Three ways to accelerate your digital service delivery
The vision for many GBS leaders is to achieve digital service delivery and true end-to-end. In fact, many see this as essential to succeeding in the future of work, but too many businesses aren’t doing it well, or are moving too slowly.
In our recent panel with SSON, Catapulting your move to a digital GBS model, we discussed how organizations can improve and speed up this process. Joined by four powerhouse voices from GBS, including AppLearn customers Reckitt Benckiser and Rolls-Royce, we confirmed the potential of going digital and explored the reasons behind some of the struggles.
And while the right approach to digital service will vary between different organizations, the challenges at a business and user level are universal.
Recent research found that on average knowledge workers are using 35 role critical apps a day, and have to shift between them 1000 times. Couple that with the fact that 90% of large organizations told us that it’s difficult to measure the important business outcomes of their software, the current landscape is making it difficult for organizations to achieve their aspiration of end-to-end.
But the goal is worth it, and our panelists were keen to demonstrate this along with three key areas to focus on.
1) Know the key drivers behind your digital vision
You only have to look at the audience poll results from the panel below to see the drivers and associated challenges are diverse. With increasing engagement and improving customer experience sitting alongside automation and securing leadership buy in, there are plenty of reasons and obstacles around going digital.
Manoj Kalra, Head of Group Business Services at DSM, kicked off our conversation on this subject by reiterating the importance of having a mission mindset. In short, knowing your desired service and outcome can be the difference when starting or expanding digital service delivery. At DSM, the three key areas driving the delivery model are digital experience, value and awareness, but this isn’t one-size fits all.
For Prashant Arora, Global Service Management Head at Reckitt Benckiser, enabling the fast-paced culture that runs through the organization had to be central to everything. This need for speed means that Prashant’s mission is to make getting the right support as easy as booking an Uber or interacting with Alexa. And while there’s more to it, with compliance and cybersecurity being essential, having this driver front and center makes everything clearer.
Insight
Panel Discussion: Catapulting your move to a digital GBS model
2) Understand and take advantage of remote working
With remote working here to stay, GBS and shared service centers alike should see the need for more digital interaction as more than an obligation. In fact, Marcus Millership, Director of People Services and GBS Transformation at Rolls-Royce, believes we’ll never get a better opportunity to drive to genuine digital service delivery.
Marcus has taken the work from anywhere requirement as a chance to push ahead and increase direct access to services at Rolls-Royce. He argues that people who work in the space are never going to get a better platform to build from, so focusing on adaption and adoption right now can be a game changer. And while this view is shared by Mark Lewis, Senior Consultant in Commercial Practice at Macfarlanes, he urges us to not digitize at the expense of empathy.
We’re still learning about the apparent upsides and downsides to mass remote working, so while we look to accelerate moves to digital models, Mark recommends we consider happiness as well as efficiency. It all comes back to ensuring customers and staff from top to bottom are as satisfied and healthy as possible—psychically, mentally and emotionally. This may seem obvious, but it’s important we don’t forget it as we get more digital than ever.
3) Capture and act on the crucial measurements of success
Data is crucial to Prashant’s strategy, both in terms of identifying tasks for automation and finding issues to fix. In fact, RB are in the process of using AppLearn Adopt to not only access deeper analytics on where their people are spending time in applications and see which screens are useful, but deliver and measure the performance in-application knowledge.
RB found that their speed can mean user education around new platforms or processes doesn’t always make it to critical paths before the team who deliver it have gone live and moved onto the next. This causes issues for even effective solutions, with support requests that should go to line managers, ending up with IT. Having data on this was crucial to both quantifying the issue and implementing an in-app solution.
Rolls-Royce are also using Adopt’s Advanced Analytics to get more intelligence on the behavior of employees and where they need to go next, but Marcus’ advice to the panel is more general. He feels we need to go deeper than traditional time to complete metrics to really reach end-to-end digital service delivery.
For Marcus, the problem with just measuring individual transactions is losing the value stream of end-to-end activity. Take something like an onboarding process, individual transactions linked to HR, Security or IT can look good, but that’s not the same as measuring the overall end-to-end experience for employees or line managers. He feels intelligence like this should outweigh KPIs, or we risk being so focused on service lines that we overlook the overall experience.
The message from our panel is clear. Driving digital service delivery isn’t quick or easy, but the efficiencies, data and insights it unlocks make it more than worth the effort.
By focusing on the three key areas highlighted by these leaders in the field and implementing digital adoption technology to unify the employee experience, you’ll be one step closer to reaching your end goal.
