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You create delighted customers through your value creating processes - how you do what you do for your customers. Frequently, value-creating processes flow through different business units and require the touch of many people in your firm before being delivered to your customer. Alignment of these processes is crucial to drive business results.

For example, in the hospitality business, how a guest room is serviced, cleaned and prepared for the next guest is only one part of the service experience. Others include what happens when the guest pulls up to check-in, what transpires during the check-in process, the ease by which the guest can move from the parking lot to their room with luggage, and other factors. The guest experience and ultimate satisfaction is a result of all of these "touch-points."

In a manufacturing setting, customer experience is shaped by the ease by which an order is specified, acknowledged, and confirmed. It is also shaped by the delivery time expectations as well as how those compare with what was promised. Finally, it is impacted by the quality of the product itself, how it is delivered and received, and how the invoicing and billing processes work. Customer satisfaction is the cumulative result of these touch-points and more.

The very best leaders define their service concept and their business in terms of results produced for customers. They are careful to define work and process flows from the point of initiation to the point of fulfillment and customer feedback. None of the links in this chain are left to chance.

Many leaders struggle to get this right. One reason for this is that in many companies, and not just big enterprises, there is a "relatively weak connection between the people in the organization that understand the business processes, the senior managers who are creating the overall business strategy, and any resources that may be needed for business process improvement and reengineering."¹

George Labovitz notes that many Total Quality Management programs and Process Reengineering efforts have failed to produce results. He cites two reasons: the customer voice is left out of the equation altogether or when sought, customer feedback is ignored.² Yet even when discipline is brought to process improvement and managers bring the voice of the customer into the business, there is frequently insufficient attention to the hand-offs between departments or staff members. Leaders are careful to engineer each individual step along the chain of value creation while ignoring the soft connective tissue that links separate processes into a systemic flow.

A relay race is won not only by the speed and efficiency by which each segment is run, but also by how smoothly the baton is passed between runners. The key questions that unit managers should ask their internal customers are:

1. What do you need from me and my unit?
2. What do you do with my output?

Are there gaps between what you need and what you get?³

Back to Power of Alignment