In our conversations with the customer service leaders in our community, we hear about the challenges of implementing intelligent automation often. Whether their organization is taking its first baby steps or already executing their sophisticated AI strategy, there are a few common pitfalls executives have shared:
Lacking Necessary Resources
There is no out-of-the-box solution to implement intelligent automation in your organization. Companies seldom account for the IT infrastructure automation demands and are rarely prepared to produce data sets that are accurate and large enough for effective machine learning. Without these key ingredients, AI projects will fail.
The Fix: Before you invest in a vendor solution, ask the service providers you are scouting what you would need to use their tool. If data is a problem in your organization, you may be able to find a solution that leverages a different resource—one your company can provide.
Organizational Silos
Meeting resistance from other departments can stop your automation initiative before it gets out of the gate. Because customer experience touches so many areas of an organization, it’s vital to think through the consequences to each business unit before implementing the solution.
The Fix: Beyond involving the leadership in the departments who will be affected, training can be a great opportunity to get buy-in from the ground-level employees who will be using the AI solution. Instead of merely training workers on the tool, consider sharing the reasoning behind the automation and what benefits the company expects to get from it.
Choosing the Wrong Problem to Fix
Because intelligent automation is new to many companies, leadership is often leery of sinking too many resources into an AI project. If the initiative doesn’t live up to expectations, automation may suffer a setback at your organization. Too wide a scope, and your project will take years to reach completion. Too narrow, and it doesn’t make an impact.
The Fix: Create an initiative that will move the needle in the area your company is most focused on at the moment. If your organization is in cost-savings mode and you can use automation to reduce call volumes or the time spent on service tickets, it gives you the ammunition you need to use AI for other goals, like increasing customer satisfaction.
Not Planning for Governance
Who will be responsible for the care and feeding of your AI? You might make it past the early stages of an implementation only to see a project stall because necessary staff were pulled away. If this is your company’s first foray into intelligent automation, you can’t know for certain if it will be successful. But if it is, there will be maintenance needed.
The Fix: Forecasting the downstream effects—a different organizational structure, reduced employees, etc.—is critical to the continued success of your initiative. Communicating these effects to the leaders at your company and having an idea of what governance will look like will save you some heartache down the road.
Join us in Chicago on August 16 for our one-day workshop, Intelligent Automation for Customer Experience, and learn what other senior customer experience leaders are doing with their intelligent automation implementations, ask questions of top service providers, and see their solutions in action in our Innovations Lab.
