Many routine and repetitive tasks carried out in your company can be solved with the incorporation of technology. It can also be a very useful tool to speed up customer service and, as a consequence of these two objectives, you will end up reducing costs.
But beware! Many times the benefits that are sought with a change proposal (such as incorporating technology), can modify the service system, thus affecting its quality.
I will show you some considerations that you must have for this strategy to produce its benefits without affecting customer service.
Incorporating technology in the production of tangible goods is not the same as in the production of services. There is a key difference in the management approach, which makes some very successful strategies in industrial companies not work when it comes to services.
That difference lies in the very nature of the services. C. Grönroos explains it to us.
Traditional management principles (based on industrial experience) indicate that the predominant factors that lead to profit are the productivity of capital and labor. These are factors of internal efficacy. However, external efficiency prevails in services. That is, what customers experience and evaluate.
Many measures to improve internal efficiency affect external effectiveness. It would be the case of reducing the number of nurses in a hospital, by calculating the care they must do for each patient and their standard times. In other words, increase the productivity of the nurses' workforce, eliminating their downtime.
Probably, if a good study of the work is done, this reduction would not affect the technical quality of the service. In other words, patients would not be neglected in everything they need to regain their health. Internal efficiency increases.
However, it is probable that the patients and those who accompany them do perceive a decrease in the quality of the service, as they experience less availability of the nurses to attend to their spontaneous requests, which are often not related to health care tasks, but more either with requests for personal care, such as improving the patient's comfort (accommodating him, providing him with more shelter, etc.), or evacuating some doubts that concern the patients or their relatives (if the patient's condition is normal, or a discomfort, or when it should be visited by the doctor, etc.). Or also when noticing that the tasks are carried out more quickly, without time for preamble, dialogue with the patient, containment.
This would be a case in which internal efficiency (labor productivity) is improved, but external efficiency is affected (perception of customer quality).
The same can happen with technology. When you are driven to incorporate technology into your service, you should ask yourself the following question:
Is the objective of this incorporation to improve internal or external efficiency?
If the answer is external, then go ahead. This change will produce an improvement in service quality, and surely, due to our natural tendency, you will have already evaluated the aspects of internal efficiency. What you should observe is that this improvement has a positive impact on all types of customers in your segment. Sometimes it happens that it will serve the majority, but there is a minority (always within your target market) who will complicate things with this change. You must take these cases into account and foresee alternatives for them. It is the typical case of internet operations. For many it will simplify life, it will save time, but for others it will be a complication since they are not accustomed or trained to use these tools.
Always give them an alternative that shows you have thought of them.
If, instead, the answer is to improve internal efficiency, you should analyze what will happen to external effectiveness. Analyze the impacts on customer perception and ensure that, with this change, the quality they perceive of the service does not decrease. Pay attention to the functional quality dimension (how the service is provided), since often only technical quality is analyzed (as in the case of nurses), but this is only part of what the client perceives.
I propose to follow the following analytical process:
