I recently read a Wall Street Journal article by Anton Troianovski, Apps Reorder the Job Landscape. The article cites how companies are using apps to streamline their offerings to their customers but the price of those app's is that we the customers are now doing jobs that the company used to do for us. In addition to the perceived redistribution of work the author believes that customer service and customer service jobs are also being negatively affected. This blog is going to look at the issue of using apps from a business process perspective and the potential customer service implications of apps; to pose the bigger question; what is your app strategy?
Distribution of tasks should be at the core of any business process management philosophy and app's help companies do this in a cost effective manner. Doing business before the smart phone explosion of the last 5 years meant doing business with tons of process bottlenecks. Process bottlenecks are not generally evident to customers as bottlenecks, they become evident to customers through their symptom's: waiting in lines, waiting to get a response, limited hours of operations, not being able to get a product or service today, etc.. These bottlenecks end up costing customers time and occasionally money.
One of the examples the author cites in the article is mobile check depositing. I love mobile check depositing because it allows me to deposit checks from my house on Sunday afternoons in my pajamas. Why am I in my pajamas on a Sunday afternoon you may be asking; because I don't have to leave my house. The bank is saying use our app and we'll remove the bottleneck of you having to go to the bank when it's open to deposit your money. The author is correct in that I have now taken over the job of the teller but the actual time spent depositing the check with the app is about the same as it would be to write a deposit slip and hand it to teller. The obvious benefit to me the consumer is that I don't have to drive anywhere and wait on any lines to make the deposit. In my opinion this is an effective redistribution of work.
In another example of the insurance claim and the ability to take pictures and upload them when you have an accident, same thing. The company is asking you to take your time to photograph the accident but the benefit you are receiving is quicker service. If the company doesn't have to deploy a claims adjuster to your accident then they can start processing your claim faster which should save you time. Not deploying an insurance adjuster also saves the company money, which eventually should trickle down to lower insurance rates for you, if you didn't have an accident and weren't a menace on the roads. Once again they are distributing tasks to end users vs. sending all tasks to a claims adjuster who can only handle only so many claims per month.
From a business process perspective this is exactly what companies should be doing, distributing tasks and removing bottlenecks from service. I reject the premise of the article that suggests that in the good old days when you drove to the bank or waited for an insurance adjuster to come and look at your damaged car that it was all peachy customer service experiences. Every interaction you have with a company is a give and take. The real question that we as customers need to be asking ourselves is, does the app provide enough benefit for me to use it or not. Adoption is the only true measure of business process success.
From a customer service perspective I do think companies need to be careful about going from a human experience to a app only experience in 1 jump, such as Westfield Malls with their concierge desk. If your customers are used to interacting with humans and then one day those humans are completely gone you run the risk of losing those customers. Now that may be ok based off of your business model and the cost of servicing non-app customers vs. app customers. I can't imagine many companies making that jump in 1 move but I could see them being able to scale down human interactions over time and placing more functionality in apps. Going back to business process management your apps should be designed to handle 90 to 95% of use cases but you need some human interaction to navigate those 5 to 10% of one-off situations that don't occur enough to justify developing an automated process to deal with them.
What is your app strategy? The mobile revolution has taken hold so quickly that companies are having to jump into the deep end of the pool with no real idea of what they are trying to accomplish. Are you building apps in house to service your employees or customers? Are you not building apps at all because you don't have the internal skill set to develop them? Do you even need an app, is there business justification for spending the money on providing an app to your employee/customer base? Is the app that you are building going to be helping your customers/employees do something better, quicker, faster or is it just going to frustrate them? These are all questions that you need to answer for yourself as a company to determine how you are going to proceed.
I would use the following Business Process Management guidelines to help guide your app decision making process:
- Don't build an app just to say you have an app. No project should be undertaken without a clear path to positive ROI.
- Keep the first iteration simple, the beauty of these apps is that you can release updates so easily through the App Store and Android Marketplace.
- Customer Data and Corporate Data has to be secured. Insure that any valuable information being collected is stored appropriately through out the entire app lifecycle. Don't let your app be the cause of a brand damaging data breach.
- Build something that people are going to use, I stated this earlier but adoption is the only true measure of business process management success.
- Your app should support you customer service strategy, and any pull back of traditional customer service offerings should be done slowly and in conjunction with with App functionality insuring that there are no service gaps.
If you would like to learn more about how WEVO Group can help you with your mobile strategy from building apps, securing data, to securing mobile devices, please shoot me an email at tommy@wevogroup.com.
