The Opportunities Hidden in your Shared Services Data

Rising costs, and a shortage of skills are two of the biggest challenges that shared service centres face today on top of other business issues. Rising costs is a global issue that is affecting all industries. At the same time salaries of skilled personnel in shared services are going up, estimated to be 8.1% pa* on average. The on-going skills shortage plays a part in the bigger picture too, impacting both existing services and innovation.

While process analytics cannot solve all the problems that shared service centres face, it can help with many of them including cost reduction and the shortage of skills. Analysing how the trifecta of people, processes and technology work together in your organisation can help greatly with cost reduction while improving processes, productivity and employee engagement, to reduce attrition.

The shared service centres maturity model

The shared service centres (SSC) maturity model in the exhibit shows how, with increased use of analytics and digital capabilities, SSCs can grow into experience-led, and digitally-enabled organisations. The most mature become more focused on customer and employee experience while achieving a digital-first strategy for value-creation, to boost revenue and growth.

That said, digitalisation strategies can stall as SSCs run out of ideas about where further improvements can be made to processes, what can be automated and how to keep employees engaged and happy during and beyond transformation.

The role of process intelligence

There is no stalling with process intelligence as it keeps the optimisation and modernisation cycle going. It captures data from day-to-day operations to uncover opportunities for process enhancements, automation and innovation. It can surface the hidden opportunities that SSCs didn’t know, nor could dream of having. One example is how a shared services provider was able to optimise its processes, shift patterns and work allocation for work from home, increasing productivity by 12% in two months. In another deployment, KYP.ai identified which parts of chat operations could be easily automated by a contact centre operator while leaving other parts to be handled manually. This freed up staff to do other work while still providing good customer experiences.

Process intelligence can help with the skills challenges too, by providing insights on how work gets done in the organisation, what hampers productivity and who the star performers are. A frequent finding by KYP.ai is that skilled people spend a third of their time copying and pasting data from one system into another – something that could be reduced through better integration and automation. With process insights the transformation investment decisions can be made with pin-point accuracy.

Finally, I genuinely believe that a good approach to business transformation is to focus on customer experience while providing strong digital capabilities that allow the human workforce to work well, and be in the loop with access to data to support decision-making on demand. SSCs need to invest in embedding capabilities in their platforms that provide end-to-end visibility constantly by capturing data and finding the insights that makes work flow.