The Self-Healing Workplace

I was just reading this article from my former colleague, Ken Quaglio.

I think he is spot on with the importance of predicting and then mitigating a future poor customer experience automatically. And that automated response is what I want to talk about.

You see, it isn't just about recognizing a problem or helping the customer to fix it when they complain, but it is about taking the initiative to make it right before the customer even knows it. I've spent the last few years in the Workplace Support business and the traditional economics there are all about the cost of calls to a help desk, servicing a laptop, removing a virus, rebooting a server, etc. I am heartened to see other former colleagues of mine (such as Marc Wilkinson and Tadd Koziel, both at HPE) try to redefine this business to focus on customer productivity and the overall user experience.

For starters, I believe this requires the folks who provide these services to stop seeing the Enterprise users of these help desks as a captured audience that is to be cost optimized and instead begin seeing them through a consumer lens where loyalty must be earned.

If the typical user of a help desk in a big corporation was individually paying for your service, do you think they would renew their deal with you? Most often "No".

So, rather than just trying to have the cheapest per transaction cost, if you took some of the self-healing approaches that Ken cites, could you actually get a happier client and a differentiated service that an alternative low-cost provider could not easily copy? If your password is going to expire while you're traveling, can I ask you to change it now? Or perhaps give you a grace period until you return? If I know you usually use SAP or WorkDay during the afternoon and it's down, could I proactively tell you so you can plan something else? Can I ship you a new laptop if I can tell your hard drive is failing?

Any outage, annoyance or cumbersome process is a chance to lose your customer. Unfortunately, it is a reality of business that these will happen from time to time.

The market is demanding better service and the businesses that can step up to it at a reasonable price will be the ones that win. Adopting a little "self-healing" could go a long way to accomplishing this.