A qualitative report on the digital transformation process

Role of Digital Customer Service

Introduction Jonathan Archibald, MD, Brightwave Group

At the start of conducting this research I was hopeful that we could discover some of the real challenges facing today’s modern customer service organisations and what this meant for Learning and Development. We wanted to get past the stats to the truth of what is happening on the ground.

The stories we are exploring have been on our horizon for years, but now, as if without warning, we find ourselves amongst it, deep inside the process of transformation, and building our own unique pathways to take us from where we are now to where we need to be.

We have long been talking about a coming age of digital transformation, a wave of change that will affect consumers, the work force, our systems and our learning. AI, automation, and all their disruptive promises are here, now, and already taking effect. The feeling has been that this is happening around learning and development but that we have not had the empowerment and the skills to put in place what needed to be done to support this seismic change. We as an industry have been talking about what needs to happen, but the reality is that we have been one step behind.

But our research has shown me that things are changing, and quickly. Everyone we spoke to is on this journey. Some are just starting out, some are leading the pack, but everyone is pushing in the right direction.

Throughout the many findings there were some key things that rang out from everyone we spoke to. Our learners need to be empowered to guide their own learning journey and we are not doing enough to help them. Whether that is through the tools and content we provide, the ease of access to them, or even helping learners understand that they exist. It’s not a question of whether the tech and tools exist or are fit for purpose anymore: they do… but are we using them enough, do our teams have the right skills to exploit them, is the wider business supporting them enough to get them embedded?

These are the challenges for all of us, for me as someone who runs a business supporting Learning and Development teams to you supporting your own organisations.

The Role of Digital is changing, and maturing rapidly. We are long past online PowerPoint and checkbox elearning and moving to a new model. Its importance in ensuring the success of our learning workforce is not in doubt anymore. We just need to all work together to achieve it. I hope by sharing the qualitative research in this report - the stories and narratives of what this process feels like, in the workflow, as we’re doing it, we can unleash the transformative potential of digital that much more effectively.

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Executive Summary Digital learning on the marchThe proportion of total L&D budget spent on digital solutions is at an all-time high. Digital’s prominence in the blend is shifting as innovations in technology and instructional design continue to make it an essential part of how today’s most essential skills are learned and shared. In the world of knowledge-sharing and performance, for any type of skill, digital is increasingly the smart organisation’s first choice.

Learning and Development teams with major Customer Service-focused organisations are bringing together different strands of digital experience into a cohesive strategy, looking beyond customer success to the enabling functions that will take digital transformation to the next level. A more seamless experience for colleagues is fully on the agenda for 2017.

1. Colleague experience is the second wave of digital transformation2017 will be the year when many Customer Service-focused organisations at mature levels of digital transformation for the customer will bring this same experience to colleagues. This will help B2C organisations make the most of their existing investments in digital skills and infrastructure, providing knowledge and resources to optimise the current customer multi-channel experience and embed continuous learning to build-out future skills requirements for L&D teams.

2. Budgets fund shift to employee-empowered learning / integrated continuous learning experience Organisations are seeing learning as part of digital transformation to support colleague experience and integrate analytics. Whilst a majority of overall L&D budgets are staying level, the proportion of spend on digital learning solution is increasing, with further digital ‘change’ projects financed centrally.

The most frequently-reported strategic driver of transformation is increasing cross-device accessibility and self-service for the learning content people want, when they need it. The significant barriers here are time, flattened access, and requisite supportive culture and mindset changes.

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3. Universal digital literacy is becoming an urgent need. And it starts with L&D.Digital literacy is widely recognised as an essential requirement within L&D teams. Closing skills gaps in this area is a priority for businesses moving towards a formalised digital strategy.

Digital is finally having an impact on how L&D teams are structured, influencing reskilling/upskilling decisions and recruitment. Desirable skills include data science, user experience (front end design) and design-thinking – expanding traditional L&D skill-sets.

4. Self-service is driving organisations to rethink contentUser-generated content and social learning are major priorities for this year but are teams putting in the comms and capability to support.

Whilst we as colleagues have high expectations in terms of learning consumption, learning content production in a work context isn’t yet a wide expectation of employee behaviour. Most organisations accept this as a huge cultural shift: even digital natives with highly-connected lifestyles struggle to transfer such habits into productive workplace activity.

