The Handbook of Behavioral Operations

17Incorporating Customer Behavior into Operational Decisions

Anton Ovchinnikov

Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

“Customer” is one of the new additions to the list of issues operations people worry about. Gartner Supply Chain Top 25¹ – a leading global publication on supply chain performance and trends – identifies increased customer intimacy as one of the key standout trends of supply chain management. The Gartner report argues that customer experience should become a measured priority in supply chain management. A similar opinion is supported by multiple conversations I had with business executives in North America, Europe, and Asia. As much as “operations” refers to designing and executing the set of processes by which an organization delivers its customer value proposition, understanding what that proposition is and, generally speaking, how customers interact with the organization is critical in designing such processes.

With this in mind, the chapter focuses on four main questions:

1. How should we think about customer behavior in regard to an organization’s processes/operations?
2. What are the main kinds of behaviors to think about?
3. What we know about these behaviors and how they impact (and are impacted by) operations?
4. What we do not know about these behaviors?

For the first question I will introduce the concept of “customer journey map” – a visual display of an experience as a customer sees it. Such maps help identify key interactions ...