Are you the victim of a really bad decision?
While everyone is racing to implement AI, most leaders have to keep running an operation that is exceeding expectations. If you work in IT or contact centers, your mandate is even taller than usual. My client Brian wowed me with a recent pronouncement and admitted, “I made some really bad decisions a few months ago, and now I have to fix them.” My client Mindy had an equal frustration, saying “I inherited this mess of someone else’s bad decisions, and I’m just swimming upstream.”
You Own the Fix
It is very much a you-break-it-you-bought-it world. In many organizations, achievement is as much in the recovery from a bad situation as it is in making good decisions; and hopefully many of us live in worlds that reward taking risks. Even if you don’t inhabit a company that rewards risk-taking, solving operational performance issues this year is both more difficult and easier than ever.
It is hard to keep a team motivated in the face of poor performance – given long wait times in queue or delays on deploying new IT capabilities. It is complicated to figure out how and when to invest because so many platforms are so radically changing that most organizations are hitting pause on spending money.
You Can Get Results in as Little as 60 days
Despite these headwinds, there are some easy wins that you can consider depending on whether your issues are projects or interactions taking too long, unproductive teams spinning over the future, or expensive manual processes causing handoffs and rework. It takes some planning and a strong dose of boldness to pull it together. Quick cycles or sprints can have enormous benefits in a short period of time. If you design in two weeks, test for two weeks, then start rolling out and tracking, you can see performance changes during weeks 4-8 or days 31-60.
If projects are taking too long, the first place to look is technology and automation. At this point in the year, if your technology initiative is not underway, it may be hard to achieve in-year benefits.
Technology Is Part of the Answer
This is where some of the new AI options can be really handy. The lowest hanging fruit – note taking, summarization, and fast research can be at your team’s fingertips in days, coming through platforms you are already using. Whether it is general employees or contact center agents, there are readily accessible solutions that improve how people work. Right now is not the time for homegrown IT. It is time to bank on the billions that large corporations already spent to make capabilities useful. It is not a substitute for the big picture roadmap of how work changes, but it is a quick start.
People and Culture Are Bigger Than Tech
Culture issues are especially difficult right now. AI is driving significant change in every facet of our professional lives – as individuals, as team members, as leaders, as organizations. The bad news is that this will not ease up for at least two to five years as AI upends the way we do everything. The good news is that there are some techniques you can use to bring people together and generate support. Hint: it is not about teaching everyone how to use ChatGPT or Gemini to update their resumes.
Adoption is a critical vector within any team. Implementing the technology is the smallest piece of the equation here. The tech itself is dwarfed by the need to adjust process and support people through the change. Strong organizational change management has been a huge factor in every client success story we have participated in.
You Might Not Want to Admit It – Labor and Process Are Fixable
If you really cannot hire or your cost per transaction is way out of whack with your competitors, then it is time to look at outsourcing. Remember that you do not need to outsource everything, and you do not have to take it to lands across the globe. You can generate tremendous performance improvements by focusing your attention on certain groups or types of interactions and looking to nearshore opportunities for staffing. Outsourced centers often have great in-house teams for process improvement, training and automation. Whatever your issues are, if you understand what you are driving towards, define what you need and what you bring as a partner, and engage by balancing risk and return, you can deliver vastly improved results in as little as 60-90 days. Sometimes just the process of looking at outsourcing uncovers ideas for how to improve the operation.
Whether the poor performance is your fault or not, strong leaders look ahead to achieve a going-forward plan, a new steady state or a fresh operational approach. And when you save the day, no one will remember who almost blew it – it’s the results that matter.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.