Goals

There’s a problem at work and it keeps happening. Joe keeps filling out the customer follow-up form and while he writes out their life story, he doesn’t capture all the useful information. So you made him a form, but people forget to refill the stack when they use the last one so there are lots of random bits of paper in the filing cabinet. The filing system, and I use the word system loosely, has been growing for years. You’ve taken to scheduling time to clear out the filing system and always find other random documents stored there. People regularly have to refer to the person who lodged the follow-up item because the forms aren’t up to date or can’t be found. Sounds like a nightmare factory for customer complaints, right?

While Joe is not real, this loosely outlines a real life problem that can occur in any place where customers exist, and the existing CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems) doesn’t account for it either through feature block or multiple CRMs being used to address different customer needs.

Why do I need a goal? Surely, I just need to automate out all that stuff. The point of a goal is to identify the specific objectives of your automation, to make them measurable, and to make them achievable.

Of the above, we have a few distinct problems.

• Form completion (printing forms, supplying the correct information)
• Document management (printing forms, storing forms, finding forms)
• Customer experience (lost information, failure to follow up, multiple enquiries)
• Information management (keeping more information than needed, storing without security measures, information not routinely destroyed when not needed)

Clearly, we need to fix the above list but when you break it into defined issues it’s not something that we can simply automate out by blindly starting to create flows.

Our initial goals may be as simple as those outlined blow. Once these are defined, we can start to create objectives that can be achieved as we continue through this process. Objectives often resemble a broad to-do list and give our project structure and act as progress markers.

Goals	Objectives
Eliminate hard copy paperwork associated with followup items	Create follow-up form in Microsoft Forms
Reduce customer complaints associated with followup process	Include followup status check in daily standup. Achieve fewer than three followup associated complaints per month over a three month period.

Now we’re not delving too far into the art of writing project goals here because our purpose at this moment is to look at why the goals themselves are important.

Achieving the above goals will see team members fill out an online form for customers which will be stored in one Excel spreadsheet and introducing the follow-up status check daily will reduce the number of follow-ups falling through the cracks therefore reducing complaints. Great! Problem solved, right?

Maybe. This is definitely a step that will improve the identified issue, but it does introduce others.

• Where is the Excel spreadsheet stored?
• Where did my data go?
• Why is management on my case about my follow-ups every day? I never forget them
• Do I really have to hold my team members’ hands? It’s their job to remember follow-up

“But I just want to automate one form!”, I hear you say.

Upon review, it’s clear that we’ve just shifted the impact of this particular problem to another place and THAT is the moral of this story. Maybe that’s an outcome that you’re happy with because that part of the business/team has capacity to absorb that issue or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, the point of identifying goals and treating process adjustments like a small project is to protect ourselves and our teams from committing to processes that further undermine the strength, efficiency and/or wellbeing of our teams.

A lot has been made of automation in recent years, much of the public understanding of automation focuses on replacing human workers with robotic ones. Depending on your perspective, this either moves us closer to the utopia of people spending more time on leisure and less time at work, or a world where corporate bottom lines have drastically increased unemployment and fiscal strife abounds.

Is it actually that black and white? Personally, I don’t think so.

In my mind, the outcome reflects the goal. If your business is seeking to reduce costs by reducing the number of team members then you’re going to pursue automation solutions that achieve that goal. A great example of this is self-serve checkouts. One person to manage five to twenty checkouts is a lot cheaper than paying one person per checkout. Obviously, shrinkage needs to be taken into account and some consideration for customer sentiment but on the balance of things its a net financial win.

Does this confirm that automation is out to get us and put us all out of jobs? No, it confirms that businesses pursuing cost reduction and increased efficiencies will sometimes seek to reduce staffing costs.

When you set your air conditioner to a specific temperature it turns off once it reaches that level, saving you power. When you sign up for a new product online and it sends you a welcome email with all your details, it makes sure that you won’t forget. When your calendar sends you a pop-up reminder about that all important birthday or appointment, it’s protecting you from errors or potential embarrassment.

Automation features in our everyday lives, much of it improves our quality of living by reducing the number of things we need to actively monitor in our busy lives.

How does this play into business efficiencies if not to reduce staffing costs? Often these automations can be leveraged to shift the focus or reduce the load of regular activities. Creating processes that leverage automation to reduce the number of steps, the number of errors, or the number of touch points can achieve a variety of things.

So the question really is; what is our goal?

If your goal is to reduce customer complaints, then your path there might be conforming and automating some of the customer followup process so reporting on timeframes is available, reminders to staff are automated, visibility is there for managers, and customers know that you have their information at your fingertips.

If your goal is to reduce the number of steps in a task, then the path there may be to automate the creation of documents and outgoing communications that are relevant to the task based on existing data.

So how do I define my goal? I’m so glad you asked.