exceptions and provide excellent levels of service.

Insurance business processes tend to be long-running, complex and require expert human judgement. Singularity’s TotalAgility product helps facilitate the Insurance Case Worker by providing real-time information, standardizing processes, collaborative communications, and reducing paper and manual processing. The end result is improved business performance, better client retention and enhanced service levels.

The implementation and capabilities of Singularity’s TotalAgility product, was extensively demonstrated during a one week Proof of Concept (PoC) held at Miller’s London Offices. The importance of implementing Singularity’s solution within Miller’s I.T. enterprise had to be demonstrated and tested before final selection. In addition, Singularity had to illustrate achievable Return of Investment (ROI) and how they can meet Miller’s immediate and long-term process operational efficiencies. After completing the PoC, Miller Insurance realized that organizational change could be achieved with the TotalAgility product and using Singularity’s getagile implementation techniques.

I should also mention some of the new features launched in version 5.3 of the TotalAgility product. The ‘Data Virtualization’ and ‘Just-in-Time Data’ features help empower the Insurance ‘Knowledge Worker’ to exceed customer service levels and compliance standards by sourcing relevant accurate information in real-time and make accountable decisions on the spot. For more information on the subject matter, we recently hosted a webinar called “Empowering employees and transforming customer service” lead by Forrester’s William Band – Watch the recording of this webinar at: http://www.singularitylive.com/resources/webinars.aspx?info=blog

Case Management by its nature is extremely unpredictable compared to Business Process Management. Case Management is about being able to handle exceptions and the complexities within Business Process Management. Business Process Management requires relatively little human input to complete a business process.

When business process exceptions happen, how does the problem get resolved quickly and effectively? This is where Case Management plays a key role to help the human decision making elements and interactions.

Case Management is about providing the ‘Knowledge Worker’ with the right information, infrastructure and tools to make critical decisions in real-time. It’s about achieving objectives and goals, rather than just following a single process line. You may follow many different processes just to find and achieve your end goal or resolve business process exceptions.

Applications of Dynamic Case Management (DCM), goes beyond traditional industries such as health, insurance, security investigations. It now extends into the broad spectrum of customer service. Today, crucial to many organizations, is the ability to provide excellent customer service. It is the competitive edge when competing for new customers and keeping existing ones. Customers have a new voice; they can easily share their bad experiences through social media channels, at the cost of your reputation which you spent substantial dollars to build.

Many organizations realize that this element of their business is so important, but just can’t figure out the solution to the problem or how to deliver it without an expensive overhaul of their existing enterprise. Case Management platforms are able to utilize existing infrastructural investments without the need to replace existing technologies, they need to be complemented and made to work better together.

By empowering the employee with the ability to resolve customer problems quickly and effectively you can create an exceptionally positive impact on the customer experience.

How often have you phoned up to complain about your broadband/internet connection? It’s the 3rd time in a month that you have complained, yet the customer advisor has to go through the troubleshooting process from the very beginning, again! The advisor isn’t able to draw on previous troubleshooting calls with the customer, can’t call on other information/colleagues to check on network status in real-time, can’t even assess if there is a trend appearing with other similar calls in the area.

By implementing a Dynamic Case Management solution the advisor is then able to provide quick real-time information, skip unnecessary steps based on previous calls, link into business intelligence tools, use unified collaboration tools and even provide unexpected compensation measures. Customer expectations will then be more likely to be fulfilled and exceeded. Customers will be more willing to tell others of the great service provided and customer retention will be more likely.

Singularity has been at the forefront of Case Management technology and is cited as a leader within Forrester’s Dynamic Case Management Wave. We have also co-written books on the subject and have several whitepapers which explain in depth what are the critical elements of case management. Visit the singularity website for more information (http://www.singularitylive.com?info=blog) or simply reply back.

At core of a successful organization is a great customer service. The goal of the webinar is to take you through some of the case instances of why top organizations are investing and driving excellent customer service processes, why its creating the competitive edge to: retaining customers, helping to win new business, and empowering employees with useful and real-time information to make crucial decisions on the spot.

So why Case Management and not ‘straight forward’ Business Process Management? Well today’s business environment is changing daily, unpredictable situations are the norm. Organizations now need to ‘predict the unpredictable’ by being able to adapt quickly. Case management technology provides a critical role to providing the ability to enabling business process agility – allowing front line customer service employees to resolve exceptional customer problems on the spot is the sign of an agile organization.

To find out more join the Webinar: Using Case Management to Empower Employees and Transform Customer Service

It has often been argued that BPM and Case Management are two separate disciplines and don’t really work together. However in more recent times, this notion has subsided. The lack of clarity on the subject matter caused much confusion, BPM and Case Management as a product is possible and necessary. It is important to note that BPM processes represent the primary approach for many businesses, but in a more competitive world, the difference between success and failure rest in being able to adapt and handle complex long-running business process exceptions.

The paper by Peter Whibley provides some excellent examples on this topic and why it is so crucial to provide exceptionally good service to customers.

http://www.singularitylive.com/using-case-management-to-empower-employees-and-transform-customer-service.lit

Organizations rely on the ‘Knowledge Worker’ to make informed decisions, on a day-to-day basis, the Knowledge Worker depends on the thoroughbred best practices of BPM to improve the efficiency of handling routine processes yet requires the additional tools and capabilities to deal with process exceptions and unpredictable processes. Case Management features such as; setting goals, task management, collaboration, orchestration of multiple business applications, real-time data handling, milestones, case history, dashboards & reporting – all located in one entity application is decisive.

