The Future of Workplace Support ... and what is in the way.

About a decade ago, office workers were used to calling IT support to have an engineer drop by their desk and fix their IT issue. Slowly, organizations started moving to support over telephone and sending someone to desk sides only if it needed hands-and-feet support. Now, with the workforce comprising an increasing mix of millennials, the preference is shifting from consuming services over phone to self-service or consuming them via chat. So, what will workplace support in the future look like? By 2020, Gartner predicts:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) will disrupt the jobs of 1 million phone-based customer support agents
• 10% of business-to-consumer first-level engagement requests will be taken by virtual customer assistants, up from less than 1% at present
• 10% of emergency field service work will be both triaged and scheduled by AI

I think Gartner may have been conservative at least on the last point above. IT support will be proactive and predictive. Self-healing – the ability of a system to diagnose and proactively resolve an issue in a way that is transparent to the user – is beginning to find its feet. Systems of the future will self-heal, starting with the common issues. For the issues that can’t be auto resolved by the systems, the users will self-service many of those. To some extent owing to organizational processes driven by cost considerations, but mostly owing to increased IT awareness of the digital-native end users. Some issues, albeit very few, will still find their way to the fulfillment organizations (IT support, Procurement and the likes). Automation will play a big role in resolving and addressing the simpler (read: repetitive / standard) issues and requests. As the automation systems learn, they will increasingly resolve more and more issues and enabled end users to do so themselves. Only the complex issues will need human intervention. The large support teams of today will have far fewer people in the future and many bots as their co-workers!

So, the writing on the wall is clear as far as role of automation (RPA, Cognitive/AI et al) in IT service delivery goes. However, the transition is unlikely to be swift. There are still significant barriers to its adoption. In my previous article, I had talked about 2017 being the inflection point for RPA. For that to happen, the following challenges need to be addressed:

• Cost of technology – The required technology exists. But the not at the price points that can make them all pervasive. Given the current cost of automation (mainly licenses, but also infrastructure, development/configuration costs) and related services, establishing a positive return on investment is straightforward only for the high-volume use cases or where the labor is predominantly in high cost locations. Automation/Tooling platform vendors have to get innovative in their pricing models. Either be bold enough and offer outcome-based pricing or move to consumption based models. Or simply drop the price to make it tenable. Yes, the R&D costs have to be recovered, but there will be a time for that. Right now, with the mushrooming of automation vendors, it is time to capture market share.
• Standardization – This is a prerequisite for automation. Non-standard processes and heterogeneous environments don't lend themselves well to automation. Lines of businesses that rake in the moolah have been the biggest offenders. They have always been able to justify their "special" needs. That doesn't help. Standardization has got to be a corporate mandate. In this hyper-competitive world, no business can afford to be indulgent for too long.
• Knowledge Management – Another fundamental automation enabler. Stronger KM practices will enable better automation outcomes. Those that have been doing lip service to KM will need to pull up their socks. The more data you feed the bots and the machines, the smarter they will be in resolving issues.
• Awareness – It is surprising how little the organization is often aware of the tools and technologies that they have at their disposal. It is important to internally market the shiny new toys and make heroes out of the early adopters. Everyone should clamor for these tools. For that, they need to know.
• Adoption – Old habits die hard. Automation would be easier to implement where it runs transparently in the background. But, when automation requires an end user to do things differently (for instance, chat with instead of calling the IT help desk), it requires massive management of change. Organizations have ignored this important aspect only to see their IT investments not yielding the expected benefits. Imagine spending money to implement a password reset solution and still have 90% of the users call the help desk to have their passwords reset. Any business case you would have established upfront would go for a toss unless the solution is adopted aggressively. Management of change can be a mix of communication and IT measures. For instance, in the above example, don't provide an option for password reset on the phone. Have end users go back to the portal to self-service their needs. Or chat with support agents in the worst case. How many times have you had to call Facebook or Amazon for resetting your password?
• Tree hugging – This is relevant for the IT service providers. Managers, especially in low cost delivery centers, have often been measured by the number of people they manage. Not surprisingly then, you find managers being reluctant to let go of people. For the bigger the team size, the more highly you are valued. And the higher are your chances of moving up the ladder. That has to change – and fast. Organizations need to not only discourage that behavior, but also encourage and promote leaders that display exemplary behavior – the ones that drive innovation and deploy automation proactively. The measure has to change to how well you deliver with how few. Devise credible system-based productivity / efficiency KPIs and measures managers by those. Not by the number of people they manage. Changing human behavior is the hardest after all. This requires clear messaging from the top. And a bit of both - carrot and stick - at the same time to enforce the change with the managers.
• Fear of job loss – While tree-hugging may be more prevalent in some pockets, the fear of job loss is omnipresent. Employees and managers worry about their jobs and find a way to talk up the criticality of the manual processes and how automation just won’t cut it for them. Organizations need to have a clear plan around this. By 2019, more than 10% of hiring for customer service will be for writing scripts for bot interactions. So, honest messaging coupled with re-skilling programs should allay any fear, uncertainty and doubt.
• Politics – This plays a major part in automation not being adopted widely. People – mostly leaders – worry about the ideas not being theirs, someone else becoming a hero and many such trivial issues. And they miss the big picture. Again, this calls for clear mandate from the top and zero tolerance for wrong behavior. It is amazing how much can be achieved if people stopped worrying about who gets the credit!
• Other issues – There could be other issues that could come in the way. Regulatory, for instance. But there are ways to overcome those. It may slow down the process, but not stop it altogether.

Automation is now an integral part of service delivery design. Technology prices will drop, solutions will become economically viable and they will be faster to implement. It is easier for new systems to be built the right way from start. Organizations with legacy systems and processes have their work cut out. They will need to be creative. If they miss the bus, playing catch-up in this fast evolving space (RPA is already giving way to SPA - Smart Process Automation) might not be easy. Once the market has crossed the chasm, the laggards will find it hard to keep up with competition. So, it is now or never. Otherwise, they risk being saddled with a workplace support model of the past. The future will belong to the bold and the agile.