8OCTOBER 2024OPINIONIN MYBy Mathew Pearce, Finance Director, HSBC [LON: HSBA]I am not a technologist. I am a user of technology. I am a stakeholder in the success of the business divisions I support. I have customers. Not the traditional external customers but rather the `internal customer'. Are they treated the same though? Do we ascribe as much focus to the needs and satisfaction of the internal customer as we do the external customer? Certainly, the internal customers are a captive audience. They cannot very well pop next door to use a different supplier; a different Finance department for example. Nothing quite like a monopoly to set expectations low. There is opportunity to be had through applying the same exacting degree of customer excellence to our internal customers. Never more so than when we embark on transformation programs to provide quality Insight & Analysis to our customers through the development of Visualisation tools, as we have done in the Finance team supporting HSBC's investment bank. Here are my reflections. Here on, I shall refer to any initiative of innovation or transformation or like project as `program'."The customer is at the heart of everything we do". Impressive sounding words. Google it. Once you skip past the adverts you will find a plethora of recognisable companies exposing this ambition for their customers. Is it as true though for our internal customers? Usually relegated to being called `stakeholders' or `users', because we could not bring ourselves to calling colleagues `customers', soon they are more a myth than an accessible living, breathing embodiment of whom we are trying to satisfy. `Customer' is such a powerful term. We should be adopting the same terminology and the same approach for all our customers.Storyboarding and mapping of our customers' personas and our customers' journeys are our compass to where we are heading with our program. Our program plan should afford the time upfront to chart these and our program management discipline should ensure that work streams and initiatives are aligned throughout and explain themselves through descriptions of customer personas and journeys. We should afford sufficient opportunity for retrospectives that include review of the progress vs the personas and journeys laid out.Engaging customers to seek feedback and participation throughout the program is a vital barometer of the level of satisfaction that will be achieved from the program delivery, and saves time by closing expectation gaps quickly and early. Firstly, in terms of the timing of feedback, limiting to just the beginning and the end of a program denies us valuable information. Knowledge is power. Conventional wisdom leads us to develop in sprints, and the approach to the periodicity of customer feedback should follow a similar ambition throughout the program. Secondly, consideration of the quality of feedback is equally important. Internally-focussed programs offer us a greater opportunity than externally-focussed ones, and we should take advantage. We should expect and demand greater engagement from our internal customers. An interactive audience is an engaged audience. We should consider how we engage them: include customers in the constituency of our program delivery teams to have the customer literally at the heart of what we do and improve team empathy; workshop out solutions together with our customers so they have a stronger connection to the end product; host more intense focus groups and demo feedback; and we may seek feedback more regularly, persistently with the same customers, and from a larger percentage of the population than we might achieve in external customer surveys. Thirdly, we should ensure our program plan includes sufficient agility to adopt THE CUSTOMER IS AT THE HEART OF EVERYTHING WE DO?Mathew Pearce
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