I’ve been to a couple of events and listened to a number of presentations recently from IT and business service providers talking about digital strategies – and how they can help their clients engage better with “digital customers”.
Part of this strategy has included building greater empathy and emotion with customers – superficially this sounds fantastic, but when I think of digital, it’s not about being nice or building an emotional attachment to customers – it’s about speed, efficacy, and awareness – these things trump everything else.
Understanding customer needs and behavior is important – as it helps to build an efficient and speedy process, but they don’t need to like you they just need to believe that they will get the goods or service when they are told and it is what they asked/paid for. If you think about successful retail organizations Tesco, Amazon, Walmart – I’m not sure too many people like them, they like the convenience of them (Fanboys – I am generalizing so please don’t troll me, of course, some people love them.) People will buy from you and like you if you are cheap, if you deliver when you say you do and will stop when you mess up (for a bit.)
Digital businesses historically had awful customer service and many still do. Amazon in the U.K. when it first started was terrible at dealing with problems – in 2003 when I ordered a book (remember when they just did books/CDs) which didn’t turn up and they basically said that it was the couriers fault and after trying for a while I just gave up – they more or less told me to sod off. Incidentally, by 2010 they had gone the other way – if you said it didn’t turn up they’d send 3 replacements (I exaggerate). I suspect the balance has now been struck.
However, customer service is still bad with many digital firms – or digital services to consumers. Particularly when the app business is an intermediary an affiliate based – I have had checkered service from JustEat, Deliveroo, Hungryhouse and Burger King food delivery – don’t judge me I am a hungry early adopter and have a teenage daughter with friends… Usually, something missing from the order and I haven’t had refunds – but I tend to return because the convenience (and my laziness) never goes away. Even poor service won’t kill a digital company if the core proposition is sound and the number of exceptions is low.
Bottom Line – Sell speed and efficiency – people don’t need to feel special and cared for unless you mess up.
So when I hear a service provider try to portray digital experience in terms of empathy or emotion I lose interest. Speed, efficiency, and real-time information make a service digital – this doesn’t need to deliver an emotional response, – the core proposition needs to be good and it needs to work most of the time.
The Business Process Outsourcing industry is going through a significant evolution from a labour-led business model to one that is now a blend of global talent combined with automation, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies. This is especially the case with the financial function, where CFOs are under immense pressure to deliver the next wave of productivity and value from automation and richer data.
Genpact as a pioneering BPO provider in the era of Digital Finance
Genpact has always been ahead of the disruption curve in the finance and accounting function, being the first to disrupt the market with aggressively affordable and effective offshore solutions in the mid-2000s, taking a significant stake in the market in its journey to becoming one of the largest pure-play BPO providers to service the CFO’s office today.
In recent years, the firm has quietly developed its own consulting capabilities, which now account for close to 10% of its revenues, where it is supporting clients with its unique flavour of digital design consulting with its Lean Digital offering, its robust operational and process consulting capabilities and a sizeable focus in robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, including touchless machine learning, which is bolstered by its new acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Rage Frameworks. In addition, its CFO Services consulting line is now involved in piloting some Blockchain implementations and an increasing involvement in Supply chain, risk management and order management transformation initiatives.
Moving beyond the table stakes
The most progressive service buyers consider process standardization, quality levels and cost savings as table stakes. As our recent study, Finance In The Digital Age shows, finance executives are challenged to better manage regulatory compliance and financial reporting, better use financial and non-financial data, make the close cycle more efficient, and have paperless audit trails. Further, at the top of the finance and accounting function, today’s CFOs are more ambitious than ever to become more involved in driving future growth for their organizations, beyond oversight on controllership and bookkeeping.
So it is unsurprising that our last analysis, the HfS F&A As-a-Service Blueprint, focused on As-a-Service design and delivery in finance among 18 leading F&A service providers. The resulting Winners Circle service providers have collaborative engagements with clients and are making recognizable investments in future capabilities in talent and technology to continue to increase the value over time. These providers are also leading in incorporating analytics as a service into Finance contracts.
