Driving a sustainable transformation – mindsets over technology

Driving a sustainable transformation – mindsets over technology 

How many times have you heard people talking about this magical new software that’s going to solve all your company’s problems? We’ve all heard things like: “We are delivering this new HR software that will change the way we do performance management”, or “This new sales software will ensure that we grow our income”. Well, we don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but technology on its own won’t solve any problem. And if you have heard those phrases before you probably agree with us that performance management doesn’t change based on the HR software and that sales don’t increase because of a better CRM. To change those experiences we need a lot more than new technology.

It’s like trusting a car salesperson to understand your needs when you have not yet voiced them. Now unless the salesperson is psychic – they must first understand what the problem is, before working on the behaviours and needs they can satisfy.

There are 3 key elements that you need to nail to deliver a sustainable transformation. They are all connected by the same mantra: people & mindsets with technology. If you only take away one thing from this blog, just remember–mindsets over technology.

To make it easier we wanted to share an example of a client we’ve worked with recently.

This is a government client that discovered that the time it takes for citizens to get the permits they need to start operating their business is huge which clearly needed to change.

So they engaged one of our consultants to go and work with them, they said they wanted to implement a new software to track the permit applications and therefore ensure that it takes less time for their employees to process and approve them.

Here’s how we worked with them.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

It doesn’t matter if your customer is internal or external, you need to start by understanding their needs, challenges, motivations and triggers. So that you ensure that you are solving the right problems.

Whilst interviewing our client’s customers we discovered that the technology they were using was one of the problems, but not the main problem their customers and employees had. 

Other problems we found were:

• Customers said they didn’t know where to start the process, what was required from them.
• The permit process was using a waterfall approach which was directly impacting the time it took to get businesses off the ground. This means that after finishing one permit, they would find that there was another they were required to do, and then another. And so what they thought was going to be a month’s worth of work turned into 7, or more.
• Internally, the different teams had little visibility of what other teams were assessing, and so if one team approved a permit for a coffee shop, then another team might disapprove it because of environmental health issues.

So changing the permit management software wasn’t going to have a major impact on the experience. We, therefore, co-created the design of a new end to end experience, from deciding to start a new business and learning about the permits to the moment when the customers are ready to open the doors of their new business. 

The solution included products and services which solved different challenges such as:

• A new webpage with clear information
• A tool to define which permits you will need along the way
• A team that will support them during the whole process
• A set of rituals to collaborate internally and ensure multidisciplinary assessment of the permits

PROCESSES IMPROVEMENT

Creating simple processes to deliver the experience your customers desire and need is essential, otherwise, that experience would only be a nice idea. 

After finding the problems their customers had and designing an experience that would deliver solutions for them, we designed the processes the different teams were going to follow along the way to ensure results. We re-designed existing processes to make them simpler and more efficient and we created new ones to ensure that the customers would receive timely information so that they were kept in the loop during the whole process.

Making sure that your processes are simple, efficient, feasible will make the difference in your team adopting them.

TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION

Once you know what your requirements are, what your customers need and what your employees are required to do, you are finally ready to select a piece of technology to support your service.

In the case that we are talking about today, our client was planning on bringing a new software in, together we found that the software was a part of the experience, not the whole service. In fact, the client decided that the new software was going to be built and deployed in the next phase of the project, once the experience was tested and the new habits were adopted. 

Meanwhile, we reviewed their existing technology services, and mapped what was already in place and could be immediately leveraged, such as a cloud to store and collaborate internally, existing CRM and website functionality to keep clients updated on the status of their permits, and even web forms that weren’t being used to replace the paper forms currently being used.

Integrating your technology with your processes and people is crucial to delivering the experience your customers desire.