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Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Frank, L., Poll, R., Röglinger, M., & Lea, R. (2020). Design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. Business Process Management Journal, 26(6)

Description

Rather than confining engagement to specific physical locations, organizations must embrace a customer-centric approach by designing business processes that empower customers to choose where and how they interact, regardless of the organization's office or branch locations. By granting customers the freedom to determine the interaction setting, companies can foster a seamless and personalized experience, nurturing stronger connections and driving business growth.

Companies should not restrict their interactions with customers to distinct physical locations. Instead, business processes should be designed such that customers can decide themselves where interactions take place, regardless of the location of the organization’s offices or branches.

Real-world application

Nextbike enables renting bicycles in large cities. Unlike other providers, bicycles can be rented and returned not only at specific stations but also in socalled flex zones, i.e. on public roads. This allows customers to arrive close to their final destination even though there is no nextbike station.

Selected source. This heuristic has been derived from Bohmova et al. (2016).

Performance considerations

Individuated interaction capability, empowered interaction capability, concerted interaction capability.

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Foundational free Patterns

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Split responsibilities

Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units

Consolidate Work

Collect similar work items and work in batches

Shift Workload

Execute tasks when the grid is powered by renewable energy

Human Process Performance

Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines

Constraint-based task assignment

Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints

Performance-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success

Experience-based task assignment

Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

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