The convenient solution

Inconvenience is a modern day sin. Scrolling ad channels offer ways out via any amount of doo-dad meant to simplify our lives. BILLY MAYS HERE. (r.i.p)

The crusade to root out inconvenience isn’t contained to infomercials, it’s everywhere. EZ Pass. Hail a person to pick up a $6 order and bring it to our house. Bag our own groceries. GPS.

Making life simpler should be noble, but when the aim is in every direction, it becomes really hard to pin down who is to benefit. Costs may only move like water in an inflatable mattress, only to bulge out another side. Collective experiences or public image may shift as we’ve seen recently in the retail sector. Consumers first rushed to the retail long ago for a pampered experience. Today, they fight auto-tip at pickup.

The need for self check-out may have been borne of necessity. Along with the curbsides and all other option. On occasion, these services rock. Nonetheless, many brands have lost luster by pushing the consumer to fully self-direct their experience. There are 4 ways to get an order from fast food these days but almost none to get a responsive person. I worked at McDonald’s for years, this ain’t no high-horse perspective.

Telephonic systems have had us filter layers of preselected and screened option routing a bad customer experience for decades. And now they’re riding long the artificial intelligence train via the chat bots.

Agents are the new multi-faceted approach to replacing those dastardly mundane tasks or roles with trained models (B actors). Customer service usually comes with high attrition, variable compensation, need for cultural fit, and other drags thought may be replaceable with these low hanging fruit conversions into the world of ai. How convenient for anyone staring at portly labor costs looking for reprieve. You hardly notice the difference.

Soon after reaching their limited scope, however, someone has to inevitably pick up and help with a situation the agent cannot. That team is by now fully diminished and overwhelmed with a never ending work pile of overflow. Luckily, agent 2.0 is now smart enough to clean some of it’s messes for a renewed subscription plan. Meanwhile, the ratings keep going down.

If this is what the ILA has meant to fight, then consider this author’s position changed. Down with the disruptive. Unfortunately, we digress away from an all automation is bad view of the world. Having spent years help build it, there’s a lot to gain when you have workers and consumers empowered with intelligent tools together. This does not mean buying into ai specifically. It means building intelligence into your systems to fit, leveraging skilled operators to maintain and develop further.

What to go after

Easy enough to say go hither and create cyborg organizations, but we risk pointing aimlessly about as I’ve labored over in the intro. So, where to start? When staring across a vast horizon of accounts or business processes it can be easy to take an average axe approach. Every ops manager in the nation has once preached about shaving $10 or 50 per shipment across all time and space for compounding like a Berkshire investment.

Instead, rely on pareto. The main levers for an organization lie in a few big pulls and bottlenecks to free. Solving for a single account or department’s dilemma can have a larger affect on a business than hitting some incremental gain on 80% of accounts or the company.

Spending all efforts on a more sophisticated data mechanism may help finally position better across all accounts. Moving up receivables by 10 days on a handful of accounts may have similar impact given time or financial constraint which gets us to fixing the right problems.

Fixing the right problems

I first began with pricing automation and evolved into a more holistic approach as it became clear how often the tools I had helped build did not scale equally everywhere. Even if we were still talking about pricing. For all the effort first made to respond to any request with a sophisticated rate, it never occurred to me we may have to accept one instead.

Creating a rate was useless when the systems asks you to accept something or counter versus offer. Yet this is exactly what some systems began to do, so we had to adapt.

Another account had no care for pricing anything at all. Their daily operations consisted of a yes/no on a firehose of FCFS tenders. Thereafter, an army of schedulers helped set and appoint the constant onslaught. These were opportunities that had nothing to do with “sharpening the pencil”.

Maintenance and integration

Which gets to a reality left untold for most systems from a new TMS to ERP to accounting software or ai agent in between is how to “hook into” or leverage any new offering. The idea of instantaneous connection should garner scrutiny. There is just too much to merge together, even to get started before any testing or production on anything worth so much impact.

Their value should be in return worth the wait, and scheduled over long horizons of use. There is little buying off the shelf and leaving anything alone, especially the more sophisticated the system. Once integrated, comes a partnership to handle the edge cases and upgrades and new features on an ongoing basis. This means teams and knowledge bases that share between one another over time.

Indirect Costs

Many such indirect costs have been highlighted again at the start, but this caution from the Boeing whitepaper is an all-time favorite of mine. The topic is of outsourcing manufacturing, but consideration is well suited for those looking to have functions of work replaced with automated and intelligent systems all over.  

Optimizing for convenience everywhere inevitably inconveniences the whole.