Making the shift to being a consultative BPO provider
In the Blueprint report, we positioned Genpact as a part of this As-a-Service Winners Circle category. Compared with the other service providers in the Blueprint, Genpact is one of the top two, leading in both the Execution of actual services and client management and Innovation to drive future value in the form through the use of talent and technology. With 18 years in the market, Genpact has evolved its traditional Lean Six Sigma process excellence methodologies into what it calls Lean Digital, a framework for working with clients to use design thinking for identifying, aligning and addressing issues and opportunities. It’s a transformative approach to align digital technology and talent with desired business outcomes from F&A delivery. HfS hears encouraging feedback from early client work.
Furthermore, Genpact has developed vertical-specific strengths in pharma, CPG, and manufacturing. Its “CFO and Transformation Services” approach is addressing the key needs of CFOs, which is in line with the market needs we outlined earlier.
The combination of Genpact’s Lean Digital, CFO, and transformation services has helped its sales teams take a consultative approach with F&A, particularly with new clients.
This has accelerated Genpact’s market performance in F&A, reaching double-digit growth in 2016. Clients in our Blueprint research ultimately point to Genpact’s “feel good” culture, where through extensive interactions with practice leaders, SMEs, and delivery teams, the service provider drives cultural alignment with its clients. HfS believes that Genpact is a good fit for enterprises that are considering operational redesign in their finance and accounting function, particularly in CPG, pharma, and manufacturing.
Genpact was rated highly in the Blueprint for the following criteria:
“Denial is not an option.” Contrary to the typical (and here, oversimplified) pre-certification, “approve” or “deny” approach to utilization of services in health care, HealthHelp launched a new model of utilization review based on the premise of non-denial procedures, and that utilization management is about collaboration and education. HealthHelp taps into its evidence-based database and network of physicians and academics to review and approve or to recommend alternatives to procedure requests. In tandem, HealthHelp drives studies and education opportunities to lead to better medical and financial outcomes when providing or using health care services. In short, the company that WNS just acquired is building out a patient- and healthcare provider-centric approach to utilization management designed to match procedure and treatment to the patient’s needs and network.
HealthHelp took roots in the founder’s own pain
The HealthHelp approach is tied to the experience of its founder, Cherrill Farnsworth, who found the number of denials and appeals she managed for radiology procedures discouraging and painful. Thinking about “how to do this differently… why do we have to deny”? Cherrill tapped into her network of people at medical centers and universities, creating a collaborative model on the premise of using data, insights, and education. Instead of a review, approve/deny, the approach is review, approve and/or educate and/or recommend. The approach uses an increasingly sophisticated system of data, digital technology, and relationships. HealthHelp is taking product development further into the realm of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well.
What gives HealthHelp the “right” to make recommendations to healthcare providers and patients?
An approach like this one—essentially, a break from the norm—depends on the credibility of the data, technology, and people involved. HealthHelp faced the challenge in the early days of people not being sure that a “non-denial” approach would be effective for containing costs. With 15 years of data, though, the company has been able to ingrain a lot of experience and knowledge into the approach and platform, to the extent that now 75% of prior authorization requests get approved for providers or are responded to with recommended changes that are approved by providers, without any human intervention. In about 25% of the cases, it goes to nurses for review; 6-7% of which are forwarded to doctors, and after that, the provider has the option to and can still disagree and go with treatment, which happens in under 0.5% of cases.
Results to date show improvement in the quality of care, which impacts Star and HEDIS ratings and reduces the cost of care by making sure the right kind of care is provided versus the lowest transaction cost at a point in time. Also, in a fee-for-service model, a healthcare provider gets paid for the procedure regardless of the result. As the industry shifts to value based care with payments tied to outcomes, approval based on evidence or alternatives becomes more strategic to positively impacting outcomes (and payments). This approach, therefore, seems to have further credibility in the value-based care model and can help healthcare providers move into the new world of healthcare. HealthHelp worked with CMS to get approval to qualify this program under provider education/quality improvement initiative and thus be included in the 85% Medical Loss Ratio for health plans.
