Adam Bujak, KYP.ai CEO and co-founder, talks to Sarah Burnett, our Chief Technology Evangelist, about how productivity mining can help organisations prepare for the economic crisis.
Sarah
Hi Adam, we have a looming economic crisis. In your opinion, how can enterprises prepare for it?
Adam
In a downturn, executives often focus on cost cutting and that typically leads to some skilled staff being laid off. This time things are a bit different. With a global shortage of skills, it would be counter-productive to let go of experienced personnel. It is sure to lead to poorer customer experience at a time when demand is uncertain, and you want to hang on to as many customers as you can.
This is when productivity mining can make an enormous difference. It can show enterprises not just how to improve, optimise and modernise processes to cut costs but how to boost productivity as well.
Sarah
Can you give examples of how KYP.ai can help improve productivity?
Adam
Yes, certainly. At KYP.ai we talk about “Know Your Potential” and with productivity mining you get process intelligence that tells you what potential there is in your organisation. You can learn the potential to remove friction from work to help your employees do more and better. For example, our clients often find that their skilled personnel are spending a good deal of time doing basic work repeatedly throughout the day. Many spend a third of their time cutting and pasting data from one system into another, or having to provide basic information repeatedly in chat channels as part of customer service. One client found that much of the chat could be handled by a chatbot and since deploying it, its skilled agents only spend 4% of their time doing chat, and that only when they need to take over from the chatbot to deal with more complicated requirements.
Sarah
Can you elaborate on how productivity mining can help with the shortage of skills?
Adam
Productivity mining shows you where there is friction in your processes. You can see it in the data that we provide, understand it, and take action to remove it. One major benefit of productivity mining and removing friction from work is that your staff become happier with what they are doing, and they enjoy their work more, leading to more job satisfaction and that in turn to fewer resignations.
Sarah
I imagine that makes HR leaders very happy too.
Adam
It does. In your blogs, you have talked about flow, that is when work is a good mix of interesting, enjoyable, and challenging, people become hyper-productive and happy at the same time. If you find and remove friction and other issues, like people being overloaded and working exceptionally long hours, or the opposite, having little to do and getting bored, then you can help create the right mix of work to help them achieve flow. Then you get higher productivity, and more employee engagement. That in turn reduces attrition rates and costs of hiring and training new personnel.
Sarah
I believe having flexible capacity to deliver products and services at various levels of output at times of crisis is important too. Can productivity mining lead to more flexible capacity?
Adam
Yes, we do that in two ways – firstly by helping enterprises improve their workload allocations and to maximise their human worker capacity. Secondly, find where there are opportunities for process automation and where robots can be switched on and off to handle fluctuations in demand with flexibility.
Sarah
Let me ask you about another important dimension in an economic crisis and that is process costs. Can you give some examples of how KYP.ai customers achieved cost reductions?
Adam
we have some great examples of this where through a mix of achieving frictionless processing, automation and higher productivity, our clients have benefitted greatly. They have avoided costs, like hiring costs. They have increased utilisation rates through better workload management and automation. They have consolidated activity and reduced costs by identifying under-utilised systems and decommissioning them.
Sarah
Do you think business growth is achievable in an economic crisis?
Adam
It is absolutely, and productivity mining can help with that too. It can identify new ways of doing things or improving operations. That helps enterprises produce innovative new solutions that could lead to growth.
Sarah
Thank you very much, Adam.
Related content:
How to Thrive in Uncertain Times
Dial up the productivity mining in shared services to achieve flow and more
KYP.ai Communication 
Sarah Burnett 
Felix Haeser