Most business systems, however, are designed for specific chan-nels, such as a call center or a website. When you use different systems for different channels, it’s hard to give your customers a consistent experience.
DCM systems are designed to give customers the same experi-ence across different channels (see Figure 2-1). No matter how they contact you, they get good service. A customer can start a case (such as an auto-accident claim) on a mobile phone and then follow up later on a website, by email, or in a phone call to a call center.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 2-1: Omnichannel user experience.
Adapting to the situation
In many customer-facing situations, blindly following standard procedure isn’t enough.
In 2009, for example, Boston police ticketed a man for driving in the breakdown lane, even though his wife was in labor and he was driving her to the hospital. (The citation was thrown out in traffic court. The police department appealed but changed its mind when the case made the newspapers.) Or consider this example: A credit card customer calls to dispute a $50 charge that she doesn’t recognize. Despite the small amount in question, a customer history free of disputes, and a spotless record of timely payment, she has to speak with four representatives and fill out a form to get this simple work done.
It’s infuriating when people refuse to apply some common sense and don’t think about the bigger picture. Because so many customer situations require some exercise of human judgment, rigid systems and mechanical responses won’t do.
A DCM system doesn’t force participants to follow a set script.
Rather, it interprets the situation, and intelligently guides flexible decision-making and action by asking and answering questions such as these:
✓ Given the background and the conversation, as well as your organization’s goals, policies, and procedures, what are the customers’ options?
✓ Which actions, products, or services would most likely (based on data on all past customer interactions) to produce the best outcome for the customer and the company?
✓ If escalation is required, which option is best for this customer?
As the conversation with the customer proceeds, the DCM system reevaluates the situation in real time and changes its recommendations to the representative as required in pursuit of the best outcome.
Driving work to done
A person who seeks to set something right wants more than just a response; he or she also wants a timely, complete reso-lution of the matter.
Chapter 2: Get ting Value from DCM 19
Too often, though, customers are asked to “Hold, please, while I research that.” Worse, customers are forced to manage the res-olution of their cases themselves. They must navigate the orga-nization manually, following referrals, shepherding work from one representative to the next, and making repeated follow-up calls to ensure that the complicated work is done as promised.
DCM systems address both these issues:
✓ They help representatives work fast by automatically pull-ing and displaypull-ing customer background, as well as rele-vant product and service details. Representatives see the whole picture without having to flip from screen to screen or put the customer on hold while processing a transac-tion. Intelligent guidance from the DCM system closes the performance gap between green and seasoned agents.
✓ DCM ensures that every case reaches resolution and that nothing falls between the cracks, no matter how compli-cated the work becomes. DCM eliminates the overhead and anxiety of manually tracking work that has been handed off. Representatives can concentrate fully on the job at hand: getting the best result for the customer and the company. In the event a customer calls in to seek an update on the status of a case, a representative can
Case-resolution case studies
Many organizations use DCM to intelli-gently guide case resolution and max-imize customer lifetime value. Here are three examples:
✓ Insurance: DCM helps insurers service claims faster, eliminate manual handling of policy changes, track complex cases across mul-tiple back-office functions, and detect fraud auto matically.
✓ Banking: Retail banks use DCM to resolve retail payment disputes.
The system generates scripts and prompts based on the customer
and merchant profile, network regulations, and agent skill level, as well as the bank’s best prac-tices and policies.
✓ Telecommunications: Telecom-munications companies use DCM to improve customer retention.
Executing multichannel market-ing strategies with personalized offers that align to customer needs and business goals prevents cam-paign collisions and ensures that offers are timely and consistent.
quickly assess the situation, and see, for example, if the case is under review with a compliance group or with management for authorization.
Keeping promises
How valuable is a promise fulfilled? In 2013, five banks were fined $25 billion for foreclosure-processing abuses during the financial crisis and its aftermath. Simply put, the mortgage servicing industry was ill equipped to help the overwhelming number of homeowners who needed assistance.
Today, one of the biggest of these banks uses DCM to comply with federal regulations requiring them to give borrowers a fair shake. Its DCM default management system cut the time required to modify a loan from 120 days to just 30 days, meet-ing regulatory agreements and increasmeet-ing loan processmeet-ing throughput by 120 percent.
Improving Efficiency
Organizations have many case management challenges, including customer, employee, and partner onboarding; war-ranty, insurance, and health-care claims; incident manage-ment; and emergency response. Efficiently resolving these challenges requires workers who can assess the problem quickly; access the right systems and data; and collaborate across multiple functions, teams, and geographies while fol-lowing company policies and procedures.
DCM works wonders by bringing together all the people and information needed to get work done and reach the best busi-ness outcomes. With DCM, jobs are done faster and done right the first time.
