Many companies have poured time and money into perfecting their digital strategies, hoping to transform their operations and elevate customer experiences. Yet, for many, the real impact of these investments is still out of reach. The quest for the perfect plan often leads to strategies that look great on paper but fall short in real life, creating hurdles in time-to-value and driving up costs. Meanwhile, both employees and customers are waiting for changes that genuinely make their day-to-day easier.
This situation brings us to an important realization: success in digital transformation and automation isn’t about crafting a flawless strategy; it’s about making practical, incremental changes that directly improve how we work and serve our customers.
With this in mind, let’s tackle three common pitfalls in automation efforts and share some advice on how to turn things around. We’ll dive into why looking beyond just the tech, managing change effectively, and focusing on the little wins every day can transform your approach from a paper promise to real-world progress.
Challenge 1: Technology over outcomes
The problem: In their ambition to automate, many businesses prioritize finding the perfect technological solution, sometimes overlooking the broader goal of improving the outcomes for teams and customers.
The fix: Focus on what really matters—improvements in how your teams operate and the customer experience. Choose technology not just for its immediate fit but for its potential to adapt and scale with your business's future needs. Let the drive to deliver superior customer value guide your platform selection process, ensuring that every tech investment clearly and directly contributes to achieving your business goals.
Challenge 2: Empowering people
The problem: The successful integration of new technologies often stumbles without people empowerment, leading to resistance from within and hindering automation efforts from delivering true impact. More best-of-breed apps are being purchased to manage niche problems in the organization, and it’s challenging to bring it all together in a way that makes sense when platforms are too complex.
The fix: Embed change management deeply into your automation strategy. Articulate the benefits, address concerns proactively, and ensure that your teams can work together cohesively and with the right enablement to leverage automation capabilities. Provide solutions and ways of working that make value creation accessible and achievable to all, giving your teams the tools to bring the best-of-breed landscape together in an impactful way.
Challenge 3: Overlooking the value of small, daily improvements
The problem: There's often a misconception that only large-scale, long-term automation initiatives can deliver significant value, leading to an oversight of the impactful, immediate benefits that smaller, daily improvements offer.
The fix: Embrace a culture of agility and continuous improvement. Small, iterative changes can have a profound immediate impact and set the stage for more extensive automation efforts. This approach encourages experimentation and learning, allowing for adjustments based on real-world feedback and leading to discoveries of even greater opportunities for efficiency and innovation.
An example of gradual improvements for sales order request automation
Step 1: Capture order requests
First, we solve the problem of capturing order requests from different sales channels and direct those requests to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This ensures that the customer success team doesn’t have to do this work manually, but each order request will still have to be reviewed.
Step 2: Automate the risk assessment
One activity that is both difficult and costly to perform is the risk assessment. So to help the team even further, we control each order request against a credit check service and an AI solution. If the risk is determined to be too high for an order request, the team gets a task to call the customer and offer a cash payment option.
Step 3: Check inventory and automate order actions
Nobody likes getting an order confirmation that’s unclear on when one can expect to receive their products. In the automation process, we therefore check the inventory availability in the Warehouse Management System (WMS) to determine if the products can be delivered within a normal timeframe or if it’ll take longer. This information will then be included in the confirmation message to the customer.
What changed?
Through the different changes in this automation process, the outcome resulted in improved order management with less time spent on manual activities and improved risk control. The impact is a happier team and happier customers!
It’s time for action.
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