5. Making sense of learning for self-service Leading organisations are bringing in job families, career and learning paths to provide a framework to self-service. Formalisation of this prevailing trend is providing a closer match of skills and career paths to learning. The ability of colleagues to find the right information in order to ‘get the job done’ is no longer in doubt. The next step lies in being able to contextualise that data for the customer’s immediate needs. The connected customer’s immediate product knowledge might easily beat that of the customer service agent, whose role is now to apply, filter and relate that information back to the customer’s personal case.

6. Collaboration between L&D and customer-facing teams accelerates transformationCollaboration with customer-facing digital and product departments helps learning teams think in new ways and enables L&D to give a more ‘consumer-grade’ experience to colleagues inside the organisation.

7. Customer service transformation is directly impacting learning propositionsThe need to multi-skill agents to support multiple products via multiple channels is becoming clear as automation and digital transformation releases colleagues to spend more time with customers and complex queries (which open up new opportunities for upselling and customer development).

The need to help end customers self-serve as well as providing live information and support to meet customer’s increasing expectations and knowledge.

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Culture, Leadership and ManagementHow today’s Customer Service organisations manage learning and skills development. Who is in charge, who are the learners, and where does L&D fit?

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1.1. Where does responsibility for Customer Service Learning and Development sit in the organisation?

Human Resources

In 95% of cases we spoke to, the Learning and Development (L&D) function sits as a sub-team inside the Human

Resources function.

To understand the level of importance attached to learning by today’s organisations it is useful to identify the role, level, and broader functional responsibilities of the senior leaders responsible for learning within the organisation.

However one major retailer’s learning leader reports to the company’s Operations and Retail Director. This is seen as providing a seat at the top table and tangible links to organisational deliverables, productivity-focus, and customer satisfaction results.

It is widely acknowledged that the L&D function touches so many other operational areas that an ability to move between departments and appeal to multiple stakeholders simultaneously is an essential informal skill for L&D leaders. Organisational structures that allow for this flexibility are more important than any set ideas around codified ‘best practice’.

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1.2. 2017 L&D spending forecast - overall

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50%

22%

28%

stay the same

decreaseincrease

“Everything has previously been face-to-face so budget will decrease due to investment in digital. We’re increasing internal capability for digital and face-to-face training so less outsourcing, less cost.” Thames Water

These figures hide a more complex story:

• Many respondents who replied ‘stay the same’ or ‘decrease’ also state that major learning projects, or broader global or change initiatives that have an essential learning component, will receive further central investment as required.

• Organisations reporting a decrease in overall budget also cite the reason for decrease as their investment in digital: the amount of learning isn’t decreasing, it’s just switching to more cost-effective options like digital.

Drivers of these cost efficiencies vary: brands at an earlier stage of digital transformation are under pressure to reduce operational costs. Others are implementing more rigour to drive greater value from learning investment.

Half of respondents report that their total L&D budget will remain static in 2017, with just under one-quarter reporting a year on year increase.

1.3. 2017 L&D spending forecast - digital

14%

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86% increase in their spend

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“There is no lack of great content, the difficulty now lies in building a great, integrated experience”.Bersin, HR Disruptions for 2017

A large number of learning leaders are entering 2017 with large-scale transformation projects already underway, introducing platforms and solutions with the aim of improving the colleague experience and integrating effective analytics to drive further feedback and insight for later projects.

Many of these projects aspire to pivot towards an increase in informal, user- generated and curated content.

Everyone is going digital.

Overwhelmingly companies anticipate an increase in their spend / use of digital in 2017 (86%) with only 14% reporting that this will ‘stay the same’.

No one reports a decrease.

1.4. Learning team size and ratios

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We found that while the company at the highest-developed level of digital transformation also had the highest ratio of employees to L&D team members, this was not a representative trend. Although digital uptake enables us to do more with less, it doesn’t inevitably lead to a reduction in L&D personnel. Instead, it appears to be increasing the need for digital L&D experts who can enable wider transformation across the organisation.

Ratios of company employees to L&D team members:

1:466

1:63

1:2767Lowest ratio

Mean ratio

Highest ratio

1.5. How would you describe your overall business’ current stage ofdigital transformation?

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Most business-to-customer companies are in 2017 some way along a journey to provide a seamless customer experience and formalising the strategies to enable this at scale. Many have invested heavily in customer experience initiatives since 2015 to support general increase in customer expectations for great service and simplicity across all channels.

