When we are providing an offering to our customers, we do that in the form of products that contains gods and services, including terms and conditions in an agreement.
As a customer you are interested in the services you get and how well they can be consumed and meeting your expectations, you are less interested in all the activities needed to be done by the provider to be compliant, for example if you buy a charger in Sweden it has to be CE-marked, have a Swedish plug, etc. and as a provider you need to secure that when you sell chargers on the Swedish market, you are compliant with the regulations for electronic devices in Sweden this includes many activities that is indirectly required to be done, but as a customer you expect the charger to be safely used in Sweden, and do not want to understand what is required to CE-marked a device.
In a company one department cannot do everything, and we divide the work between departments, we can do this in different ways, one way is to package our delivery as if it was customer products with terms and conditions and a big interest in making sure that it can be consumed in a good and satisfying way.
If we describe this in a simplified form with three perspectives:
Front Stage: the products and bundled services we are offering to our customers and target departments.
Experience: how our customers see us, our brand, the channels they can consume our services and the journey they take when they are onboarded and using our services.
Back Stage: what we need to have and do to provide the services, organisation, processes, information and IT applications.
From a customer perspective we want them to Experience our Front Stage, but not be concerned with the Back Stage.
We can see this as different sides on a cube, where two of the sides are visible to the customers (Front Stage and Experience).
If we look at the Back Stage we have our implementation and as said before one department cannot do all the needed work, we have to group the work and distribute between our departments, the departments will provide services to each other and be experts in different areas.
We can describe this with the same cube model, where one cubes Front Stage services another cubes Back Stage.
In an organisation one department can serve many departments, and we have a network of services used by different departments.
Lets look at an example of which cubes we would have if we have two different customer product offering:
Home Loan provided by our retail sales department.
Real Estate Loan provided by our Corporate sales department.
The sales departments work differently, and processes will differ and also use different channels.
In this example Home Loan is very automated with self services via a mobile app, and corporate Real Estate Loan are more manual a provided via a branch office.
Both products use a shared solution for managing the loans, “Mortgage Loan” that is providing the needed services that is part of the two customer offered products.
Mortgage Loan has a process “Loan Application” that has one step where we perform the Credit Application, this is done by Risk Department that have a product “Credit Risk” that contains the service “Credit Application”.
In the Back Stage of Credit Risk we have the process “Credit Granting” that includes an activity performing KYC, KYC is done by the CLM Department that have a product Customer Lifecycle Management, that includes the service “KYC”.
We can continue adding more cubes for example we need to be able to disburse the loan that is done by Payment Department, and in Sweden we also need to perform reporting, for example ESG reporting.
The message I am sending is that if we package both what we offer to customers and what we provide to other departments with the same product thinking, we will always be professional both to our customers and between our departments, with clear offerings and terms and conditions.