DCM captures the essence of management guru Peter Drucker’s concept of “management by objective,” which states that people are more inventive and engaged when they work together to reach well-defined goals. According to Drucker, too many rigidly defined workflows and rules smother an organization’s ability to innovate. Instead, the organization should give workers the information and people they need to get the job done so that
Chapter 2: Get ting Value from DCM 21
they concentrate less on the low-value logistics and more on the higher-value application of judgment.
Giving just enough information
“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” was the Ancient Mariner’s lament. You too may feel thirsty — for useful, actionable information in a sea of data. You have to work hard to find what you need and avoid distractions.
DCM systems radically improve worker efficiency by auto-matically fetching and presenting the information people need at particular points in managing a case. DCM puts all the information — emails, records, correspondence, and so on — in one place and organizes it for rapid review and understanding. Workers no longer have to consult multiple computer screens or rule books, and the history of the case is immediately visible.
Because DCM systems are sensitive to the context of the work being done, only the information relevant to the job at hand is displayed. Simpler screens are easier to read and less likely to create distractions and misunderstanding.
Setting priorities
A DCM system optimizes team productivity by assigning the highest-priority work to the appropriate people at the right time.
Work rosters made by traditional systems are typically deliv-ered to teams in daily batches. Savvy workers cherry-pick the easy items that will improve their metrics, leaving the harder items to languish. DCM systems intelligently route priority tasks to the people who have the right skills for that work, ensuring that they’re continuously engaged with important work.
Being social
According to a survey by Avenade, an IT services provider, more than half of all information workers today use social collaboration tools to share documents. They also use these tools to communicate with customers and find experts or
information inside their companies. This behavior makes sense, because people use these tools in their personal lives.
Social tools are incredibly intuitive. It’s natural, then, that your employees use them to get their work done in the office.
Informal use of social tools in the enterprise bypasses the security, control, and audit of managed business processes.
You can’t simply stop people from using social tools. But when social tools are disconnected from the work you’re trying to manage, you can’t trust them to get the job done. Also, those tools can’t be audited later if something goes wrong.
A DCM system solves this problem by incorporating social collaboration into the case management system itself. Users have tools that allow them to find and chat with colleagues who can answer their questions, advance or resolve a case directly from their conversation feeds, and even incorporate conversations from external social media networks. Because all this activity occurs inside the DCM system, all these dis-cussions become part of the case history. Everything is in one place for later review or audit.
Automating
A DCM system goes beyond workflow (the management of the receipt, routing, and reporting on work) to actually automate the response and resolution of that work itself.
Automation can drive tremendous productivity gains when decisions that don’t truly require human judgment can be handled by a system. Automation achieved through the appli-cation of policy (business rules) can make decisions based on the situation and its context. Simple decisions can address issues such as approving an order based on the order size, the customer’s credit rating, and the customer’s business history.
More sophisticated automation also includes predictive and adaptive analytics. Advanced analytical capabilities can create an intelligent script for a sales or service representa-tive, including a short list of offers to make to the customer ranked by desirability of those offers to the company. The DCM system analyzes the situation by comparing a cus-tomer’s history with the histories of all other customers and their responses to previous offers; then it produces the script based on the offer most likely to achieve the desired result.
Chapter 2: Get ting Value from DCM 23
That’s the predictive aspect. The system continually learns from the response of customers and dynamically adjusts the offers over time. That’s the adaptive aspect.
Use case management reporting to determine what human activities are worth automating. Sometimes, it’s best to hold off on automation in the first phase of project delivery. Use real production data to determine where you’ll get the most value from the automatic application of business rules and analytics.
Automation is a key capability for improving not just opera-tional efficiency, but operaopera-tional quality as well. You can use automation to meet or even exceed the skills of your best customer representatives. Automated processes ensure that every interaction is a personal experience that fully leverages all your best practices.
Connecting to the Internet of Things
From smartphone devices to smart TVs and connected cars, the vision of a connected world is turning into reality. The pro-liferation of connected things sensing and responding to the world around them creates ripe opportunities for innovation.
DCM is a core technology for this revolution in connected devices, known as the Internet of Things. Production DCM sys-tems in transportation, health care, and agriculture are among the first systems to create cases in response to events gener-ated by connected devices, coordinating people, systems, and other connected devices in the course of completing that work.
Air transport, for example, uses DCM to drive fast turnaround of airplanes at terminals, coordinating and optimizing the flow of millions of passengers and bags, as well as the actions of thousands of employees and systems (see Chapter 6).
Many insurance companies now offer customers a smart device to install in their cars. The device tracks a customer’s driving habits, and the insurance company’s DCM system uses that data to underwrite the customer’s policy, based on precise driving records. Premiums can follow the customer’s driving record, and claims can automatically integrate accu-rate data from the car’s smart device.
Gaining operational visibility and control
You can’t improve what you can’t see. Undocumented manual processes run in the dark, which makes it hard to measure and control individual and team performance. With undocu-mented manual processes, bottlenecks and inefficiencies can fester until customers or employees complain. If you don’t have visibility into the work, it’s impossible to be proactive.
