What state has Covid-19 left your business in?
Has it made you robust, agile and ready to deal with anything – or has it left you weaker, more vulnerable, and struggling to keep up with the pace of change?
I’m asking because it was about this time last year the pandemic struck and called time on our ‘traditional’ ways of working.
Many of the enterprises I work with were ready. But many more weren’t. It’s those companies that keep me up at night, and I worry how many will still be here when we mark the second anniversary of the national lockdown next year.
Quite simply, time’s running out.
The challenge ahead
Financially, Covid-19 has had a substantial effect on our society and economy. We're in the worst recession since the Second World War – with the World Bank estimating a 5.2 per cent contraction in global GDP last year – while McKinsey has seen the global numbers of employees working remotely increase fourfold.
Meanwhile, our recent Work Survey found some companies are still lacking when it comes to embracing remote working, with over a fifth (22 per cent) of execs and a quarter (27 per cent) of employees thinking their organisations hadn't reacted with enough speed and agility. And for nearly half (44 per cent) of the executives we surveyed, the transition has disrupted interdepartmental communication, meaning collaboration has got worse.
The irony is, the future of work is an exciting place for those C-suite execs who are brave enough to see the aftermath of Covid-19 as an opportunity to grow. For those of you who don’t, you might as well stop reading.
Striving for the Future of Work
On April 28th, I'll be hosting a panel discussion at ServiceNow's Future of Work virtual event, and I'd love to see you there.
For me, buying in as much tech as your business can possibly afford does not propel you towards a future workplace. In fact, it does the opposite, drowning your teams and customers with unconnected apps and processes.
The future of work will only arrive for business leaders prepared to reinvent their organisations to keep employees engaged and productive, and customers happy and loyal. And that means finding ways to improve the experience.
After all, it’s experience, not products, that now differentiates brands. There is no such thing today as a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ car, because consumers won’t accept that. Rather, it’s the purchase experience – and ongoing customer support – that make all the difference for customers. The exact same thing goes for your teams.
Winning in this experience economy only happens when you find ways of enhancing and enriching experience for both employees and customers. After all, if one’s happy, it makes sense that the other is too.
If my calculations are correct, that makes CX + EX = the experience economy ... and that is the future of work.
4 ways to win the experience economy
I’m fortunate enough to talk to customers on a regular basis and hear how experience is benefiting their customers or employees. And based on their experiences, I see four clear areas for businesses to focus on to win in the experience economy:
1. Make work less complicated
In my opinion, good experience happens when things are made simple.
For Vodafone, that meant streamlining processes to unlock better customer insight. Serving more than 300 million people, they worked with us to get a simple, intuitive, 360-degree view of their customers on one application that helps them provide excellent service. And it's led to a 25-point increase in customer satisfaction, as well as a 45 per cent increase in productivity.
2. Get rid of broken processes
Slow, manual processes see simple customer requests take hours to resolve, and that leads to frustration for your customers and your employees.
That's why Cheshire Datasystems Ltd. (CDL) was looking to grow its insurance software business by improving service desk response times. With ServiceNow automating their processes, they're now achieving up to 100x faster response times for incidents and requests, and have seen a 50 per cent reduction in calls and emails to the service desk. That's a big win for the experience economy.
3. Make teams more productive
Imagine you were responsible for the day-to-day lives of an entire population, from the food they ate, to the air they breathe, and the water they drink.
That's the role of Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. By turning to ServiceNow to connect their different departments and processes together, they've managed to reduce their agent call times by 50 per cent. That's meant less time spent on repetitive admin, and more time to spend helping citizens' issues when they need it the most.
4. Make work more efficient
With a workforce of over a hundred thousand people, and digital-savvy customers across 180 countries, BT is constantly challenging itself to find new ways of making work more efficient.
The business is now on a mission to reinvent the customer experience and better meet the constantly-evolving expectations of its customers. With ServiceNow, BT has built a customer-facing app delivering breakthrough services that will potentially eliminate up to 10,000 manual tasks – no mean feat for a business this big.
Join me at the Future of Work
Those are just four examples of businesses striving for the future of work by focussing on solutions that enable better experiences for teams and customers. I have many more to share!
As we start to see the emergence of avenues out of the global pandemic, it's time for us all to feel optimistic. Our Future of Work event on April 28th is an ideal opportunity for us to stop for a moment to consider where we've been, and where we're going – and we'll hear many more inspiring case studies, too.
I’ll be joined by Donal Óg McCarthy, managing director at Accenture Cloud First and Tom Cheesewright, applied futurist, for my panel, and I really hope to see you there.
Chris Pope is global VP of innovation at ServiceNow