Alex Smart Yeah, that’s the question that everybody’s asking at the moment. So digital first future. We are already there. It’s not really a future. Just about every business is digital first, even if they don’t think they are.
Everything that underpins every transaction you do in your business is underpinned by some kind of technology. You know, your email, your banking transactions, your your file storage. So even if you don’t sell anything online, you’re still a digital business.
So I think the digital business is here, but I think what has changed over that COVID period is the expectation of the experience of the digital business, both from your internal customers, but also your actual customers that you’re selling products to. They expect a different experience.
They expect to be able to do what they can do in person, digitally as well, and they want to have the option to choose which way they go.
Now, for businesses, that’s a big challenge, because, you know, transforming things that you’ve been doing over the phone or through a human into a digital environment.
It’s not necessarily that easy or that easy to scale, and that’s where I think the emergence of new technologies like AI is changing the game, and so we’re using AI. For instance, at the moment, to understand the sentiment of people who call us.
So we used to do sentiment analysis quite manually. We used to listen into calls. We used to review call recordings, but now we have continuous AI monitoring of customer sentiment, and it can even alert you know, your your contact center team leaders, when something’s going off track.
And what that does is it just helps us provide a better experience immediately for our customers, whereas before it would have been, oh, six months ago, we found we weren’t doing that well. Let’s put a program in place to improve it.
Now we know instantly how well we’re doing, and it can also help us pick up on where sentiment might be falling. It might be a particular product design. It might be something that they’re finding that they can’t do on a website.
So, you know, I think this is where ao is just accelerating those experiences and helping businesses to move faster. And I think we’re very open to adopting that. I wouldn’t call us bleeding edge, but I do think we’re quite leading edge on some of that stuff.
And I think because we’re a small business and we’re quite an agile business, it’s probably slightly easier for us to adopt some of those changes and test them.
If you’ve been a large, well established organization, it takes a bit more time to turn a big ship than a little boat. So speaking of turning big ships, you’ve led several transformation projects throughout your career. So what is it that attracts you to them?
And what advice would you have to new CIOs, who are maybe taking on their first major change project? Yeah, okay, so the first part of your question, I’ll tackle first, which is what attracts me to transformation. And that’s I’m essentially a problem solver at heart.
I actually I probably don’t have deep skills than anything else. That’s the one thing that I would own as my deep skill is being a problem solver. I love facing into a real challenge and figuring out how to solve for that challenge.
That’s what transformation is, because you don’t go down a transformation path unless you have a really painful problem to solve, because it’s not an easy thing to do. Incremental improvement is far better because it has less impact. But you don’t do incremental change for a really big problem.
You do transformational change for a really big problem. So I think that’s what’s attracted me to transformation, because I love solving those problems, and I think there are some things in transformation that, if you know in advance, can help you really be successful at them.
So we’ve already talked about one, which is, keep the objective front and center. Don’t get distracted. Remember the problem you’re trying to solve, and be really single minded about solving that problem. But alongside that form, the simplest path to get there to solve that problem.
Don’t make it complex. Don’t try and add everything and all at once, go down the simplest path to get to that objective. There’s plenty of time later to improve it.
And once you do that, once you form that path, then you can kind of understand what capabilities you’re going to need, and you can assemble a small group of people highly skilled in those capabilities to form a lead team.
And that core team is essential for the success of delivering a transformation. And I would suggest that that team can’t be people from outside of your business.
That core team has to be people who are in your business because nobody loves your business like people who work in it. You can have some brilliant contracting partners, and we do have some brilliant contracting partners, but they can’t love your business like your people do.
So that core team is essential, but you’re never going to get enough people for a transformation from your internal team. So obviously you need to grow that, and you need to scale up by bringing in resources that you can scale down later.
And that’s easy to do once you have that real core team that really has ownership, that’s highly capable that understands the simple path that you’ve laid out and can hold the main thing and make the main thing the main thing.
