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Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever 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

Companies should analyze at which times customers want to get in touch and adjust their business processes accordingly. From a customer perspective, the implementation of this heuristic will be perceived as the possibility to interact with the company whenever customers want.

Real-world application

The grocery store REWE extended its opening hours until late in the evening, as its customers prefer to do their shopping after work. In addition, the call center of National Bank, which is responsible for blocking credit cards, is available 24/7, as in the case of a lost or stolen credit card customers expect immediate assistance. In case no employee is available, a phone service or chatbot can be used.

Selected source. This heuristic has been derived from Strohle et al. (2018).

Performance considerations

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

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Foundational free Patterns

Establish a case-based mindset

Remove batch-processing and periodic activities from your business process

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Split responsibilities

Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units

Apply triage

Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities

Shift Workload

Execute tasks when the grid is powered by renewable energy

Green Variant

Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process

Automate for environmental impact

Implement automation in a sustainable way

Quality-based task assignment

Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics

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Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

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