Automation the key to solving the service challenge

Historically, service has always been something that consumers received in person, over the phone and, more recently, via email. However, the service experience hasn’t exactly improved much along the way.

While the turnaround time for getting what you need is a lot swifter these days, it’s also more likely to be disjointed, onerous and less personal for customers.

Fortunately, consumer technologies such as online retailing and banking are recognising that decline in service experience have begun countering the trend with well-structured web apps, integrated chat and online communities.

What this means is that consumers can now easily share feedback, read reviews and rate products.

As a result, the service experience has also grown much richer and is not so one-dimensional any more.

Service as an enterprise boardroom issue

Businesses are now seeing that level of consumer experience enter the enterprise. In fact, service-oriented thinking is gaining traction across the enterprise, as employees increasingly require access to real-time assistance.

IT teams are increasingly building their own storefronts using a service catalogue, where employees can go for all their service needs. Calling the help desk is becoming something of a bygone era. Instead of just monitoring the elements of the infrastructure, and inferring service implications, IT is now beginning to monitor and dashboard the services directly.

Not to be outdone, organisations like HR and facilities that may not have thought of themselves as service domains are also starting to implement online service models, which essentially define what services can be requested and how to obtain them.

IT executives want to lead with a service-centric mindset, and are viewing the focus on infrastructure as subservient to the service model. With so much of the infrastructure moving into the cloud, this redirection of IT focus isn’t coming a moment too soon.

Are businesses going a little service-crazy here? Not really.

The people who are being served only care about the service dimension. For example, they are not terribly interested in seeing or understanding how the sausage gets made. It’s the service providers, the folks doing the serving, who of course need to be experts at that.

However, numerically the audiences being served are, more often than not, orders of magnitude greater than the service providers. So, it’s about time enterprises put that service hat on, and kept it on.

Automation as the cornerstone of the ultimate service experience

The new age of service is not just about making the experience more productive for the requester. In the enterprise, it’s a management issue. How do we scale service activities to ever greater volumes, at ever lower cost or investment, with ever more compelling service experiences?

Automation holds the keys to the challenge. It is fundamentally the essence of moving into the cloud.

Such a service framework is most apparent at enterprises such as Amazon.com, where they do not publish phone numbers or email. Every service interaction has been thought of and provided for in the most intuitive manner within the system environment. They continue to squeeze out every ounce of friction in the process of transacting with Amazon - one click, and two days later it is on your doorstep.

Certain service activities, especially those facing external audiences, have been defined and structured to the point of running as standardised processes, and they can be automated. Yet internally, service delivery is still living in the realm of personal interaction and communications, sometimes still the yellow inter-office envelope, but more likely voice and email. As it is so people-dependent and people-mediated, the results are often sketchy - sometimes unbearably so.

Unfortunately, there is only so much you can do when service is poor or not forthcoming at all.

As such, managing and automating service relationships and interactions is the next major software frontier in the enterprise. Enterprises are gradually recognising that this is really where orders of magnitude of efficiency improvements can be realised.

At the end of the day, moving to the cloud to help automate our increasingly services-based world may be not just a value-add but something that all customers demand.

Image: David Oakley