A customer process refers to the activities a customer goes through to interact with a business process. In essence, there is a customer process: Buy New Car. The process begins when the customer begins to think about buying a new car and ends when the car is purchased (or the customer decides not to buy a car). Organizations commonly think of improving their own internal processes, but, in fact, if they really seek to improve the customer’s experience, then they ought to focus, instead, on the customer’s process and think about how they can improve it, adjusting their internal business process to assure the customer a better experience.
BPMN provides a separate swimlane in which one can model the activities a customer goes through as he or she interacts with a business process. A good discussion of this topic, from a Lean perspective, is presented by Womack and Jones in Lean Solutions (Free Press, 2005).
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