For most organisations 2017 is the time to pull together disparate systems into a cohesive strategy which also looks beyond the customer experience to the enabling functions that will help take this to the next level. This dynamic isn’t yet translating to the colleague experience at the same pace - although this is very much on the agenda for 2017 and beyond.

45% of businesses cite lack of digital skills as the biggest barrier to becoming a digital business.Source: Accenture 2015

The right senior leader mindset is crucial for successful ongoing transformation. Organisations at more mature stages of digital transformation report more digital-focused leadership teams. Cultural and legacy effects are significant here.

The Six Stages of Digital Transformation

Business As Usual

1

Present & Active

2

Formalised

3

Strategic

4

Converged

5

Innovative & Adaptive

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1.6. At what stage of digital transformation is learning, performance and knowledge sharing within your organisation?2017 is the year when many B2C organisations at mature levels of digital transformation for the customer will bring this same experience to colleagues.

Most L&D Departments have been pushing boundaries through experimentation, laying groundwork and creating momentum for official digital transformation programmes, many of which are being implemented this year. Colleagues are also customers, using multi-channel delivery and taking advantage of disruptive technology in their private lives and bringing these expectations of support to the transformation process.

A small number of organisations are keeping pace with the level of digital transformation for the business. The majority are 0.5 – 1 stage behind with stated intent and roadmaps for more formalised transformation in 2017:

The average level of digital maturity is 2.4 for L&D functions compared to 3.1 for the overall business. We need to train the L&D function first for those skills to cascade throughout the organisation.

Customers were the focus of the first wave of digital transformation. The second wave? Colleagues - changing skills and experiences both inside the L&D function and in every key business area.

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1.7. What skills does your team have to support digital learning? What do you outsource and what do you produce internally?

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It’s important to understand L&D team structures, their ability to adapt to work at different scales, and their level of digital skill. The traditional skills of L&D - f2f training, learning design etc. - are developing into new forms and being joined by more future-focused tech- and service-based skills, such as consultancy, content design, social media and community management, design thinking and product management.

The majority of learning leaders are looking to increase internal L&D capability to support digital agility to enable continuous learning.

• This isn’t just the traditional skills of the L&D team: digital skills gaps are common to all L&D teams.

• Desirable L&D skills for 2017 and beyond include digital content development and publishing, video capability and analytics skills.

Additional skills are needed to support self-service and continuous learning. Many utilise external third-party digital learning providers to augment expertise and support around the internal team. For complex projects and initiatives this support is still essential in most cases.

• A changing emphasis to user-generated content (UGC) is present, but cultural and structural support is lacking in most cases. UGC creates its own complex learning and production demands, and is not applicable to all learning situations. Successful integration of UGC into the wider L&D offering requires clear policy and flexible strategy: moving from top-down to horizontal learning solutions is a marathon, not a sprint.

• Digital literacy is a key requirement for new recruits in the learning team. Many teams are self-taught and are transferring skills.

“Ideally, people would have design-thinking skills, user experience, front-end designers who can prototype an MVP quickly. It’s essential to have a good product manager who understands user needs, behaviour, technology and the business requirements.”

1.8. How does your learning team collaborate with other internal functions?

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In smart and streamlined organisations the L&D function benefits from collaboration with other colleague-facing functions, plus those other teams applying digital technology to improve end customer experience.

Who owns the colleague? In a networked business it’s crucial to share common purpose – support functions across the business must work together to provide the best experience for colleagues as customers.

Collaboration across diverse areas such as digital products, innovation and internal comms represents a massive opportunity for driving L&D outcomes throughout the organisation.

• Organisations with higher levels of digital transformation maturity collaborate more and with better outcomes:

Improved collaboration is a strategic necessity resulting from advanced levels of advanced digital development.

• The introduction of social learning networks and enhanced next generation LMS functionality enables L&D to bypass traditional and broadcast internal communication channels.

• This informal flow of skills and knowledge between peers and colleagues is an important source of innovation and development that routes around organisational hierarchies and obstacles.

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Strategic drivers, barriers and benefitsWhat is driving investment in digital L&D?Cost efficiency, digital transformation, capability gap, new products, culture change, digital literacy and the ability to support customers.

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2.1. What are the key strategic drivers for L&D investment in your organisation?

Organisational digital capability and literacy at the colleague level is a priority area for those businesses moving towards formalising a digital strategy.

