Process Exceptions - Superhero or Bad Guy?

“And, so the lion fell in love with the lamb”, murmured Edward Cullen. Vegetarian vampires, powerful action sequence, breath-taking scenes, and good music, Twilight movies have a lot to offer.

Did you ever wonder how unlike it is for a teenage girl to fall for a vampire? Of course, the exception rate is quite high as you don’t find vampires that often.

Well, it’s the exceptions that lead us to something wonderful. Now imagine, what if Edward was not a vampire, without all the superhuman stuff, Twilight would have been like any other story and not sure if that’s what audience would fall for.

The movie leveraged an exceptional plot and became a blockbuster.

This gets me thinking, can businesses leverage exceptions this well?

Exceptions- The New Norm

Let’s consider an instance of a customer calling a customer service center. An operator welcomes the customer, guides the customer through a fixed menu, asks for customer’s details and then diverts the call to the concerned department. And, in case the customer’s concern is not listed in the menu shared by the operator, he/she gets a recorded response, “Sorry for the inconvenience, our customer rep will get back to you shortly”.

Was the customer’s request, in this case, an exception? or Exceptions like these are the new normal?

Customers today want you to remember them and treat them in context. Every customer interaction is an opportunity for you to reinstate your brand and leverage it for new business. However, the rigid processes interfere with your customer experience. Interactions like the one mentioned above should be treated as unique cases, as mishandling of such requests could impact your business and brand.

Accepting Edward for who he was, Bella chose an extraordinary life. Likewise, for businesses to be truly customer-centric, they need to manage exceptions well rather fall for it.

Fall For Exceptions with Case Management

As difficult as it was for Bella to differentiate between vampires and humans, it has become equally challenging for enterprises to clearly differentiate between structured and unstructured processes.

With exceptions increasingly becoming the norm, unstructured processes are becoming critical. This presents a strong case for businesses to manage unstructured scenarios as effectively as the structured ones. Hence, it requires organizations to adopt an agile system to manage such ad hoc scenarios.

The answer to today’s business needs is a Case Management system. The system is built on BPM platform and offers unprecedented flexibility to optimize outcomes for both structured and unstructured processes. It provides the much-needed agility to business processes and empowers knowledge workers with contextual information, enabling smarter decision making in real-time.

For organizations to become exceptional, they have to leverage exceptions well. They need to manage exceptions as they come, leverage them to drive more business and deliver greater customer satisfaction.