The acquisition by WNS brings a complement of resources to both organizations and its client base
The healthcare industry is so ingrained in a yes/no approach that it took a few years before the model got adoption, primarily with mid-tier healthcare organizations. Joining with WNS gives HealthHelp the opportunity to scale and support a broader range of payers and providers. WNS also has a wealth of analytics capability, talent development and industrialization expertise that is complementary to HealthHelp, with resources that can help expand and develop the services and technology platforms to impact healthcare outcomes more broadly.
The acquisition of HealthHelp is part of the WNS strategy to shift attention from the cost of transactions to the cost of quality care and support—towards patient centricity. To date, WNS’ work in healthcare has been mostly analytical and transactional services: billing, collections, provider network services, and claims processing. HealthHelp brings in clinical and operational expertise to impact medical, as well as administrative outcomes, thus closing the loop. It also brings a human-centered (aka design thinking) approach to solving problems and developing a new business capability that the healthcare industry needs.
Our day of judgment is upon us! Can we really “unlearn” the last two decades and change how we buy, sell, behave and operate? Do we really have what it takes – deep down inside – to get ahead of this maelstrom of change and come out the other side with wealth, happiness and another two decades of double-digit growth?
Of course we can! But only if you book your last-minute spot to the services event of the year, in Midtown Manhattan next week… Join me, my colleagues and the industry’s finest as we engage in the richest dialog yet on how to tackle the most crucial transition our industry has ever faced, and how to come out the other side re-energized and happy to go to work again.
Service Buyers get complimentary access – only a few seats left, so apply now!
To name a few companies which will be represented…
And a few of the power brokers debating the big outsourcing reset in New York…
Find the full line-up here. See you in New York this Thursday, I hope!
Last summer I wrote about my desire to be a superhero –to help companies buy IT products and services ethically and help suppliers create new opportunities for themselves and their people. When people source ethically they can reduce a lot of bad in the world – child labor, human trafficking, working conditions that harm and kill people, and a host of other problems.
Yesterday at SAP Ariba Live, the software company announced that it was partnering with blockchain provenance firm Everledger to explore the use of blockchain across Ariba’s suite of applications. As a first step, the two companies are working on a track and trace (provenance) application.
Everledger CEO Leanne Kemp and SAP Ariba Senior Vice President Joe Fox discussed the application and broader blockchain implications at the event, talking about empowering an ethical supply chain. They see a future where using blockchain to track goods from their raw materials through their final delivery would help companies have visibility into the entire supply chain. This would then allow companies to avoid problems such as:
Counterfeit goods being swapped in for the original goods at some point in the journey
Unintentionally supporting illegal and unethical conduct by suppliers and other third parties involved in conflict minerals like blood diamonds because you couldn’t tell where the diamond originated
Being out of compliance with government or industry regulations because related to the point above, you couldn’t prove that the product was made without conflict minerals or other illegal inputs
Undoubtedly, this announcement is a huge win for blockchain technology. It’s a major software company investing in a specific commercial application. It also reinforces the importance of provenance as a key blockchain “killer app,” coming soon after IBM’s announcement with Maersk that the two firms would work together to trace shipping containers. We’ve written before that provenance will get adopted faster than many fintech blockchain applications. These two deals show movement in that direction.
Even more powerful is the business and human story about making the world a better place. SAP Ariba’s and Everledger’s message of using blockchain to help business work more effectively AND to improve the lives of people is inspiring. It’s what technology is supposed to do, and we’re hoping to see more companies explicitly make corporate social responsibility a key factor in their technology decisions.
In order to prepare for the upcoming travel and hospitality Blueprint, I decided I needed to do some “field research” (ahem) by taking a vacation of my own to sunny Puerto Rico to get the experience of an end consumer. This was fortuitous timing as RFI responses were trickling in, and I couldn’t help but relate my experiences to what I’m hearing from the service providers and buyers in this space. As analysts, we tend to travel a bit here and there, but often have the luxury of travel plans being made for us with group coordinators. Having planned this trip out myself with the help of some great references, I thought about travel in a more selfish way—one that made me think very much about all the things T&H service buyers and service providers could be doing better to think of ME, the traveler, at the core of their operations.
