Findings from our latest executive roundtable

Elena Christopher, Melissa O’Brien, Phil Fersht

A recent HFS study of 590 global 2000 enterprises found that the top strategic and operational objectives for intelligent automation are revenue growth and improved customer experience (CX) (Exhibit 1). At our June 19 executive roundtable in New York to discuss the potential of integrated automation for elevating customer experience, it was clear that the success of any automation program is in large part dependent on enabling humans, not replacing them.

Exhibit 1: The quest for improved CX tops the list of objectives for intelligent automation

^{Source: HFS Research in conjunction with KPMG International, State of Intelligent Automation, 2019
Sample = 590 Business Leaders including 100 C-level executives}

Decades of stagnating process redesign has made integrated automation inevitable

The delegates, a unique mix of automation strategy and customer experience leaders, agreed that integrated automation (IA) approach is the only realistic way forward for enterprises seeking to maximize the benefits of emerging automation and AI technologies.

In short, the much-lauded business benefits to be gained from process automation software, machine learning, and tools such as cognitive assistants and natural language processing have opened a can of worms for enterprises eager to leap into the AI generation. Any executive dealing with automation initiatives has admitted to investing far more time, resources, and money on revisiting their institutional processes to figure out how they can be rewired to take advantage of automation and AI software.

As enterprises dive deeper into the execution of their IA strategies, a (sometimes) painful reality is emerging—you can’t achieve change with technology projects alone. Scads of task-focused proofs of concept (POC) across unintegrated sets of digital technologies have had limited impact, and they often alienate the human users needed to adopt and perpetuate the new and refined processes. This is where integrated automation comes into play—the integration of technology change agents like the “Triple-A-Trifecta” (automation, analytics, and AI) with people and process (Exhibit 2). Delegates noted that this concept is often best enabled by a peace treaty between the age-old corporate holy war of IT versus business operations. Yes, you need to work together.

Exhibit 2: The path to integrated automation

_{Source: HFS Research, 2019}

The key to successfully integrated automation is preparing and enabling humans

The role of humans in successful automation programs is critical. While the use of RPA may have started as a means to reduce headcount and automate rule-based tasks, delegates at the roundtable shared a growing realization that it’s actually the inclusion of humans in their automation programs that helps them drive value and results and achieve scale. Or, more pointedly, it’s been pretty much everyone’s experience that just automating work without employees’ buy-in and understanding at every echelon of the company yields limited value, little to no scale, and most certainly no transformation. Key thoughts on how to include and prepare humans for automation include

• Clearly articulate a compelling directive: Senior management needs to define and communicate the purpose of automation and disseminate the message throughout the company. Establishing a senior leader to serve as the face of the program shows commitment and creates a conduit for dialogue. Transparency about the goals of these initiatives is important to keeping people informed and engaged.
  
  
• Incentivize the “frozen middle”: The group universally agreed that the main change issues are occurring with middle management. While the C-suite often conceptualizes big-picture ideas, middle-management staff have little incentive to invest time in learning how to take advantage of low-code software tools, and they frequently stifle projects or offload on junior staff where results are often siloed. Companies need to foster a culture of innovation and incentivize staff to master new tools to drive customer value. Leadership must lead by example and get personally involved in initiatives to show their teams the way, or progress will always be slow and painful.
  
  
• Tie automation to cause-based interest: People need a good reason to draw them to work. Help employees connect with the business purpose behind your automation program. Demonstrate, literally, what is in it for them and how their active participation can help make their job, company, and customer interactions better. People need to connect with the “why.”
  
  
• Understand culture and behavior to change it: Complementing human labor with digital labor challenges the status quo of how work gets done. Aside from adding to job-loss fears, it also changes roles. Lee Coulter, CEO of Shared Services for Ascension Health, shared his concept of the “manager in the middle,” pointing out that managers often measure their worth by how many people they manage. Even if headcount stays the same, enabling more work through the addition of digital workers is a breach of identity and purpose for many. You need to manage the automation message and execution at up and down the chain of command.
  
  
• Create joyful solutions: John Cottongim, Head of Automation Hub at Mars, introduced the delegates to the concept of “joyful solutions” as a measure to ensure both acceptance and value of automation. He reminded us that leveraging automation to improve user experience—whether the users are employees or customers—is where you create exponential value, improve or reinvent processes, and ultimately where business transformation starts to take hold. Otherwise, you get mired in digital exhaust.
  
  
• Promote facts over fear: Before everyone freaks out about replacing humans with robots, it’s important to note that automation is nowhere near keeping pace with attrition. Market stats show average annual attrition at around 18%, whereas even the most well-scaled automation programs have returned around 1 million hours to their business, an equivalent of ~500 FTEs of work, which is less than 1% of the workforce of any global 2000 company. Many enterprises are not backfilling attrition and are using digital workers to help make staff more effective—essentially doing more with less.
  
  
• Keep user experience in mind to balance business versus customer benefits: A particularly spirited discussion of cognitive assistants as a current automation technology being used in many customer-facing contexts served to remind us that even when you have broad employee buy-in for automation, it is critical to keep user experience in perspective when externalizing solutions to clients. As one delegate noted, offering a lame chatbot with no cognitive capabilities in hopes of reducing call or chat volumes can end up decimating CX. Keeping in mind the experience of those consuming the solutions is critical.

The Bottom Line: Integrated automation can elevate customer experience if we put humans at the center of our strategy.

While there is great potential for integrated automation to positively impact customer experience, our roundtable discussion underscored the palpable need to first ensure alignment with user experience—literally how integrated automation solutions impact those they touch. The patient-zero “users” are typically employees, so getting employee engagement with automation correct is on the critical path for all enterprises trying to drive digital transformation. The role of humans in automation is the gigantic elephant in the room that will block most progress unless your enterprise has a clear plan for driving effective change.