Include your customers
“You could be producing the best goods in the world. But are they aligned with your customers’ objectives?”
Any automation initiative (whether you’re scaling or not) should meet client needs. The focus must be here from the outset. “What do they need and what are they asking for?” This commercial approach was central to Amit’s risk protection initiative.
“In the context of payment processes, one to two days makes fraud a major risk factor. That’s long enough for a possible fraud to be hidden in the system. From the outset, we knew we needed to automate and speed up the entire payment process for our clients.” Reducing the time to 100th of a millisecond locks out the opportunity for fraud. And better secures client transactions.
Amit followed a design thinking process here and step one was empathy. “Listen to client, end clients and senior stakeholders. Understand their pain points.”
Not only does this build the business case and enable buy-in down the line, it also puts you on the front foot. “In the case of fraud protection, it’s a matter of prevention rather than damage control. Using automation to prevent a problem builds your reputation. If you are controlling existing damage, your reputation is already lost.”
Getting deep into the client’s psyche early on helps preempt user needs. But be warned: realising an automation need today might not mean it is immediately activated.
