How do you like this site? We would love to hear from you! Take a short survey or

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.

Share this pattern

Enjoy these

Foundational free Patterns

Eliminate activities

Eliminate unnecessary activities

Distinguish case types

Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes

Isolate exceptions

Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow

Apply Integral technology

Elevate physical constraints by applying new technology

Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

Use eco-friendly resources

Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives

First-contact problem resolution

Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues

Performance-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success

Back

Share this

Connected to

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

What's Happening?