DCM gives you real-time views of work, as well as insight into trends and emerging problems, allowing you to take immedi-ate action. Refer to Figure 5-2 to see an example dashboard, in which the data collected feeds directly into Lean Six Sigma process improvement disciplines.
The key to hitting service-level agreements (SLAs) is keeping an eye on milestones. A missed or risky milestone means that time must be made up later through reprioritizing or tempo-rarily assigning more resources. Early warning and the ability to take action are critical to meeting SLAs.
Rules and regulations
If a DCM system gives people leeway to exercise their judg-ment, how can you be confident that they’ll do the right thing?
Without a doubt, industry regulations must be followed. Of course, company policies and procedures exist for good rea-sons and must be applied consistently.
DCM uses rules to automatically constrain options and drive outcomes. These rules are the policies of your enterprise and the regulations of your industry. The value of this capabil-ity has grown with the increasing reach and complexcapabil-ity of regulations.
Health insurance, for example, is a heavily regulated industry, and states mandate how quickly claims must be processed.
Errors, inconsistencies, and duplications can complicate the processing of a claim, as can lapsed policies and late premium
Chapter 2: Get ting Value from DCM 25
payments. All these situations may cause delays, which can lead to fines and interest payments. DCM claims-processing systems have helped a Midwest Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, for example, to increase the automatic resolution of claims by 38 percent and cut late payment fees by a whopping 90 percent.
Audits
Every action in a DCM system — automated or human — is recorded for audit. You can rewind the tape and play back what happened in a case, step by step, seeing who did what and when they did it. Documentation, logs, and data can be produced and tailored to meet compliance requests and regulations.
A DCM system also keeps an audit trail of system changes so that all changes in business rules are transparent as well.
The operational and system change history are kept together, so you can even replay actions from systems that have been updated in the past. Compliance officers can review actions and results from old system configurations without needing to rebuild or restore the old systems.
Changing at the Pace of Market Demands
Business history is littered with cautionary tales of one-hit wonders, companies that lost customer focus as they grew, and moribund firms that couldn’t keep pace with nimbler com-petitors. Were these companies blindsided by change? Some were; others knew what they had to do but couldn’t pull it off.
From operational tweaks to profound enterprise transforma-tions (see Chapter 5), DCM provides excellent change manage-ment capability. DCM is strongly outcome-oriented, keeping goals front and center throughout the initiative. Equally impor-tant, the technology involves and empowers the people closest to the business to change the way the business works.
Business–IT collaboration
The success of your DCM project depends on effective col-laboration among business leaders, subject-matter experts, and information technology (IT) professionals.
If you don’t include business people in your DCM system design plan, your DCM initiative will fail.
The good news is that DCM systems themselves facilitate the necessary collaboration, and DCM vendors provide methodol-ogies to ensure that the right people are involved throughout the process.
Direct capture of objectives
It’s much easier to collaborate when everyone is working from the same page. DCM design tools help by capturing business requirements in a way that both business and IT can under-stand. A DCM system visually models all aspects of the system, including high-level case flow, detailed processes, the appear-ance of user screens, and the data to be handled.
At any time, you can demonstrate and verify a DCM system, even in skeletal form, so that everyone can see that it accu-rately models the work you want to be done.
This visually modeled WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach eliminates the misunderstandings that plague teams that construct applications with traditional methods.
These traditional methods require business analysts to docu-ment requiredocu-ments in painstaking detail; IT analysts translate the requirements into IT designs; then programmers imple-ment the designs into finished applications. Too often, how-ever, the results don’t match what business people expected.
The entire process can take so long that the system is obso-lete before it’s done.
By directly capturing business objectives and immediately turning them into demonstrable systems, DCM makes it pos-sible to validate designs during the requirements-gathering sessions.
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Although it’s possible to build a DCM system by using traditional waterfall development methods, in which all requirements are defined before any functional systems are delivered, most DCM systems are built with agile develop-ment methods, in which systems are delivered in a phased approach. Each phase (called a sliver) introduces additional functionality and builds on what came before. An agile approach not only delivers valuable functionality to the busi-ness faster, but also enables participants to review and refine requirements throughout the project. For more on agile and waterfall methods, see Chapter 5.
Business rules
Business rules are policies that govern how work gets done.
Through business rules, business people can change the way a DCM system works without running change cycles with the technical teams. This procedure radically reduces the time it takes to update business policy in a fast-changing environ-ment, as these examples illustrate:
✓ A business rule states that all transactions greater than
$10,000 must be reviewed by a supervisor. It turns out that this rule generates many more reviews than neces-sary and that a more appropriate value is $20,000. With DCM, an authorized business person is empowered to make that change directly; no programming changes are required.
✓ Some insurance rules vary state by state; others are common across all states. In an organization that uses DCM, when regulations change, business people can change all rules directly in the system, and subsequent processing of claims against these rules follow the new regulations.