Education

In recent years, businesses have embraced digital transformation as the answer to many challenges which threaten their long-term performance. However, is this over-reliance on technology eroding relationships with customers?

Digital transformation projects have long promised to revolutionise operations, but haven’t always resulted in the promised efficiency and cost reductions. Almost three quarters (73 percent) of IT decision-makers agree that while the huge potential of digital projects is often talked about, most of the time they fall short of being truly transformational or revolutionary.

“With technology, there seems to be two movements at the moment,” says Gobeyond Partners CEO Mark Palmer, “one is trying to make our lives easier and more straightforward. The other is a snowball effect of layer upon layer of technology vying for attention with no consideration of the customer. Think about the app alerts that keep popping up on your smartphone, or emails asking you for customer feedback. Many people are simply not interested in this type of activity. Being pro-tech is good, but only appropriate tech that will genuinely make peoples’ lives easier.”

In our quest to have the fastest chatbot or most efficient AI-generated text, we’ve neglected the nuts-and-bolts of customer service itself: the customer.

By placing human experience at the heart of transformation, organisations can focus on delivering value. Practically, this can mean taking an end-to-end view of the customer journey, leveraging digital technologies to augment human interactions, and engaging colleagues on the change journey.

Giving power back to the customer

The rapid expansion in capability and accessibility of technology has made a big impact on customer service. Today’s customers can browse and switch between competitors with more ease than ever before, comparing your service to that of more agile start-ups or organisations in completely different sectors. As the 2019 Customer Satisfaction Index from The Institute of Customer Servicerecorded a fourth consecutive drop in customer satisfaction, it’s no coincidence that we found 71 per cent of managers in our recent survey were concerned about the impact changing customer expectations will have on their company’s growth.

Customers are seeking more human-led guidance, particularly for complex journeys or queries. “Tech can achieve more in a single step, such as verifying ID or signing documents, but people still want explanation and reassurance about products and services,” says Peter Nicol, SVP Strategic Partnerships and Alliances at Vizolution .“It’s about being able to hold the customer’s hand and walk them through the channel of their choice.” Indeed, 63 per cent of people prefer face-to-face communication when making big decisions, according to the Social Market Foundation.

Engaging your colleagues

It isn’t just speaking with customers that can foster a more human-centric approach; it’s talking with employees and clients too. “For me, i try not to spend too much time in an office locked in meetings or calls,” says Mark Palmer. “The real value is in getting out there, meeting people and listening to their concerns. We know that 70 percent of change programmes fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. I am a fan of John le Carré’s advice: ‘The desk is a dangerous place to see the world from.’”

A recent Gallup survey revealed only eight per cent of British workers are engaged in their jobs. As Bruce Daisley, bestselling author, technologist and former European VP of Twitter points out, this means more people are actively disengaged in their jobs than engaged.

When the London office of Twitter had reached 200 people, things went awry. That year, Bruce recalls that 40 per cent of staff left. “Every Thursday was somebody’s leaving do,” he remembers. That ratio has since been converted into a two per cent leave rate, with Daisley  fostering employee engagement by hosting smaller, more focused meetings, channelling curiosity (“when we’re distracted, we achieve less”) and empowering staff to “reclaim their lunch hour”.

In a recent survey from the CCA Global, we uncovered a worrying discrepancy that reflects a broader trend; 95% of executives felt their company actively engaged with staff to encourage ideas for process improvement, but only 52% of agents agreed that this happened.

The digital tightrope

Having a motivated and happy workforce is only half the story. Businesses should be mindful of balancing technology and people to deliver the right digitally-enabled human support.

“Simple digital journeys are convenient and cost-effective” says Peter Nicol, “but if you have a complex digital journey, then customers will require human help.” Mortgage information, investment advice, and rectifying bank errors are tasks that don’t typically lend themselves to ‘straight-through’ online interactions. Vizolution research has found that only 40 per cent of customers complete such journeys.

Ultimately, it comes down to choice, and offering as many friction-free solutions as possible. Further elaborating, Peter comments that “Customers should be able to speak to advisors on whatever channel they prefer: in person, on the phone, web, chat, app and video” 

The power of experience

As faceless digital startups flood the market, there’s an advantage to being a more human firm. Mark Palmer , reflecting on his own experiences said  “You can now order a Jaguar Land Rover online from its website, delivering it straight to your house, just like a Tesla. But when I buy a car, I like to sit in the seat, smell the leather, listen to the stereo. I don’t go to a dealership because I want a faster car; it’s experiential.”

There also isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach to human experience. Mark explains “It’s a fine balance with each client we work with to support existing processes, remove wasteful activity, introduce appropriate tech and upskill colleagues to drive improvements,”.

But one thing’s clear. In the 2020s, technology has the best chance of reaching its true potential when it complements humans, rather than replaces them. As Bruce Daisley reflected at our Future of Service conference; “Success in the future won’t be determined by technology, but humanity. And those companies that recognise that will do the best.”