Large established organisations can be nervous about digital uptake’s unforeseen risks and the disruptive ways it can affect the many other challenges of operating at scale, from legacy IT infrastructure to international legislative compliance.

Nevertheless, mobile, multi-channel access and the ability to self-administrate are seen as key aspirations for unlocking digital’s many benefits. Realising technical access and cultural learner autonomy are a vital aspect of moving customer AND colleague experience to the next level.

“For us, there are two main interlinked drivers: Making sure people can access what they want, when they need it with consistency on all devices. The second is mindset. We need to market the benefits to say it’s ok to learn what you want. Be as inquisitive at work as you are when searching for a holiday or insurance.”

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Strategic drivers

2.2. What are the main barriers to using digital learning? What misconceptions are holding us back? Are organisations equipped with the technical infrastructure and cultural capacity to optimise the benefits of digital?

• Most companies consider ‘legacy’ as the biggest barrier - the simple difficulty of moving from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. Overcoming legacy inertia and integrating systems into new processes is an important part of the digital transformation journey.

As part of wider digital transformation, every organisation has a decision to make: gradual renewal of systems and hardware - or a hard digital reboot? The quicker these common challenges are overcome, the sooner digital benefits become both apparent and genuinely transformative to the broader organisational goals.

• Lengthy sign off processes with content providers are also mentioned as an impediment to L&D agility. This is a driver for the increase in internal capability, and the quest for iterative ‘minimum viable product’ solutions and the necessity of both internal and external content teams to be able to collaborate rapidly and at scale. This expertise tends to currently exist and is available as a service proposition from leading vendors.

• Understanding how to self-serve: individual mindsets are another barrier. The behavioural shifts that have taken place over the last decade in our personal lives – all digital, all mobile, all the time – have not been mirrored in the workplace.

Even ‘born digital’ millennials don’t necessarily understand the rule-book for using social at work – and this uncertainty creates new barriers even in organisations where legacy inertia has been overcome.

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“We need to get across the message that work is learning, learning is work. It brings immediacy to the content and makes it useful.”

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Preferred learning models and blendWho teaches the teachers? Which conceptual apparatuses inform our thinking when we plot and plan our digital L&D strategies?

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3.1. What learning model (if any) underpins how you deliver learning?

There are two trends that the modern L&D team needs to balance: one is making learning useful to support performance capability, right here and now. The other is helping colleagues gain skills for the future, driving behaviour change and innovation.

Mastering this dynamic – and finding frameworks to support it – is key to optimal L&D delivery, and is attested by the research shared as part of Bersin’s continuous learning model.

• In preparation for a learning future where autonomous, self-directed (and self-generated) learning becomes the norm, organisations are focussing on new job families, business and technical skills beyond management and leadership as a way of structuring progression and career paths.

• Formalisation is providing a closer match of skills and career paths to learning, balanced against a push towards self-service within established frameworks to help colleagues connect with other people and opportunities.

This requires us to ask questions like: What does the colleague care about? What does the colleague need to know and when? What are their realistic user scenarios? How do we blend and balance different learning solutions to meet the learner’s development ambitions and career-path?

• The core lesson of the 70:20:10 model – that most learning in an organisation happens informally, in the flow of work – has been widely accepted as a truthful picture of the reality within today’s businesses. The terminology itself has dropped out of general use, largely due to its unfamiliarity outside the immediate L&D sphere.

“We split by Leadership, Technical, Operational, and Functional business skills. We don’t currently split around experiences – which it should be.”

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3.2. What’s your blend split between face-to-face and digital?Understand if there are any criteria applied to using digital / blend and if there is a percent target for digital solutions. How do today’s customer service-focused L&D teams decide to make digital part or all of a solution? Are there set criteria applied to using digital solutions in the overall learning blend, or do decisions on the split vary from project to project, and from learning need to learning need?

• The proportion of digital learning in the overall blend is increasing across the board. However, even the most digitally mature organisations are registering no more than 50% digital, and most organisations are aiming at about 50% as part of a longer-term roadmap and as an aspirational target appropriate to most learning needs and blends.

• Alongside this more imaginative and effective use of digital is the reinvention and higher priority on face-to-face for where it matters and can add the most value to the blend.

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“We are aiming to do more in blended space. Digital is not about cost efficiency. It’s about what’s the right experience for our colleagues and the business. We’re looking at our audience profiles, just like customer segmentation, to create solutions that makes sense in this context.”

