The Fast Eat the Slow
We’re always looking for opportunities to improve the experience our customers have with our products & services.Each year we deliver services to around 160,000+ (mostly) digital natives which presents a whole new set of challenges around the way we design our services and meet ever increasing user expectations.
One thing we learned very early on is that in the modern ‘app economy’ speed to market is more important than ever before. It’s no longer good enough to release major updates two or three times a year - improvements and fixes need to be a steady stream of activity which challenges traditional development and release processes.
We operate on a fortnightly release cycle which in our sector is actually pretty darn good but I know that moving forward that just isn’t going to cut it. We are probably never going to do hundreds or thousands of releases a day (we aren’t Amazon or Facebook) but having the ability to do a daily release feels like a good goal to set ourselves.
To that end we have been investing in automation - putting in place continuous integration/continuous delivery processes & tools as well as test automation. We still have some way to go but we have put in place most of the components required to implement a CI/CD pipeline.
The adoption of cloud technologies has allowed us to see speed from another whole perspective - it’s not about automating & accelerating current processes but rather having the opportunity to re-engineer how we deliver from the ground up. A recent example demonstrated the power of this opportunity for me.
Like many organisations a large chunk of our customer contact via telephone relates to routine tasks (account information, password reset etc.) - the opportunity to automate and streamline these interactions is a no-brainer but if you’ve ever worked with traditional voice/IVR solutions you’ll know they are cumbersome and expensive to set up.
We had a look around at what cloud/SaaS options existed to deliver those services and it just so happens that Amazon Web Services recently released their Connect service which provides basic contact centre/IVR functionality. Using the Connect service (connected up with other AWS services and functionality) we were able to stand up a working solution within just 60 mins! Anyone can ring in and - based on the number they are calling from - can access their account information any time of day or night without the need for any human intervention.
Now what impressed me wasn’t that functionality; that technology has been around for years. No, what impressed me was that it took just 60 minutes from me saying ‘I’ve got this idea…’ to having a working prototype. All at pretty much zero cost, other than people’s ideas and time.
In a world where ‘it’s not the big that eat the small but the fast that eat the slow’ (thanks for the quote Rod) it is this sort of engineering that will give us the best chance of to staying relevant and meeting the expectations and needs of our customers.
I think we will run a hybrid (private and public cloud) environment for the foreseeable future but having cloud-based services which can augment our enterprise platforms means we can dramatically improve our chances of not getting eaten.
Footnote: during the time it took me to write this post the team added a follow up text feature which send the information you heard during the phone call to your phone via SMS - you’ve got to love cloud!