Shared Services have a unique opportunity to reshape how they operate and the value they deliver. By shifting from a cost centre with a focus on pure service delivery to a disruptive, digitally-enabled front runner, greater strategic value can be delivered. In order to achieve this against a backdrop of rising expectations, we need to look at the function through a different lens.

Jump to:
Introducing a more human lens
What does this mean for Shared Services?
Transforming a Shared Service operation with a customer journey approach
Other considerations
How a customer journey lens delivers strategic value
Where to start on your transformation journey

Many businesses have started on the road to transformation, experiencing varying levels of success. We increasingly see organisations focused on initiating activities such as using disruptive technology and enhancing their analytics capability. Whilst these are valid and essential levers, we find that looking at single point solutions outside of a broader context can present risk by only delivering short-term benefits, potentially leading to increased cost or poorer service in the long run.

We asked a panel of global shared service leaders to share their views on some of the greatest benefits they expected to realise from a transformed Shared Service function:

When asked what the biggest barriers were, nearly 80% stated that practically implementing end-to-end ownership in a fragmented IT landscape was a significant concern.

Where there is a clear desire to reduce costs and take broad ownership, current approaches are so far failing to provide the necessary strategic perspective. 

Introducing a more human lens

Whilst colleagues each bring with them different experiences from businesses they have worked for throughout their careers, we are all also consumers who access services from a wide range of providers as part of our daily lives.

As a result, we all have examples of providers and products we like to use, and a core part of our reasoning for using those providers repeatedly is due to having a good experience when receiving the service or goods that they are providing to us.

There will be certain characteristics that are consistent with these good experiences, such as being easy or low effort, available when needed, and a high value, but efficient service. This fulfilment of service is what we call the customer journey.

While a customer-focused viewpoint has delivered significant benefits and change for our end customers, we believe that this customer-centric lens has the potential to improve service provided for internal customers too, thereby enhancing the value that can be delivered.

What does this mean for Shared Services?

It therefore makes sense for shared services operations to also focus on their internal customers’ experiences as they travel along their internal customer journeys to receive the services offered to them.

As Shared Services have evolved from a pure cost reduction focus through economies of scale and wage arbitration, the key challenge is how to enhance the value added to the business and become a strategic partner.

Transforming a Shared Service operation with a customer journey approach

To deliver a great customer experience, Shared Service providers firstly need to build their capability to understand the current experience and needs of their customers, through seeking, collecting and analysing the voice of their internal customers. This includes recognising that there will be different customer segments who may have different requirements that should be designed for.

To deliver the desired experiences, a customer journey approach must be used. It is important to design the journey from the customers’ perspective to ensure it is seamless, effortless, and appropriate to expectations.

Critically, the journey needs to be defined from the point the customer realises they have a need to ensure the activities they undertake before they engage with Shared Services are included in the design. This approach often uncovers areas where there are opportunities to add additional value to the business and improve performance.

To ensure a successful customer design there are several potential pitfalls which could cause the design to fail. These are:

• Lack of understanding of the customer
• Not taking into account the end to end journey
• Not incorporating multiple channels
• Approaches which aren’t holistic

Key to the journey designs, and the underlying processes that deliver the experience, will be the use of intelligent automation which can draw on technologies including robotic process automation and machine learning. These technologies will improve accuracy and speed, reduce the human effort required to deliver services, and significantly improve the organisation’s ability to collect data automatically.

Value can be achieved from investing in analytics to turn this data into actionable insight, allowing you to improve service and provide a more strategic ability to support wider business decision making.

Is there anything else that needs to be considered to deliver the journey?

The implications of a customer journey redesign can mean you need to challenge and change several parts of your operating model.

At Gobeyond Partners our holistic operating model definition is made up from central and surrounding elements.

To ensure the operating model has considered how all the components work in harmony, we start with the business strategy and service proposition, before sequentially considering how each segment serves to realise this vision.

As the operating model informs how to best structure operations and align to customers, it supports more precise targeting in automation, opening up new alternatives to wage arbitration in order to reduce cost, without impacting on delivery of service.

To deliver a consistently high-performing function, there are multiple human factors that need to be managed carefully. As the Shared Service redefines the way it works with internal customers and shifts its role to one of greater value, there are many new capabilities it will need to develop, including:

• Managing the customer experience by continually measuring customer satisfaction, as well as checking the services are meeting customers’ needs
  
• Providing the skills and resources to design and deliver customer journey improvement and end to end process transformation and management, including skills in automation technologies
  
• Supporting the shift to becoming a strategic partner by providing insight through an enhanced data collection and analytics capability

As intelligent automation is delivered and embedded alongside other processes, this further reduces human effort and shifts the mix of skills away from rules-based processing to higher order diagnostic skills.

How a customer journey lens delivers strategic value

The benefits from this approach are multifaceted, however the major areas delivered include:

An operating model designed around delivering great customer experience

A designed-in focus on the activity and processes that our internal customer most value. This provides the opportunity to enhance the level of human interaction in these value-add services, and provide focus for intelligent automation strategies, i.e. those activities that aren’t highly valued and are just expected to be ‘done’.