As a consumer, these themes resonated with me the most:
Word of mouth matters more than ever: So many decisions to make; where to stay, eat and what to do. Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are ubiquitous, and travelers really rely on these sites for decision making. The downside is information overload and credibility; I read scores of reviews with a skeptical mind, thinking this could have been written by someone with totally different vacation priorities or motivations. Now if a good friend recommends a tour, combined with a raving review on TripAdvisor, I’m sold! Service providers should be thinking about how to help hospitality clients maximize loyalty and advocacy among visiting customers. Those who represent the travel intermediaries and review sites should think about how to make the personas more “real” – think of the possibilities for gamification (i.e. giving people badges or discounts if their reviews are well liked or validated.) This could go a long way to make these review sites and intermediaries more valuable for customers. Intermediaries are also more important than ever for local tour companies whose websites are wildly out of date and impossible to navigate—so knowing the local businesses is more important than ever.
Self-service is fantastic—but make sure you have the processes and training to bring it all together. It’s pretty cool that JetBlue has started a system of printing and applying your own tags to baggage. But, as someone who doesn’t normally check a bag, this caught me by surprise at Boston Logan as I was reluctantly checking my vacation + business attire luggage to accommodate all the shoes I needed for these two incongruous journeys. I was confused, but all that the woman at the kiosk could do was repeat in a saccharine cheerful voice, “You need to print out a tag at the kiosk.” Literally, that’s all she could say. I would have felt more comfortable with a robot. When there are process and technology changes, especially those that affect your loyal customers, make sure your employees are trained to be empathetic and helpful and that you use all the relevant communication channels to update customers. Plus, preemptive outreach can prevent incoming calls to customer service and confusion in the field.
It all comes back to making it easier for the customer. This is true in every business model, but the hotel industry seems to be closer to cracking the code on seamless experiences despite juggling many balls in the air at the same time—dealing with disgruntled, tired travelers, unexpected issues like broken elevators, cancelled flights or storms closing the coveted beach, and handling countless travel intermediaries like Expedia and the like. This requires a lot of connection between front, middle and back office—as we describe in our OneOffice framework—it seems that hotels are getting closer to connecting these siloes to create omnichannel experiences, but what I’m hearing from buyers and service providers is that there’s a lot of disconnect behind the scenes and making up for it at the front end. Despite sometimes glossy front end experiences (think the swanky hotel lobby with fantastic, quick check-in service), there is still much opportunity to streamline processes behind the scenes. The notions of service experiences are also evolving, keeping T&H clients on their toes. Today you introduced mobile self-check-ins; do you need to integrate tours & activities scheduling into your app next?
The Bottom Line: competition has pushed the travel and hospitality industry to live and breathe the “customer-first” mentality, but the fast-paced nature of the industry and customer expectations will continue to create opportunity and challenge services buyers to think about “what’s next?”
Differentiation is the name of the game— and more than anything, services buyers in the travel and hospitality space need flexibility and innovation from their providers. Between M&A activity, regulatory and compliance changes, disruptors from the “sharing economy” and the volatile nature of travel itself, having the customer constantly at the center of the universe is no easy feat. Always being that step ahead, with automation and innovation, is where service providers can step in to support those memorable experiences.
Remember all those juicy reasons why companies jumped into outsourcing? Like driving out cost, standardizing processes, perhaps even finding a few nuggets of innovation along the way with better access to talent and technology? Well our new 2017 State of Operations and Outsourcing Study of 454 major enterprise buyers gives a pretty gloomy picture of the current value impact of today’s outsourcing engagements:
What made us happy in the past no longer passes muster
If there was ever one home-banker benefit from outsourcing, it was always the ability to take 30%+ off the bottom line cost of running a process or set of processes.
The VPs and below are those who are managing the engagements – and not even a third of them view their engagements as being very effective at driving out significant cost or making their operations more flexible and scalable. Their bosses are slightly less cynical, but still the vast majority is underwhelmed.
“But how can they be unhappy, we saved them so much money?” I hear frustrated providers cry…
Well, the answer is quite simply that those costs have been removed from the balance sheet – they no longer exist. Managing operations in a global environment is now the new normal – money that was saved was a onetime experience in the past. It’s like trading in your Hummer for a Prius… you don’t think to yourself, everytime you fill up with gas, “Wow, I’m saving $50 per tank”, but you might even think, “Hmmm… maybe I’ll get a fully electric car next and save even more on my running costs”.