3.3. What technology infrastructure (platforms) do you have in place to access learning content and resources?Learning Management System (LMS) technology is used by all of the organisations who participated in our research. However the way this technology is deployed – where the LMS links to performance and talent systems or supports mobile learning, and how effective it is for the organisation – varies massively from case to case.

• A significant proportion of respondents are already involved in a learning technology transformation project, involving for example a move from Enterprise LMSs to Cloud-based apps.

• Most organisations appreciate that moving towards social learning practices as part of an iterative sequence of improvement represents a huge cultural shift. Success in this area is not going to happen overnight despite considerable ambition and some encouraging pilot successes (and failures) – many feel 2017 will be a breakthrough year for social learning and user-generated learning content.

• Many orgs are introducing specific micro-learning programmes to increase capability of customer service staff.

There is a direct correlation between learning and team capability / performance which is now being actively leveraged by progressive L&D teams to deliver real behaviour change, real skills development, and real results.

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“We have Work Day App, Cornerstone, Lynda.com and we’re looking for this all to become one App and access point over next 12 months.”

3.4. How is digital transformation in customer service impacting your learning proposition?

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The digital revolution in Customer Service is changing the learning terrain beneath it. The two complementary dynamics shaping our response to this trend are, on one hand, how to support multi-channel Customer Service; and then how to extend multi-channel to the colleague.

• The ability to self-learn. From customer service agents to engineers servicing people in their homes – colleagues need to be able to support their own development as the upskilling, as change is a constant.

• The need for different skills. For many the aim is for automation and digital transformation to release more time for solving more complex customer queries. This requires increased capability in problem-solving and communication skills as well as service and product knowledge.

• Helping customers self-serve. Digital transformation has to be about ease for customers. During digital transition periods they may require *more* assistance as they become familiar with the nw system, and these effects need to be anticipated and planned for.

This dynamic works both ways: Colleagues need a level of digital literacy and light instructional skills to be able to support today’s complex customer needs.

Solving these problems requires built-in flexibility from our learning systems and programmes: colleagues do not need to know all the answers, but they must know how to find those answers.

Some companies, particularly within the Banking or Financial sectors, are taking this further by looking at digital skills as a cultural programme which helps communities beyond the paid-for services they offer.

• Meeting customer’s increasing expectations and knowledge. One major challenge is how to equip customer service colleagues with live, relevant information at a time when customers may know more about your product than you do from product reviews, from the latest celebrity vlogger, or simply from their own habitual use of the product.

How do retail organisations react and benefit from multi-channel customer advocacy and feedback? Is it necessary for colleagues to be able to horizontally learn from the customer, with a brief to elevate and represent the customer’s priorities as their representative inside the organisation?

“We’ve got a big piece around channel skills, helping customers to self-serve, use web chat … The connected home and remote diagnostics will become an increasing part of our service so we’ll need to educate our customers around the digital agenda. We’ll be aiming to fix before a problem has occurred.”

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Learning audience

How well developed is our capacity to support self-directed learning? Self-directed digital learning solutions require clear information and goal alignment and anytime/anywhere multi-device access as basic essentials. Is this something L&D is correctly placed to deliver?

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4.1. Are your colleagues encouraged to learn in a self-directed way?Self-directed learning represents a challenge and expense to learning design at scale. Self-directed learning requires a pivot towards performance support resources and job aids, which demand different skills from L&D teams.

Recent industry data – via Towards Maturity and elsewhere – indicates that due to the environmental constraints of the shop floor, retail colleagues are less able to self-administrate learning: getting great learning experiences to learners who are not desk-based still represents a challenge. How do we close that gap?

• All organisations are aiming to empower colleagues, and acknowledge that they can support self-directed learning better. Whilst the ambition is there to promote self-directed learning, many organisations –and their learners – still need to overcome a passive “learning is done to me” culture, associated with classroom training and one size fits all e-learning.

• Sharing the right message with colleagues is crucial: a well-shaped learning proposition to communicate that things have changed, and now you can learn whenever you like, wherever you need it. There is a crucial need to make sure learners are buying in to the journey - otherwise they will never arrive.