Having Case Management and BPM capabilities in one product, allows organizations to optimize the spectrum of business processes that exist, from the routine to the unpredictable.

To read more on how Singularity stacks up against competing products, read the MWD Advisors vendor guide – Singularity: Integrating BPM and Case Management for the Microsoft platform.

There are some key differences in these two categories.
• The latter grouping involves an element of adversity, whereby whilst services need to be provided, they are typically subject to eligibility criteria. The same outcome is likely to be viewed differently by the various actors involved
• Interactions are not typically 1:1, they can involve other parties and intermediaries. Also the actors involve more participants across organisations and the public – whereas the former are typically intra-organisation or with willing participants across organisations
• They occur over longer time periods – mainly because of the variety of actors and the resolution of any adversity between the actors involved

To get back to the title – its clear the computers are very good for solving the “digital” challenges of this world. However for those areas which centre on more complex human needs, i.e. “analogue” challenges – then solutions need to leverage the capabilities of both computers and humans together. The best approach that we have for this today is the “case management pattern” – whereby we provide comprehensive support for the staff charged with handling the case, without compromising their ability to deal with the nuances which rely on human skill and intuition. Going forward I believe that this is one of the most important areas of ICT evolution, especially given the nature of the challenges that it is designed to meet. Perhaps looking back in 50 years time the achievements in this important domain will be taken for granted in exactly the way that we take the digital computer for granted today.

Singularity defines a process skin as a variant of a core process map or template. A process skin changes the rules associated with the process but not the process itself.

“We believe that process skins will significantly reduce the operational cost of managing multiple business process variants and can transform the operational agility of BPO and multinational organizations,” said Peter Browne, CTO at Singularity.
Singularity clients can now define a process map as a ‘Process Template’ and quickly create different variants of that template map as ‘Skins’ based on operational parameters such as SLAs and resources.

Individual modification of process variants is no longer required when changes are made to the core process template, in some cases reducing an activity that previously took months to a matter of minutes. Organizations can dynamically modify multiple process variants simultaneously, without reliance on I.T., transforming their operational agility and allowing them to rapidly react to changing market conditions.

Process Skins includes the following features:

 
Dynamically Modify Existing Core Process Templates
Previously whenever changes to the core process map were required this change had to be replicated across all process variants representing a significant cost overhead to the organization. Now dynamically changed processes are effective within the skin immediately, including on any jobs that are live on the skin.

Customizing Skins
Users can customize the operational data for each skin, for example it is possible to define Red-Amber-Green (RAG) settings in a skin, which are different from the settings defined in the core process template.

Skin Rules
Many organizational processes change temporarily, for example short term promotions or changes to approvals processes at financial year end. Users can now define skin rules based on which of the skins are dynamically selected at run-time.

Skin Versioning
Each release creates a new version of the skin (major versions only). The jobs created on a skin always use the latest skin version.

Case Fragment Skins
It is now possible to create process skins for Case Management fragments as well as for the core process templates.
For more information on TotalAgility visit: http://www.singularitylive.com/products/total-agility.aspx

The traditional view of the customer relationship as a simple dichotomy between the competing needs of the business for improved productivity and efficiency and the needs of the customer for improved service levels and increased satisfaction is no longer valid. Businesses struggling to improve their customer service are failing to recognize the role and consider the needs of their own employees. Traditional approaches to customer service using CRM and automated workflows are failing because they do not consider the power of the employee. Attempts to automate the employee out of the customer service equation have backfired.This new Singularity white paper shows how successful customer service organizations worldwide have transformed customer service by empowering their employees. You will see how Case Management applications are best placed to deliver employee empowerment and transform your customer service from “The Computer Says No” to “The Computer Says How”.

http://www.singularitylive.com/using-case-management-to-empower-employees-and-transform-customer-service.lit

The key to Apple’s success is providing an end-to-end solution: from buying music on itunes, providing a library of ‘apps’ (through the Apps store), easy-to-use interfaces, beautiful intelligent design & packaging and of course great marketing.

Many organizations have great individual systems collected over the years, but don’t work well together to provide a customer centric end-to-end package. The value of a complete package far outweighs disparate individual systems that work independently, which in the end, lead to poor service levels and inefficient business performance.

The TotalAgility product’s greatest strength is to provide a complete solution to your organization that creates the capacity of uniting your enterprise together and producing true Business Agility.

“With the release of v5.3 the TotalAgility product extended its data handling capabilities allowing organizations to easily utilize fragmented data, extract value from it and put it to work for the benefit of the organization. This version helps organizations reduce the cost and risks associated with process improvement activities by enabling the reuse of data models in related business areas, reducing data integration costs and eliminating the risk associated with the management of multiple data sources,” said Peter Whibley, Singularity’s Product Marketing Manager.

The Singularity TotalAgility product now provides superb Data Virtualization that allows users to “link data and sync data” which simply makes the process of connecting and managing multiple data sources faster and more cost effective.

Further advances in external data source data integration, make “Just-in-Time” decision making possible. There is no need to wait lengthy periods of time for information to become available. ‘Just In Time Data’ makes crucial information available on-demand. In addition, the TotalAgility product delivers support for a visual representation of your Enterprise data stack.

Finally, v5.3 extends the relationship with Microsoft Dynamics by allowing fine grain control of storage attributes of an entity within Dynamics CRM.