Give your automation and AI some people power

How to get your teams working together and feeling better.

In our last blog we discussed the importance of taking smaller steps and putting process before technology.

But there is a bigger picture here – even if you get the process aspect right, it won’t necessarily count for much unless you can implement this on a company-wide scale. Whether that technological change can flow effectively across your business all rests on you creating the cultural shift needed for it to happen.

In short, you need to smash silos and build bridges.

Create company-wide cultural change

The mistake many businesses make is believing that automation and AI all hinges upon technology. If only.

You can’t simply deploy a program and expect a solution without a cultural paradigm shift, because that is what will ultimately be the vehicle for the technological shift. The companies that effect this change will be more likely to succeed in the long run.

Because of this need for company-wide collaboration, it’s vital to get everyone on board. Buy-in needs to be collective because it’s a lot harder to get things done if all your people aren’t supportive of the change. Some businesses have struggled after they found that getting buy-in from middle management proved a lot harder than buy-in from the C-Suite.

So what exactly will it look like when everything clicks into place across your company? It’ll be a more harmonious balance between automated interactions and human actions, together with a smoother, more effortless experience for your customers.

Smash those silos

Sabio helps clients to understand the importance of bringing their teams together as one.

That’s because AI-powered automation projects led by a small siloed team usually don’t go well. Teams isolated in silos often don’t understand how their actions affect other departments. A common example of this that we see today is in the digital team “owning” this new technology, adding new AI driven pro-active contact options online without consulting the contact centre operations, and the staff on the frontline are suddenly swamped and left managing this increased demand, unaware of where it came from.

AI-powered automation demands collaboration because companies function better when teams become mindful of the knock-on effect of their actions.

One of Sabio’s skills is in helping clients improve the internal communication between their departments. We can help clients identify and bridge gaps in each department’s understanding, and then bring the whole company together to be working on a shared goal as one.

Look after the wellbeing of your human beings

The potential benefits of automation and AI are tremendous, but if not applied in a careful way, automation programmes can be highly disruptive. Any new technology you deploy will affect your people, so it can only work if it’s compatible with them. It’s vital, therefore, that you’re aware of how automation impacts staff wellbeing, and have a plan to provide them with support.

You need to know right away if your agents are becoming overworked. Through successful automation, they won’t be dealing any more with the simple transactional contacts, instead they’ll be supporting your customers with longer, more mentally demanding interactions. We know that giving agents these non-stop complex and difficult conversations can take its psychological and emotional toll on them.

Thankfully, the applications of automation and AI reach inwards to your people and contact centre, so the same powerful technology that delivers solutions for your customers can be applied to support your agents. At Sabio we have solutions and systems to help you monitor the mental wellbeing implications of an increased team workload after automation and AI deployments.

Discover more insights in our new eBook

Our new eBook, Smashing Silos & Building Bridges. Automation and AI that unites all your people, reveals how to bring about this kind of people-powered automation.

You’ll learn many rich insights you can apply to your own company, such as:

• Sabio’s four pillars of success
• Four ways Sabio can help you harness AI
• Why automation and AI attempts often fail, and how to avoid these mistakes
• Why you need to think process-first, not tech-first
• How taking smaller steps allows bigger leaps
• Industry case studies from Marks & Spencer and BGL

Download the eBook HERE