How citizen development can close the digital skills gap
06/08/2021 Firstsource
Sundara Sukavanam, Chief Digital Officer, Firstsource
You won’t be surprised to learn that 84% of companies say digital skills are more important to their business in 2021 than two years ago. But you might (and should) be alarmed to discover that in the last six years, the UK saw a 40% drop in young people leaving education with relevant skills. No wonder 76% of businesses think that the digital skills gap could further hit their profitability.
But enough of the bleak statistics. Let's explore citizen development initiatives because they might just be the solution. These in-house programmes help non-IT-trained employees gain digital skills by using low-code/no-code applications. One such initiative is being successfully piloted by us at Firstsource and we're learning a lot from it.
The Automation League
Part of Firstsource’s Digital First, Digital Now vision, the Automation League is a digital skills programme that teaches employees how to identify automation opportunities and build solutions.
The initiative is designed for employees across all organisational functions – from operations to customer services, marketing and HR – and provides the education, tools and training capabilities for automation amongst the non-technical workforce.
Firstsource developed the training and methodology in collaboration with UiPath – a platform that automates repetitive office processes for agile business transformations. Thus far, Firstsource’s citizen developers have built over 100 automations or ‘bots’ – and in doing so, have been driving innovation, boosting efficiency and enriching customer experience.
Letting go of the top-down approach
Typically, company-wide automation initiatives are approached from the top-down with the C-suite deciding what is to be automated. The Firstsource pilot employs a bottom-up approach, meaning the staff ‘on the ground’ look for automation opportunities. After all, they are most familiar with the daily processes and best qualified to propose workable fixes to the productivity drains they face.
Furthermore, a bottom-up approach presents a powerful way to scale a solution. Since the bots in the Automation League were created to serve a legitimate purpose – and developed by colleagues – they are more likely to be endorsed and utilised amongst teams faster.
Automation mindset
Most people mistakenly believe that automation requires prior coding experience. Automation League is founded on the understanding that prior technical knowledge is not a requirement for developing digital skills.
The first part of the initiative helps participants develop an automation mindset, before introducing programming skills. As one participant remarked: “identifying what processes can be automated is probably the most difficult thing to start with, having a whole training section dedicated to it makes a real difference”.
There are two benefits to adopting an automation mindset. Firstly, it alleviates fears around digital skills and automation. Participant Barry Goodfellow, team leader, Firstsource, comments: “It’s really not about replacing jobs but rather about taking laborious tasks away – the ones that are time-consuming and stop you from focussing on more meaningful tasks”.
Secondly, an automation mindset provides employees with the ability to see tasks differently. They don't just spot daily frictions but understand how these are caused by process limitations, and most importantly – they can identify steps that can be automated to fix these issues.
Automation in action
After embracing the digital mindset, participants are taught how to develop automation solutions using a low-code platform. Goodfellow, who delivers services for a network provider, developed a bot for identifying accounts that need to be closed. Formally a manual process, he says: “our escalation department would close 200-300 accounts daily… with that being automated, what would normally take 3 hours now takes just over an hour to do”.
His automated solution also considers special circumstances: “with the pandemic and people’s circumstances changing, accounts get flagged as vulnerable depending on their situation. The bot considers that. So, if a member is marked as vulnerable, actions don’t get taken automatically”. Moreover, the mobile phone network was so impressed with the solution that it’s integrated the bot into its operations.
Many participants who have created smaller bots feel motivated by the results and are now aiming higher. Liza Mckenna, customer service agent, Firstsource, started with building ‘a very basic bot’, designed to reduce time spent logging into a system: “It can take three minutes, swapping between two browsers, to be able to log in. So, I created a bot that significantly cuts down this running time, essentially saving 110 agents two and a half minutes each day”. For the business that means saving four hours a day.
After seeing success from her small bot, Mckenna has set her sights on creating one that can recognise emails in foreign languages, automatically send them to Google Translate, and place them in the system as a private note. She explains: “We get emails in Arabic, French, Bulgarian, you name it. My bot could save agents between four and five minutes every time they get a case that's in another language”.
It is clear that while the digital skills shortage will persist, employers can reduce the effects by running citizen development initiatives. As the Automation League demonstrates, these programmes do more than teach new skills. They help employees think differently, seeing their everyday tasks from a new perspective, identifying efficiency opportunities which might have been missed if the solutions were developed top-down.
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