We can go on to bemoan the disappointing lack of effectiveness from analytics, automation and cognitive from over four-fifths of outsourcing engagements, but we know clients are unlikely to have invested actual funds in these areas as part of most of these engagements today – they are getting what they have paid for in the past.
All is not lost as many operations leaders want their service providers to change with them
However, the next wave of engagements have to be set up in a very different way to bring back delights to these jaded customers, which is where the brighter news appears:
What’s encouraging here is that buyers, by and large, do not view their service providers as mere efficient cost take-out vehicles, which was how well over half viewed them a couple of years ago. While 43% of SVPs and above see service providers as competent partners who can deliver the goods, another 35% actually view them as real innovation partners who can work with them to achieve co-defined business outcomes. This is a breakthrough for the services industry.
The Bottom-line: The door is wide open for ambitious providers willing to invest in developing their talent, but closing firmly shut for those perpetuating what worked in the past
There has never been a time in the history of services where we’ve arrived at such a pivotal turning point – what used to work for clients is now commodity, and those service providers wanting to avoid this drain-circling spiral into transactional insignificance must make serious investments in their internal capabilities to partner with their clients. This means more people who can work in close proximity to their clients with real capabilities rolling out automation roadmaps, designing digital business models, working with clients to develop predictive data models and smart cognitive strategies. Sadly, there isn’t much of an available pool of eager college graduates ready to leap into these roles at low wage rates, so providers need to reinvent themselves radically as true learning establishments and universities for their emerging talent… ambitious people will want to invest their careers with firms who are prepared to invest in their talent. The future isn’t about buying packaged consulting, it’s about partnering with services firms whose stakeholders want to co-invest in themselves and their clients with a long-term vision and definitive plan. The model has changed forever… and we can only watch, learn and work with it as it unravels piece by piece.
Looking further into the future, who will dominate the space in 2020? Three providers are set to remain at the helm for the foreseeable future: Accenture, IBM, and GEP.
IBM has a massive supply chain, which it smartly leverages in its procurement offerings. IBM is bullish on cognitive procurement. IBM BPS is morphing into Cognitive Business Solutions. Its own procurement provides a great playground for applying and road testing all the new cognitive procurement solutions, giving it an advantage over providers who don’t manage procurement for their own organization or have less ‘cognitive savvy’ clients.
Towards 2020 IBM will be leading in the cognitive procurement services space. Underpinned by a strong BPaaS platform, most clients will look at IBM first when it comes to new cognitive technology-driven services with vastly improved data analytics capabilities. The biggest challenge for IBM to succeed with cognitive procurement is to bring clients along this journey. The vast majority of procurement organizations perceive itself as far removed from advanced innovative procurement capabilities – they are fixing the basics, getting procurement technology to work and pondering the opportunities RPA could bring the procurement function. The gap between cognitive procurement and the (perceived) level of maturity and change readiness of procurement is the hurdle IBM needs to take to make its cognitive ambitions reality or be at risk of running too far ahead of the game.
Accenture has a significant head start to all other providers, having invested and developed capabilities through acquisitions like Procurian and putting technology into every procurement engagement, leveraging one-to-many advantages for years. Now Accenture is betting on modularity to give them sustained advantage with current clients. And opening markets with medium-sized enterprises, for whom the business case of outsourcing procurement never added up.
Accenture seems to have a more ‘wait and see’ stance when it comes to cognitive procurement, investing in capabilities and use cases, but not willing to bet the farm just yet. Be confident they’ll pounce when the time is right and gobble up any procurement related cognitive and artificial intelligence capabilities they might lack. We expect via acquisition, maybe not of the magnitude of Procurian, but an inorganic technology growth strategy makes sense.
GEP plays in an increasingly contentious market, with its procurement BPO brethren gobbling up smaller niche firms, investing heavily in technology and partnerships. As the largest pure play procurement service provider and a pioneer in procurement technology, the onus is on GEP to continue its leading position and ‘best in class’ technology. We expect technology and services to converge more and GEP may emerge as an acquirer of cognitive capabilities as cognitive and AI in procurement are on the rise.
