Set your phasers to stun.

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series.

We’re continuing to explore the theme of Digital’s Blowing Up Operations (here’s our latest Ops post: Do you have a chicken when you need a pig? in case you missed it).

This week I want to talk about phasing your transformation programme.

Pretty much every automation or digitisation leader these days has too much work to do and not enough budget, time or resource to do it all in one go.

You have to make trade-offs and prioritise which parts of an interaction you are going to automate or digitise first.

Often these decisions result in real impacts to the teams that have to manually fulfil customer requests, and that can have ramifications across your whole organisation.

Recently a client told me that their digital sales channel had huge growth but they were going to have to scale it back because they couldn’t cope with the (manual) fulfilment volume within their Operations unit. Every CEO's worst nightmare.

Ops leaders often despair that their organisation’s focus on digitisation is solely on the shiny customer channels and that the automation agenda never makes it to Operations. Manual processes that support digital interactions can be clunky and inefficient and worse still, an “interim solution” that never gets remediated.
 
So, how do you phase your transformation programme to maximise positive impact, and not blow up Operations in the meantime?
 
Set your phasers to stun. Here’s my Do’s and Don’ts about how to phase your transformation work.

DO take an 80/20 approach

​The old faithful 80/20 is very applicable here. Realistically there are some customer or staff interactions that you were just never meant to automate. This might because they are too bespoke, they’re about to be obsolete, they’re so complex that the ROI will never justify it or they require human contact for a highly emotional customer interaction.
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Be clear upfront with your stakeholders that these are out of scope and then never speak of them again.

DO prioritise the 80%

How do you do this then? This post, Priorities for Automation Post COVID, might help. (Post COVID? How happy and naïve we were back then!)
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In a nutshell – focus on profit pools, biggest opportunities or threats, or the biggest driver of operations volume/customer effort.
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DON’T take an approach that it all needs to be automated so you’re going to start at function A and work through to function Z. You will never get to the real priorities for your organisation and your colleagues may have killed you before you even make it past function E.

DO take an end to end view

Even if you only have capacity to digitise a part of an interaction right now, it’s helpful to plan the whole new interaction upfront. What’s the critical parts, what’s the nice to haves?

Taking an end to end view helps you understand what your users’ needs are, the technical dependencies you have and gives you clues about how to sequence the work effectively.
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You may also find some small changes to workflow or process that allows you to eliminate some paper or save time straight away.

DO be ruthless about your minimum viable product

​Every interaction that you need to digitise will have a number of distinct scenarios based on factors such as customer segment or product. You don’t have to solve all those variations in one go. Start with a ruthlessly cut down minimum viable product, for example: simple customers, who have our most popular product and only have one simple request.  Build your capability and confidence out from that.

DO believe that you can run multiple processes at the same time

​It is perfectly possible to funnel one group of customers down a new process and the rest down the old process. Build a user interface that makes it easy for your customers or staff to use the right process for the right scenario (and most importantly doesn’t allow the new process to be used for things it isn’t ready to be used for). 

DON’T start automating new interactions until you’ve finished your current one

There’s a real temptation to digitise everything you can through your customer channels without fixing the “fall to floor” steps within your customer support teams. There are two major issues with this approach:

1. Eventually your customer support team will run out of capacity to process these digital requests.
2. When you do come to automate the manual parts of a customer interaction, often the significant benefits attached to full end to end automation have already been realised and the business case to finish off the work is less than compelling.

 
This may be a controversial view but I think that over the medium term you are better to have fewer interactions that are fully automated, than more partially-automated interactions. Disagree? ​I would love to hear what you think, leave a comment below!

However you plan it, digitising and automating your customer interactions is a bit like painting the harbour bridge. The work is never done!
 
Next week we’re moving on to talk about digital channel strategy and how to get the most out of your transformation investment. See you then!

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