• Many organisations are providing learning opportunities that respond directly to colleague feedback i.e. tools to do jobs and skills to support careers. This is what will make their businesses great places to work as well as shop, but it requires key changes to the composition of the L&D capacity:

° Learning content production teams - learning design, graphic design and course-building skills working in-house in collaborative corporate ‘micro-studios’

° Agile working practices to liaise across all levels of the organisation and create new mission-ready learning content rapidly and at scale

“We’ve built a performance support tool to help our contact centre gain product knowledge which uses APIs to interrogate third-party systems to identify the exact product a customer needs fitted based on their exact product.”

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4.2. How is learner data being used to inform design decisions?How are L&D teams using real data to indicate engagement and inform solutions? There are many ways to measure digital learning’s impact upon its learners. These can be built into the courseware itself for later feedback and study (completion rates, likes etc), or they can be estimated from observed behaviour-change in the workplace.

This iterative, feedback-based approach to learning design is the norm in gaming and consumer app production, and is shown to deliver real benefits in terms of changing learner behaviour. Can L&D themselves learn from this trend to improve the way we work?

• Despite L&D leaders’ appreciation for an evidence-led approach to learning, the legacy and complexity of systems have made meaningful insights difficult to extract and implement. We can expect a wave of analytics as new integrated systems come online as part of the current stage of digital transformation, as current legacy systems make smart data analysis difficult. L&D should be preparing for this now as a workstream to current projects.

One company is recruiting a data scientist to their global learning technologies team to help drive improvements and make recommendations for future infrastructure investment. Data analysis will become a ‘must-have’ skill, to some degree, for any future-forward L&D team.

Whilst there are pockets of good practice, few organisations have yet developed a sophisticated approach to collecting and analysing data.

• Once launched several organisations build in a questionnaire or use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gather data on the experience. NPS is considered useful as it’s possible to compare learning experience scores to other experiences within the organisation.

• New public or open online platforms such as Futurelearn, Coursera etc use analytics cleverly to measure engagement. This product mentality and tactics can be used in a corporate setting. Some organisations are already doing this, but it is the consumer tech apps who are leading the way, and who in-house L&D teams should look to for innovation and expertise.

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“We have user-testing as a workstream. The insight we gain from this flows into product design and communication. This will be much easier when our eleven LMSs become one later in 2017. Our Management Academy is rich on data. We were able to identify where users were losing attention or dropping out, and changed learner experience to improve engagement.”

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Impact and success

What is digital transformation doing for Customer Service training and outcomes, right now, on the ground, and in the flow of work?

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5.1. Where is digital adding the most value?A consistent. widespread narrative is forming and spreading of the benefits digital learning brings to the organisation, to the customer, and to colleagues. This story touches on both individual learner aspirations AND be aligned with the current goals and mission of the organisation.

• For some, digital is making the biggest difference in the Customer Service space and with a number of initiatives in place, this is an area likely to grow. Traditional Customer Service workspaces – the shop floor, the call centre, or out talking to Customers one-to-one – present challenges to digital uptake, while also having the most to gain from transformation.

Right now, in many cases digital is adding the most value in many more well-trodden business focussed areas:

° Cost and time savings

° Induction and retention – with the mature understanding that the efforts and energy put into the induction period need to be extended throughout the colleague’s working life

° Compliance

° Simulations and systems training

Learning leaders acknowledge digital learning has the potential to deliver more. Most expect digital’s impact to increase in the next two years.

“Accessibility is a big value-add for us. Our people love the fact that they can revisit learning and have an individual experience. It’s an unequal experience in the classroom. Extroverts soak up all the time.”

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Future directionWhere do we go from here?

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6.1. What’s top of your digital learning wish list for 2017? Given a free hand and absolute power, what changes would you like to make to your organisation – or the industry as a whole – that would facilitate the digital transformation process and make the biggest difference to the way you work?

The top aspirations for our customer service learning leaders are:

• Internal capability of L&D team (and throughout the organisation) to develop, design and deliver digital content to support digital literacy for everyone (design thinking plus digital development capability).

Wish-list items for L&D teams to facilitate widespread digital literacy includes a standardised suite of tools to support development and also an information and insight-gathering capacity, actively setting aside time to survey the latest developments in the industry via social learning networks, networking events, editorials etc.

• A seamless, end-to-end, accessible colleague experience: most tend to believe that improvements in LMS technology and hosting platforms are moving towards this eventuality, with organisations upgrading and consolidating systems.

Consistent universal access is still a barrier to effective internal promotion of digital learning. With skills and infrastructure in place, opportunities to leapfrog and push ahead with digital transformation are inevitable.