Technology deployed in appropriate settings

By delivering technology in a manner internal customers value, Shared Services can not only improve accuracy and create capacity, but collect better quality, real-time data. By combining this with analytics and data science, and integrating further data from different sources, you can produce actionable insights that support internal customers’ decision making, enhancing your value proposition.

A platform for Shared Services to become highly effective innovation and transformation hubs

An opportunity for Shared Services to function as digital centres for excellence, where they prototype, pilot and deploy disruptive technology and data-led initiatives that are aligned with broader digital strategies and customer requirements.

Where to start on your transformation journey

Build your case by starting with your internal customers; this will highlight areas of alignment and conflict within your current operating model and business strategy. Areas for improvement will be identified that move you towards an extended, more strategic, model, rather than attempting a grandiose full-scale transformation that’s unable to respond quickly to internal customer feedback. 

When working within legacy IT infrastructure, it’s always wise to start with a suitable proof of concept whilst working in partnership. By using analytics and automation to bring together multiple data sources, you can identify how to close current gaps and where to apply intelligent automation to best navigate between different systems. From this point, benefit can be defined early on, with key stakeholders engaged in scaling solutions.

These are some of the key ways many Shared Services functions are trying to transform. By looking from an inside-out perspective, asking what drives value in the business and reviewing their journey through the eyes of an internal customer, they are able to clearly define value and build a more prominent position in their organisations.

Digital disruption over the past decade has seen many firms favouring a tech-first approach for customers, driven by the need to reduce costs. Introducing the human touch – at all levels of the user’s journey – can radically transform customer service. It was the central theme at our recent Future of Service conference and industry survey, which unearthed the following trends.

A human touch can improve the bottom line

For much of the 2010s, many businesses have pursued automation of customer service processes, believing them to be more cost-effective, efficient and less likely to result in error. Yet, according to those businesses responding to our survey, a human-first approach has delivered higher financial returns.

Companies considered to be human experience leaders (those who provide excellent customer and employee experience) were 1.4 times more likely to have reported increased revenue in the previous year than those that defined themselves as solely employee experience or customer experience leaders.

In a paradigm shift reflected elsewhere in the survey: managers are prioritising customer experience (21 per cent of respondents said their transformation agendas were focused on this) over keeping up with changes in technology (16 per cent). As Gobeyond Partners CEO Mark Palmer commented:

“Where are we seeing improved productivity and more effective customer service currently? – it’s coming from a different place: the starting point is [companies figuring out] what the experience will be for the human being – both the provider and recipient of products and services.”

Want stronger customer experience? Start by making employees happy first

When it comes to human-led customer service, one of the significant issues for customers is that the employee at the other end of the email or phone seem poorly equipped to respond to their needs.

According to experts ranging from Twitter vice-president (and author of The Joy of Work) Bruce Daisley to anthropologist David Graeber’s Bull**** Jobs: A Theory, the nature of modern employment can be blamed. Many workers feel disempowered and ill-equipped to help customer despite the best intentions, also reflected by a recent Gallup survey revealing only eight per cent of UK workers are engaged in their jobs.

Yet, those companies that crack the culture conundrum of employee engagement do see a correlation in terms of revenues (see Temkin Group’s Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2017). The two-thirds (69 per cent) of managers in our survey who agreed their company delivers “a superior employee experience”, could be channelling the following insight from Daisley:

“Customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that, I mean employees who feel engaged, responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work – this applies to all employees, from interns to the CEO.”

Customer experience needs to be driven at board level

“When I see companies with separate MDs for digital, consumer and telephone I put my head in my hands,” says Palmer. “[For these organisations] A lack of singular ownership for customers is an issue.”

Indeed, the lack of a senior executive who is accountable for customer experience was a concern for many of the respondents to our survey. More than four-fifths agreed that customer experience should be driven at board level (and one-fifth of businesses admitted they don’t adequately drive customer experience at this level). As Palmer says, “Those companies that put the human being first in their transformation work will continue to do a cracking job.”

Leave behind the acronyms and jargon

“The use of acronyms and buzz words is causing problems in many organisations,” says Palmer. “The excessive use of acronyms can be problematic. Sometimes they carry multiple meanings, which causes confusion or even worse; erodes trust from customers, clients and staff alike.” Indeed, research conducted by insurance firm Aviva in 2017 found that two in five (41%) people ignore information they receive from financial providers because they do not understand the language used.

A good example of this in practice exists in some of our work with government agencies working in in the healthcare sector. According to Palmer, “When people are met by a healthcare professional in an empathetic way, all the jargon is debunked and everything is delivered in plain English, the patients stress levels reduce. It also results in shorter consultations; which are much more effective for the business too.”

By placing people at the centre of decision making, tools and technologies are focused towards delivering greater outcomes – resulting in stronger business performance.