Experience Oriented Architecture - a Requirement for the next Business Cycle

As the US and world economy cautiously moves out of the doldrums of recession, it’s high time for developers to address an issue often overlooked during the go-go years -- but crucial for the next upswing: cleaning up your systems and processes act.

Now is the time to take a good, hard look at the full lifecycle of marketing, sales and member service to eliminate non-integrated systems, data redundancies and inconsistencies; Identify teams and functions who have not fully bought into the fact that everyone is part of the member service process. Repeat: Everyone is part of it, one member interaction at a time. In the world of Facebook, Twitter and instant feedback, it’s the baseline for survival. One way to make this transition simply and seamlessly is a switch to an Experience Oriented Architecture for your sales and operations.

Taking our organization’s 25 years in the shared ownership industry as a “case study” I offer two developments which brought us to this juncture.

At ResortCom International, we are exposed to a very diverse cross-section of US-based and international developers. A few clear patterns have emerged over the last few years of economic headwind: during the good times many developers did not pay much attention to their overall servicing architecture. In the context of ever increasing sales and associated profits, fretting over the minutiae of how well all of the underlying systems and processes are working together seemed disproportionate in terms of bottom line impact. Many made systems decisions without a master plan. Many lack an executive level resource to bring together systems and people. It’s much like trying to build a 500 room resort with a blueprint that’s leaving out the plumbing. The result: disjointed architecture that can lead to rather unpleasant experiences for the members.

At the same time, the emergence of social networking and the transition of the Internet from early adaptor to mainstream have brought with them a true transformation on all levels of customer interaction. Whether it’s marketing, sales or customer service – consumers demand transparency, consistency and, if they are not fully satisfied with the interaction, are well aware of the power a negative online post can have on any company’s reputation

We find that many of our clients are scratching their heads on how to incorporate this new marketing reality. Much hype has been produced around Web 2.0, Facebook, Twitter and new media marketing. What’s missing is this: if underlying systems and processes are not perfectly aligned to create consistent top-grade customer experiences onsite AND offsite, the newly empowered customer will shun you. On the plus side, for those who can provide these experiences, entirely new buyer groups will open up.

Combine the lack of previous investment during the boom years with the new consumer reality and we have a fairly urgent call to action.

So what is the best approach to making the necessary adjustments?

A great way to start is to perform an experience architecture audit. This goes a bit beyond a traditional system architecture assessment as it spans both people and systems with a central focus on all customer experience touch points and their delivery throughout your operation.

Experiences start and end with people interactions. The underlying technology acts as the supporting toolset and rarely if never will be able to overcome processes or a business culture that is not aligned with the overall goal of customer centricity. Therefore, first, it is important to clearly identify functions and processes that are not clearly linked to supporting the customer experience. For example, we found that how we incentivized and measured our financial processing team did not make it clear to our employees that they were an important part of the fulfillment of customer requests. When we created an incentive that was based on turn-around of posting requests within 48 hours, behavior and attitude changed quickly.

Of course we had to have the right process workflow tool in place to be able to easily measure and report on this new key metric. This is where the second portion of the experience architecture audit comes into play: ask yourself some key questions: What systems do you have in place to track customer interactions? Are you able to centrally track all interactions from the first time a lead is generated to what they bought to how they were using their membership? How much customer data is duplicated in different systems? Do you have an online self-service architecture that provides the same consistent answers on your member website that your customers get when calling your service center? Do you have real time reporting in place that monitors all key interaction metrics so you can quickly respond to feedback from your customers?

Based on this audit, a clear roadmap will emerge revealing which people and incentive changes to implement for this new environment. On the systems side, the advent of the Software as a Service model (SaaS) has made formerly prohibitively expensive software investments obsolete: instead of a large up-front capital investment and high yearly software maintenance fee costs from vendors that don’t have any incentive to care about your success once you have signed on the dotted line, there are a number of great solutions available now with minimal upfront cost, pay as you go pricing models that tie your SaaS providers’ success to your own success.

It is easy to be somewhat confused by traditional software vendors though, offering their same old software for rent over the internet. Be sure to evaluate your providers carefully. The best SaaS solutions are developed by people who are actually using the software themselves to also provide people solutions. Ask questions such as “Can you provide a snapshot of my current portfolio performance any time, from anywhere? ”Can you analyze delinquencies and foreclosures by multiple criteria to identify problem trends? How do lenders react to the reports provided? Do you have a multi-language team?” You’ll discover that the best answers come from companies who have years of hand- on experience and come up with solutions based on servicing members in an industry which now is truly international.

In summary, we believe the time is now to move to an Experience Oriented Architecture to be prepared for the next business cycle; an architecture that is adaptive to whatever new products emerge, one that will ensure your members off-site experience equals their vacation experience when onsite.