In service, sales and operations, AI is becoming part of the process itself, or is doing away with processes that in the past had to be optimized. Much like the move to digital, only on a far larger scale.

If the AI discussion has so far been confined to chat interfaces, (Front-end) it is now clear that the real strategic value lies in changing the deep operational structure. The question is no longer “how will AI answer the customer”, but “how will AI reorganize the company” so as to shorten SLAs, streamline the Back Office and produce a final resolution at first contact.

The move from reactive management to proactive management begins with the “democratization of expertise”. Once AI systems put complex insights in front of the first-line agent in real time, the need to “check with the Back Office” fades away.

In retail, AI connects the supply chain to customer service; smart systems spot a stock delay before the customer is even aware of it and authorize the agent to offer compensation or an immediate alternative, heading off repeat contacts and keeping satisfaction high.

In hospitality and complex services too, the revolution shows up in the optimization of task routing (Dispatching). Instead of the customer waiting for a status check, AI identifies the substance of the request and assigns it directly to the most available and most suitable service provider.

The Back Office holds many processes in the customer value chain that involve processing information and reaching a decision, and that until now have depended on a human service provider. Bringing AI in can shorten the process considerably, sharpen its accuracy and reduce risk.

Checking eligibility under an insurance policy, for example, or reviewing supporting documents in a request to approve a service under the health basket, and so on, today rest on the agent doing the review, take a great deal of time and depend on that person’s level of knowledge and precision.

AI also enables a shift from random statistical quality control to continuous control of 100% of interactions, which makes it possible to identify process failures the moment they occur and correct them immediately.

We see this today in advanced healthcare organizations, where AI manages patient flow by predicting appointment cancellations and automatically slotting waiting lists in by clinical urgency, which shortens the SLA to treatment with no human hand involved.

Where do you start? The strategic Assessment stage Rolling out AI is not a technology project, it is an exercise in process engineering. The first step for any senior management team is to run an Operational Assessment to identify the quiet bottlenecks, the places where information stalls or requires manual approvals. That process includes mapping the customer journeys against current Back-Office capabilities,

defining new success metrics (KPIs) focused on shortening SLAs, and building a roadmap for rolling out tools that support decision-making in the field. Only a precise link between business strategy and operational infrastructure will let the organization harness the power of AI and turn service into a winning competitive asset.

In short, this is the time to act, to think big and to start small.

At the executive roundtable led by 7I’s together with Tiff and CommBox, held in October 2025,

we examined personalization in service from several different angles

The journey from personal service in the branch to personalized service in digital

Customer service used to rest on a personal relationship with a representative at the branch – a banker, a doctor, an insurance agent or a salesperson. Personal familiarity, a face-to-face conversation, and reading needs out of human interaction were the basis of the service experience. As Asaf Eldar, Head of the Retail Division at Discount Bank, described it,

“Walking into the bank and seeing a familiar face gave me a different feeling… It will be hard to reproduce the depth of emotion people felt – it probably creates far more chemistry than I can imagine.”

Over the years, and mainly on the back of accelerating digitization – including COVID and the war – service moved to central contact centers, apps and websites. The central challenge: how do you preserve that personal, empathetic feeling when the service is delivered remotely and automatically?
Today, leading organizations are building Hyper-Personalization capabilities – deep personalization based on data, AI, and precise identification of the customer’s needs in real time. The goal: to bring the personal feeling back, this time with technology.

Why does this matter now?

Customers are already there. They are used to tailored service from platforms such as NETFLIX – 80% of viewing on Netflix is the result of personalization – and the same holds for digital platforms like Amazon and Google.