Which are the providers emerging to challenge the leaders?
The early 2017 activity is driven by Indian heritage providers WNS and Wipro. They show their ambitions and make steps to move up the strategic value chain and incorporate more procurement technology into their service delivery and offerings.
WNS, with the Denali brand as a strategic procurement services arm, will have moved into the As-a-Service Winner’s Circle by 2020. The strong vision and upstream procurement capabilities from Denali put together with the execution prowess of WNS leads to cross-selling opportunities and investments in tech-enabled new services. The downstream procurement side of the business will have moved to procurement platforms of WNS’ partners, with WNS managing the platforms.
Wipro announced an investment and strategic partnership with Tradeshift, which is emerging as a top 3 digital procurement platform and arguably the only real “platform” in the space. This will turn out to be a smart move for Wipro, addressing a technology gap in its procurement offerings and developing on top of the proven platform that is Tradeshift, leveraging an existing and expanding network and adding Wipro Holmes capabilities. On top of this, the partnership with Tradeshift has the potential to help Wipro move up the strategic value chain, with more upstream services and shifting technology-based services to new commercial models faster.
Genpact continues to move up the strategic value chain, and between now and 2020 will have sought to bolster the technology layer in its Procurement As-a-Service offerings, something it lacks compared to other As-a-Service Winner’s Circle providers in 2016. Genpact’s conundrum is choosing between organic growth to add technology prowess to its BPO capabilities and acquisitions to get there faster. With a poor track record with acquisitions – Headstrong comes to mind – we will follow their ability to make the RAGE Frameworks acquisition work and how the newly obtained Artificial Intelligence capabilities are transferred to procurement solutions.
Infosys builds out the procurement practice on AI, analytics and platform technology. ProcureEdge and Mana will continue to converge and bring innovation in downstream and upstream procurement. The lack of enthusiasm for BPO from Infosys’ top brass is a big concern. To make a concerted move in the Procurement As-a-Service space, Infosys needs a bigger commitment to BPO in general and more focus on bringing all the pieces (Mana, ProcureEdge, category management and strategic sourcing talent and capabilities) together.
Proxima leapfrogged incumbent legacy procurement BPO providers with high value, on-demand As-a-Service services, leveraging technology and expertise. Building out technology led point solutions (beyond current offering in Commercial Management) and marketing pure subscription-based services, a fairly new area for Proxima, will be a major effort to cement a leadership position in Procurement As-a-Service.
All signs point to buyers looking for more modular services – fitting well with Proxima’s focused approach and offerings. However, if the market would shift back to demanding end-to-end procurement services, Proxima would have to quickly acquire more end-to-end capabilities.
Fading into Obscurity?
In an earlier version, I wrote: “Capgemini will have lost most of its appetite for the BPO side of procurement, while IBX remains a technology asset in the increasing tech-focused procurement services market”. Reality caught up, and Capgemini sold IBX to Tradeshift last week – essentially selling its biggest asset in procurement. Combined with the seeming lack of focus for BPO in Capgemini’s C-suite post iGate acquisition, we can conclude it exited the Procurement As-a-Service market in early 2017, well before 2020. IBX needed significant attention and investment from its parent to compete in the procurement platform market, and Capgemini decided it wouldn’t stomach this.
HPE is now the home of Xchanging, once a force to reckon with in procurement outsourcing. Xchanging dropped from the As-a-Service Winner’s Circle in the 2016 Procurement As-a-Service Blueprint and are in danger of sliding down further in this space. Neither ‘interim-owner’ CSC nor HPE are big on procurement outsourcing, a market HP neglected in the last decade, although it had the biggest supply chain in the world to service and leverage.
The Bottom Line – From Cost Obsession to Value Creation
Looking into the glass bowl, we expect the procurement As-a-Service market to continue to build value for providers and service buyers as the value of digital solutions, analytics, procurement tech platforms and cognitive automation takes hold. Albeit with a smaller number of providers, which have a full stack approach ranging from upstream strategic capabilities to platform-based execution of transactional procurement – delivering business outcomes on a subscription model.
In 2020 the market will be bifurcated into the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots’, the ‘Haves’ being those providers with technology, platform based delivery and upstream procurement capabilities, offering flexibility, agility, modularity and superior digital customer experience.
