Africa’s Standard Bank has powered the continent’s economic growth for over 150 years. As new generations have taken the economic reigns, and their over ten million customers fundamentally changed via a digital transformation, they had to learn to respond in real-time, 24/7, and with uncanny relevance, accuracy, and cost efficiency.
When they implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to keep up with customer demand, every brick-and-mortar bank, every employee, and every customer relationship would need to change. They chose WorkFusion’s RPA software to enact the change and, with it, they received expert guidance from a firm that had already transformed countless Fortune 500 brands and knew how to manage large-scale technological change toward world-class customer experiences. The good news is, WorkFusion doesn’t keep their change-management secrets hidden.
Start and End with Buy-In for Long-Term Success
Like Standard Banks’ implementation of an enterprise-wide RPA software, when beginning a large-scale technology initiative, WorkFusion’s Jennifer Valenti warns: “Successful implementations depend on strong engagement from all stakeholders.” And, she and other WorkFusion stakeholders offer tips on how to create the top-down organizational buy-in so essential to sustainable change in a digital world.
1. Define and prove your business vision. Begin by developing a minimum viable product, complete with key features to satisfy early adopters’ product expectations. Even as you’re defining long-term success goals, as early users test the product, make sure its design and features show the immediate business value of your implementation. Design it to solve their problems and, thereby, create product enthusiasm.
As you expand usage rights and product features, these now confident and enthusiastic users are more likely to become product champions to other stakeholders, resulting in growing buy-in throughout your organization.
2. Locate and place your product champions. Via step one, you’ve already created potential product champions to position in strategic points in your business. Your implementation has solved their problems, so it’s time to evangelize those wins via the very people they impacted. Give early adopters a platform to share their success stories. You may do so by publicly rewarding their wins or giving them an opportunity to present their projects before key stakeholders.
3. Ensure team success with easy-to-use business processes that promote shared ownership. Be careful how you expand on your technology-solution design to solve new user problems. Whether techies or customer-service representatives, all relevant stakeholders should feel just as at home applying your implementation to their problems as your early adopters did.
Choose solutions with intuitive user designs and interfaces as well as personalized views. For example, for real-time, granular analytics, Standard Bank chose WorkFusions’ Control Tower, which offers users a self-explanatory interface that shows the status of every business task as well as end-to-end business processes.
Intelligent automation allowed bank workers to visually track key performance indicators and workforce performance so employees from the top down could easily define their problems, monitor them, and view their progress toward business goals. With a little piece of the pie personalized to them, users feel ownership over the initiative. With ownership comes buy-in.
4. Allow users to focus on the core talents and strengths that build enthusiastic confidence. Lean on intelligent-automation technologies that eliminate tedious tasks and allow users to focus on the key talents and strengths that instill confidence in them. In doing so, you remove the uncertain sting of change and show employees how their roles will be more essential than ever. Who wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that?
For Standard Bank, via Intelligent Automation software, processes were automated as machines learned to carry out simpler employee actions observed via the application user interface. This left brand experts to focus on tasks that only human knowledge can guide and carry out. In this way, employees became more indispensable as their time investments became highly specialized and, therefore, more valuable to the bank and its customers.
5. Use technology to define clear roles and set their boundaries. Change management 101 tells us that undefined roles breeds uncertainty or a sense of lost control — feelings that few of us are eager to embrace. In contrast, clarified roles remove the bitter taste of uncertainty, leaving room for growing initiative ownership and enthusiasm.
Look for technology solutions with role clarifying features. Standard Bank removed the uncertainty of vague roles by incorporating WorkFusion’s automation workflows. These allowed tasks to automatically be intelligently routed to the right person or bot.
In addition, the Control Tower’s visualization of the individual tasks each is responsible for means employees don’t have to wonder what falls under their role jurisdictions. As such, employees could be more proactive in their changing roles and, therefore, in control of their own success.
6. Catalyze positive momentum: eliminate struggles before they settle in and make wins contagious. When workers struggle with new solutions, it often taints their opinion of them. For new technology initiatives, don’t let users wallow in their struggles. Instead, choose technologies that allow you to monitor job performance in real-time, identify the areas in which people struggle, train in real-time to increase understanding and skill, and allocate tasks according to users’ strengths based on job performance.
Simultaneously, choose solutions that will allow you to pinpoint those who do well and then reward them, ideally in a public fashion. Doing so boosts overall morale as team and member performance is recognized as positive.
WorkFusion’s SmartCrowd solution allows brands to monitor worker-performance analytics in real time, pinpoint wins and areas needing improvement, then act to reward or offer training to further develop skill sets. As a result, the stage was set for Standard Bank’s team confidence to steadily rise while eliminating change pain points as they happened.
Now, it’s your turn.
For any change initiative, top-down buy-in requires a contagious positive momentum created by a clear change vision, reduced complexities, user support to eliminate pain points, emphasized wins, proven change value, user control and ownership, and user support so each can realize their value and success-potential in the change process. This is true when implementing any new business initiative, but especially in a technology initiative where change can be more complex as machines come alongside human agents. Choose technologies that work alongside human change agents to create a positive change momentum.
With WorkFusions’ guidance, Standard Bank took their business vision to its fullest impact, creating a leaner company that could offer better customer experiences. For their now always-on, fast-paced customer base, their new RPA capability meant employees could create greater customer-centric efficiency. With WorkFusion’s guidance and solutions, customer onboarding was reduced from 23 days to just five minutes.
Now it’s your turn to follow suit: in your next enterprise-technology initiative, follow WorkFusion’s 6-step change path toward a stronger and more sustainable business offering catered to your target markets.