Customers expect the organization to recognize them, understand their needs, and offer them the right thing, at the right time, in the right channel. As Asaf Eldar put it, “in the end people want an answer to the need they have right now”
A 2025 Medallia survey covering the preferences of 23,000 customers found that 61% of consumers are willing to pay more for a personalized experience, while only about 25% of consumers have experienced a very high level of personalization

“Personalization is a question of resolution”

Eldar highlighted the gap between what organizations imagine and what customers actually need, and warned against shallow personalization built on nothing more than basic customer details.
Udi Asulin, Head of the Telephone Service Operation at Maccabi Healthcare Services (a large Israeli HMO), described the launch of specialized contact centers serving different populations. On the face of it that could have cost operational efficiency, but in practice it produced a 10% drop in repeat calls. In his words,

“If we do not know how to connect to the customer’s needs, to make the service accessible to them using the information we already hold – then it is not really personal, and we will never get to hyper.”

We also learned that if you are going to personalize, it had better be accurate. 61% of consumers say that “reliable information” is the single most important element of the customer experience (Qualtrics 2025)
Shai Ben Moshe, Head of the Customers, Sales and Service Division at Bank Hapoalim, stressed the importance of precision in personalization:

“If we offer a customer something that does not suit them – it annoys them, and it produces the opposite result.”

53% of consumers say they will cut their spending on a brand after an unsatisfactory experience (Qualtrics 2025)
We learned that it is worth examining and sharpening the line between personal service and the customer’s privacy.

Udi Asulin of Maccabi noted that customers mostly expect us to use the information we hold, while medical confidentiality of course does not allow it, and that creates a gap between expectations and data protection. Nir Lautman, Chief Customer Officer at Clal Finance and Insurance described how they chose instead to surprise customers in places with no connection to insurance at all – happy moments, such as sending a gift to a new mother.
Lautman (Clal) shared that in insurance, knowing the customer is the basis for pricing the premium. Recently it has become possible to raise the resolution using data, understand the customer’s individual needs, and build products that fit them – Clal BEHAVE in motor insurance, for example, which uses driving monitoring to let customers who drive carefully pay less.
Aliza Gavra CDO and CX at – MAX, described how a location-based service they offered customers was read by those customers as “Big Brother”, and after reviewing the reaction they decided to withdraw it.
Elad Mizrahi, CEO of Tiff described the rollout of bots together with CommBox and stressed the importance of process continuity around anything that starts in a bot. Consistently examining customer intent and the actions the bot failed to close, while carrying all the information forward into the rest of the journey, is a necessary condition for building customer trust in personalization that no human is running.
We are all only at the beginning this is the time to dream
Even the leading organizations are at the early stages of implementing Hyper-Personalization. This is a long journey, and it takes patience, trial and error. As Asaf Eldar noted,
“The war was a catalyst for a great many technology processes – it cleared the blockages and accelerated projects that had been planned for six months and closed in two weeks.”
According to the 7I’s 2025 survey, among the 40 companies taking part in the roundtable, 50% of organizations in Israel already include personalization in their strategy, only half of those have put a budget behind it, and fewer still have aligned the organization’s targets to it.
Karni Kaplan, an expert in operations and technology for the Contact Center, noted in her talk that although the expectation had been that AI’s impact would show up as efficiency gains in staffed service, adoption of AI tools in customer service stands at just 24%

Technology is a condition, but not a sufficient one

“There is genuinely a role like that in the structure – a customer experience manager – whose job is to listen, to understand, and to give the right thing.”

Quality data is the foundation for everything
Without a strong, clean, up-to-date database there is no way to produce personalization. Aliza Gavra (MAX) reminds us that data is the fuel that drives the engine, and that quality data is the foundation for everything. Without it, she argues, there is no real personalization. Aliza also reinforced the need to fit the customer experience to the different identities of the same customer, and the importance of measuring digital channel adoption accurately.

According to the 7I’s June 2025 survey, 88% of organizations report that they are not exploiting the full potential of their data for personalization.

We asked participants what can be learned from their experience – how do you start well?