With affordable, modular services making procurement services accessible to midmarket enterprises, a new hunting ground for service providers is gradually emerging. Moreover, emerging digital clients, which may be less than $50m in revenues, but have high volume transaction needs, will need to access procurement services. It’s not going to be all about size and scale, but also profitability and transaction volume.
Providers will be venturing, more and more, into direct spend delivery models, supporting clients to drive value and efficiency with cognitive, AI capabilities. As enterprises like to keep control of sourcing of direct materials and services, this will be a collaborative, partnership approach as opposed to full-blown outsourcing.
While we wait for the new Obamacare “replacement” bill to sink or swim, we can’t help but ponder the implications of whatever outcome on the healthcare industry and the services ecosystem that supports it (especially since we get asked!). Amid all this uncertainty, one thing that is sure not to change is the consumerism that has taken a strong hold within the healthcare industry, which would be the case with or without the ACA. As consumers, we are wondering, if I can order merchandise from many different suppliers on amazon and pay in one place, why can’t I see all my clinical data and lab images and send them from one doctor or clinic to another? If I can send the record of my dog’s shots to a boarding kennel electronically, why not send my children’s immunization record to schools and summer camps just as easily? Yes, we know about interoperability and security issues. However, we have come to expect the same access and convenience in our healthcare experiences as we do in all the other aspects of our lives.
Healthcare providers and payers are challenged to meet these increasing expectations—and are investing accordingly in digital enablement. HfS’ recent state of business operations survey indicated that 42% of healthcare companies are planning a significant investment in analytics to better understand what are the issues for whom, what are the opportunities to interact and impact members and patients and administrative support; and 36% are investing in social/mobile/interactive enablement to redefine, “modernize,” or create the customer experience. Despite all this planning and rhetoric, dealing with the healthcare system often feels like the dark ages rather than a modern customer experience. Our recent research found several examples of service providers and buyers working together that are hopeful of experiences to come:
Creating the digital customer experience by connecting front and back office: Due to ACA regulations, healthcare payers have needed to adjust to dealing with consumers (versus employers’ HR departments.) Many have set up retail storefronts including mobile centers where people can come in for enrollment (majority), questions and paying bills. Teleperformance uses a proprietary software, TLSContact, to manage the process and workflow of the customer retail journey. Representatives are able to access the initial app that the customer started online, and the workflow software helps identify the bottlenecks and how to better staff these centers. For example, they can look at and analyze the processes to find out why there are long wait times—enabling clients to improve the process and better staff to meet demand.
Developing customer journeys that look “outside the hospital walls” and building solutions that support the journey: Approaching healthcare in a consumer-centric economy drives healthcare organizations to look at how to initiate and keep the customer relationship over an extended period of time, not a point in time. Emergency rooms are designed to address a “point in time,” but we know that a health incident starts before a person arrives at the ER. VCU Health neurologist Dr. Sherita Chapman Smith is championing an effort to use telemedicine as a way to do assessments on stroke patients while they are in the ambulance, on their way to the hospital. (link). In pilot simulations underway, the hospital is using trained actors to simulate stroke symptoms to test out the platform during ambulance rides to the hospital. “Patients” are picked up in an ambulance and connected via teleconference to the neurologist in the hospital, who conducts a remote assessment; and when they get to the hospital, they are quickly advanced to the next stage of treatment. The approach creates faster interactions between the points of care and speeds the time to treatment.
Using digital technology to make the users life easier and more real-time interactive with support systems: A healthcare organization that has partnered with NTT DATA Services described a consulting-led project which was aimed at the total redesign of the patient’s journey in various medical use cases (i.e. bariatric surgery, knee or hip replacement) in order to personalize that patient’s journey whenever he/she logs into the mobile app or accesses the website. This means drawing together an understanding of that patient’s journey from start to finish, and knowing what stages they are in throughout their course of treatment, and what their needs might be. This hospital relied on the provider’s experience mapping expertise.
