Examples of Digital Operations, Part 2
A couple days ago, I shared a few examples of how good digital operations practices can impact your business: collaboration and automation. These focused on setting the foundation for your team’s ways of working and leveraging them to increase efficiency and flow.
Today we’ll cover integration and customer service.
Integration
I think of automation (discussed previously) as getting your tools to do things for you—send this there, replace this with that, etc. I think of integration as getting your tools to do things together. Many of the platforms I mentioned earlier provide the ability to pull other tools’ features into their own. If you use a customer support ticketing tool, you might be able to pull those into your project management platform. Or you might be able to access your company documentation from within your group chat.
All these things are small improvements in flow and efficiency that together over the span of weeks and months lead to real improvements in your organization’s performance.
And let’s not fall into the trap of focusing only on technology. Think about how you might better integrate the various teams within your org. Is sales up to speed on the latest and greatest from your production team? Do the individual contributors understand leadership’s vision? Getting everyone on the bus makes for a smoother day-to-day. When people understand the why behind their daily work they can find better ways of working and even better satisfaction in what they do.
Customer Support
Much of what I’ve discussed above is internally focused. But digital operations should extend to your customers, audience, or end-users as well. Customer support (or whatever you call it) should be a key piece of your planning. Does your external audience understand how to get in touch with you when they have questions? Do those inquiries have an established path or route to the responsible parties? Once they have those questions, do your employees know how to answer them and how much time they have to do so?
I think these questions around customer support are a nice way to highlight the need for well-considered digital operations. It’s easy enough to muddle through and make it work with your colleagues. But when you start getting inundated with customer requests, questions, and feedback, the need for systems and processes becomes hard to ignore.
Think of these challenges as the canary in the coalmine for your digital ops. If you’re seeing these needs from your customers chances are good your employees have them too.
If these topics resonated with you or if you want to learn more about taking your digital operations more seriously, reach out and let’s talk! Consultations are always free and I’d be interested to hear your perspective.