• Of all the simple, widely-understood technical fixes that could make the most immediate difference, single sign on represents the upgrade that will have the biggest simple impact on behaviour.

• For digital transformation to be successful at the level of mind set and culture, it’s vital that learning and people capability is part of the strategy. On the flip-side, everyone across the organisation needs to understand that they are responsible for their own development: “As soon as this is recognised at Board Level … the end customer impact will be significant.”

“To spend more time training on customers and behaviour, rather than processes. Our people just need to take small chunks of time out to brush up on product knowledge and improve customer service skills.”

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6.2. How can digital learning add more value in your organisation?

What benefits do we hope to achieve through digital learning in the future? How far can the benefits of digital drill down and trigger wider behaviour change and innovation across the organisation?

• The most visible benefits of digital learning are felt in the value they bring to front line colleagues, who are often the lowest paid in an organisation with the most to gain from improving their skills for the future:

“The paradox of automation is that it’s often not realised in practice.”

Providing digital learning solutions to this group will have a positive impact on the employee value proposition (EVP), supporting recruitment and retention as well as capability.

• One of the clearest keys to unlocking the benefits of digital learning is short-cutting to informal, user-generated social collaboration, bringing the way we learn at work in line with the way we learn in our personal lives.

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“Culture and productivity. If we can sort out access, digital learning can help mould us into the organisation we want to be.”

“We need to think about the user but also the end customer, what experience do we want them to receive from our people. And then we need great comms and to make sure [it] matches the business brand.”

Appendix: Six Stages of Digital TransformationPublished online in April 2016, Altimeter, a Prophet company’s Six Stages of Digital Transformation document represents a comprehensive framework to ‘advance technology roadmaps, business models, and processes to compete in the digital economy’.

Authored by digital analysts Brian Solis and Jaimy Szymanski, the report draws meaningful commonalities out of the huge diversity of disruptions, innovations and individual experiences that constitute the global organisational phenomenon of digital transformation.

Acknowledging the concept’s fluidity, Solis and Szymanski define digital transformation as:“The realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees to effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy” (Emphasis added.)

This emphasis on the twin subjects of the transformation process – customers (end-users) and employees (learners) – is one of the reasons Six Stages of Digital Transformation was chosen to provide the structural basis for the current report.

The Six Stages as described in the document are as follows. In the course of our research we sought to informally grade our research participants against these standards:

1. Business as usual: Organisations operate with a familiar legacy perspective of customers, processes, metrics, business models, and technology, believing that it remains the solution to digital relevance.

2. Present and active: Pockets of experimentation are driving digital literacy and creativity, albeit disparately, throughout the organisation while aiming to improve and amplify specific touchpoints and processes.

3. Formalised: Experimentation becomes intentional while executing at more promising and capable levels. Initiatives become bolder and, as a result, change agents seek executive support for new resources and technology.

4. Strategic: Individual groups recognise the strength in collaboration as their research, work, and shared insights contribute to new strategic roadmaps that plan for digital transformation ownership, efforts and investments.

5. Converged: A dedicated digital transformation team forms to guide strategy and operations based on business and customer-centric goals. The new infrastructure of the organisation takes shape as roles, expertise, models processes and systems to support transformation are solidified.

6. Innovative and adaptive: Digital transformation becomes a way of business as executives and strategists recognise that change is constant. A new ecosystem is established to identify and act upon technology and market trends in pilot and, eventually, at scale.

All extracts and material on this page from Six Stages of Digital Transformation are © Altimeter, a Prophet company 2017.

Of the Customer Service-focused companies who participated in our research, the average transformation stage for Customer Service companies we spoke to is 3. Formalized, with 29% at the 4-5. Strategic / Converged stage.

Download the full Six Stages of Digital Transformation document from the Prophet website:http://www2.prophet.com/The-2016-State-of-Digital-Transformation

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With thanks to all the companies who participated in our research:Autoglass; Aviva; Bupa; Centrica Plc.; Lloyds Banking Group Plc.; Marks and Spencer Plc.; Mothercare Plc.; Next Plc.; Npower Ltd.; Old Mutual Wealth; Renfrewshire Council; TalkTalk Telecom Group Plc.; Tesco Bank; Thames Water Utilities Ltd.; Wilko Retail Ltd.;

Special thanks to Myles Runham of Myles Runham Consulting; and Sam Taylor of Hitachi Rail.