It’s clear that healthcare isn’t getting less complicated any time soon. Whatever the fate of the ACA, the current political tone is foreshadowing more complexity and anxiety. Whether people are going to be uninsured or underinsured as critics of the current bill claim, or need to switch plans or providers, we can be sure that activity in the healthcare systems will increase. We can also be sure that that emotion will be at an all-time high, with the anxiety and fear that comes with people uncertain about what the changes mean for their lives and their loved ones: all the more reason that healthcare organizations need to be more nimble, intuitive and empathetic to that customer experience. Unfortunately, examples like the ones we highlighted above are the exception rather than the norm.
Bottom line: It’s time to think of and treat patients and members as customers you want to attract and retain, whether you are a health care provider or payer or a third party service provider partnering with a healthcare organization. Now we need to roll up our sleeves and partner in the effort to create a healthcare experience that puts the customer at its center.
“We’re driving this community as we try to figure out how to make our over-150-years-old financial institution relevant to the digital age and beyond,” said an executive from John Hancock last Monday, as they opened the inaugural Boston Fintech Showcase event. With 16+ startups in attendance, the Showcase was held at John Hancock’s Seaport district location, home to its Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) innovation group. The Boston community has growing influence in how modern technologies are making their way to various BFSI segments including payments, capital markets, insurance, mortgage, financial reporting, and taxation. Within the diversity at the showcase, what struck me were two common threads that bound the majority of the showcase participants and their value propositions to the legacy banking, financial services and insurance industry.
Reducing customer effort using technology: Driving better customer experiences is usually outlined by most large financial institutions as one of their key focus areas – with just cause, as customer ratings continue to fluctuate for this industry. A large part of financial services experience has to do with the level of effort it takes for end customers to interact with their banks and complete any transaction. Using more straight-through processing, automating redundant interactions, reducing the legalese required, and overall easing of the customer effort was a big theme at the Boston Fintech Showcase. For example:
Quilt is trying to streamline the life insurance segment for the new generation of millennial policyholders that want 100% online transactions/interactions with lower legal ease.
Rate Gravity is simplifying the home mortgage industry by eliminating salespeople and providing a single source for potential customers to compare lenders and complete their loan process more efficiently using technology.
Circle is a social payments platform that is using the open internet to offer secure and fast payments globally all from your mobile device, without any lengthy data entry/form filling (think Venmo for cross-border payments).
Leveraging data for new ways of working: A large number of the startups showcased, including the examples mentioned above, have focused on simplified data entry and making more efficient use of external data sources through automation. While this in itself adds to reducing the customer effort, we see ways in which some fintech startups are developing new businesses on the back of big data and analytics. For example:
Prattle is a text analysis specialist that offers sentiment data that predicts the market impact of central bank and corporate communications to help traders spot macroeconomic trends and improve their predictive models.
Finomial automates aspects of investor services by providing a single platform for fund administrators to process inflows/outflows, track transactions, get compliance dashboards (FATCA) and performance reports, as well as giving investors access to data and documents.
Finmason provides independent investment analytics to help customers make better decisions on their portfolio.
Partnering on fintech will drive new results for financial services
From our research, these examples and use cases are aligned with investment intentions that large financial institutions have expressed to advance their digital journey. They are also problem areas that IT and business services providers that run operations for banking clients are trying to solve.
While these startups have a head start with building out solutions, the next step for them is critical market exposure to scale solutions and drive adoption, partnering with clients, technology and service providers to the industry.
The corporate strategy head of a large financial institution brought up during our conversation at the event, “We are trying to prioritize which of these initiatives we really want to double down on in the next two years. We might have to look outside because we cannot create incubators for everything.” It is an opportunity for partnerships/acquisitions for service providers looking for innovative solutions, and at the same time, an opportunity to bring their strengths together. Part of the Fintech Sandbox initiative is giving startups free access to financial data to help them develop their offerings. This is another area where service providers could step up, with valuable operational data and expertise.
Overall, we see a strong need for the industry to work together to solve these critical challenges – lowering customer effort to create better service experiences, and making better use of data and analyses available to financial institutions. The event was a great example; many BFSI firms had internal strategy and innovation groups exploring fintech internally and supporting startups with incubator-like capabilities. With that kind of support, the Boston fintech community is quickly becoming a hub for smart enterprises on that journey.
