Courage…and Lighting the Torch to Service Management Innovation

A few years ago, I saw a presentation at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando that was inspirational, talking to the future world (2025 and beyond) and all the technological changes we should anticipate. There was a lot of hype about how AI was a key ingredient in everything, changing the way we harness information and change the way we, as consumers, experience all services. It reminded me that not only do we want things to be better, faster and cheaper, but also different. However, to do that means we have to be willing to disrupt, to challenge the status quo. That also means taking people out of their comfort zones. It takes courage to push for that type of change, especially knowing there could and often is an avalanche of resistance, pain, and suffering.

Here's a tale about pushing the limits and charting a different course in service management. It’s a journey that’s taken a ton of courage to embark upon, and ultimately not anything that happened overnight.

In 2019, I attended many conferences focusing on the customer experience using forms of AI. These showcased solutions that would identify the technical issues the customers were facing, their root cause, and allow the automation of a solution in response.  This included capturing a “digital score.” I thought to myself, pure genius! Let’s eradicate the issues instead of waiting on them to get called in to support.  I saw this as a proactive way of serving customers. I’d also been hearing more about chatbot technology and how advanced a channel it had gotten. There was a lot of natural language search technology and intelligence wrapped into these chatbot tools.   I looked at this as a reactive way of servicing customers, but in an efficient/effective way. The ideal situation was to have both forms of AI- proactive and reactive, to give the customer the best overall experience.

By the end of 2021 and, after close to 2 years during the Covid19 pandemic and heavy demands to support remote users and changing platforms, we had completed 2 proofs of concepts and had opted to implement a chatbot solution called Barista, by Espressive.

While selling the concept of a virtual agent was simple, the amount of resistance associated with opening a new channel, a “chatbot” in a healthcare environment nonetheless, was very tangible. Here are some of the early challenges:

1) Selecting the key categories/needs to focus on-

We had to know where to start-pick the top 10 things that we think AI could solve easily and with regular consistency.

2) An outdated, internally facing knowledge base

We needed to review and update upwards of 400 documents and make them short and sweet so customers would use them.

3) Acquiring skillset in using the AI solution to create “intents”-

We had to carve out time from 2 full time Service Desk analysts to learn how multiple integrated-tools work  and allow them to fully manage content development in an agile fashion.

4) Integrating the new tool into the existing environment-

We had to integrate Barista to our ticketing system, our self-service portal, our Microsoft Teams, and also make it available via the smartphone platform.

5) Making it our own- “branding” it so it receives maximum acceptance-

We had to rebrand the solution, naming it “Monte” and co-develop marketing campaigns (icons, communications, incentive programs) with the vendor to appeal to our clinical and non-clinical customer personas.

6) Knowing what to measure and what kpi’s to track/target-

We had to decide on what was most important to us. In the end, we had to develop charts for tracking “deflections” away from the Service Desk, but also ZLR- Zero Level Resolution.

7) Getting everyone in IT to make it a priority -

As this solution took endless hours/days on design planning and implementation of changes on the network, application, and database layers, including opening SSL for external access to allow for smartphone as a channel.

In the end, we went live 6 months later than we had planned to, and are still in the 1st phase of implementation. Our next phase will incorporate RPA- robotic process automation (you already knew that.) However, this is way bigger than getting a new cool tool in. It’s about changing work habits, and then mindsets.   What if we solve issues that we know customers are going to encounter, with automation? It’s a huge time commitment to understand how customers work, what breaks, and what can be fixed with scripts and automation, then mapping that into a process.   It takes tolerance for risk, openness to failure, and resilience. Ultimately, it’s all about the courage to do what’s really hard, and not give up!