• Dream big, start small – do not wait for the perfect solution. Start with small, measured steps that create immediate value. Asaf Eldar’s advice: “better to give the customer something than to try to build the whole dream.”
• Identify the high-value populations and events – focus on the cases where Hyper-Personalization will create real benefit for the customer and for the organization. Clal Insurance, for example, developed a product that monitors customers’ driving behavior and offers them a premium tailored to it.
• Work at the organizational level as well – cultural change is a condition for success. Personalization is not only technology – it is a new way of thinking. As Asaf Eldar noted, “as Israelis we need to know our customers – to know they are looking for protektzia, the inside track – and turn that into personalization.”

After an interesting day, we concluded…

Hyper-Personalization is not just a buzzword – it is a deep shift in thinking. Organizations that can balance technology, data and human sensitivity will lead the market. The executives who took part stressed one point: this is a journey that demands vision, flexibility and a genuine ability to listen to the customer.

Advanced technologies and fast, real-time data processing are slowly freeing us from classifying customers on the basis of historical data. They allow ever-greater personalization of the service and the product to the individual customer, matched also to the moment of consumption, to geographic location at that time, and to further contextual variables. Heightened personalization – Hyper Personalization is built on analysis of historical data combined with forecasts.

This is going to get interesting… for every one of us, personally

We are all already well familiar with the way Netflix, Spotify and Wolt match content, based on viewing history, searches and preferences, on the viewer’s profile, on geography and even on the time of day.

Imagine that kind of service at the bank, at the HMO (health fund), at the clothing store, at the supermarket… it is not far off.

hyper personalization, then, is a business strategy that uses advanced technologies to deliver highly personalized experiences, products or services based on the customer’s behavior and preferences and on the context they are in.

hyper personalization uses technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), creative intelligence, machine learning (ML) and real-time data analysis to create heightened personalized experiences for customers. It goes well beyond the basics such as addressing customers by name or recommending products based on their purchase history. hyper personalization draws on far more data, more current and more precise: browsing patterns, location, preferences, similar customers, and contextual factors such as the weather or the time of day.

hyper personalization is steadily gaining ground in sectors such as retail, entertainment, healthcare and banking, improving the user experience and raising customer engagement.

Customers like it, they even expect it.. it is taken for granted

Heightened personalization is welcomed. According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value, three in five consumers want to use artificial-intelligence applications while they shop. Another study, by McKinsey, found that 71% of consumers expect businesses to deliver personalized content. Of those customers, 67% say they feel let down when their interactions with businesses are not matched to their needs.

Consumers expect interactions matched to their preferences, their behaviors and their particular needs rather than generic approaches. hyper personalization answers that demand while strengthening customer-retention strategy. The benefits of personalized marketing show up in hard results: according to McKinsey, it can cut customer-acquisition costs by up to 50%, lift revenue by 5-15% and raise marketing ROI by 10-30%.

When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to connect with the brand, buy again and build long-term loyalty. That emotional connection is a differentiator in a competitive market. Customers favor brands that understand and prioritize their individual needs and preferences.

hyper personalization also supports innovation. Collecting data and analyzing customer behavior lets businesses understand emerging customer trends and behaviors in depth. These activities sit alongside initiatives in which businesses use technology to sharpen their strategies, develop new products and anticipate future customer needs.

How hyper personalization differs from traditional personalization

The main difference between hyper personalization and traditional personalization lies in the depth of the data used and in the degree of tailoring. Personalization as practiced to date generally uses basic customer information such as names, purchase history or demographics, in order to create generic personalized experiences.

Mentioning a customer’s name in an email, or recommending products based on earlier purchases, is traditional personalization. With the tools we had before the AI revolution this was certainly effective up to a point. The technology allowed analysis of static data, which could miss the customer’s changing needs or preferences.

hyper personalization goes beyond those tactics through advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and real-time data analysis. It draws on a wide range of data including behavioral patterns, browsing activity, location, device usage and even contextual factors such as timing, phone type or the weather.

That depth lets businesses create highly personalized, dynamic experiences that adapt to the customer’s evolving context. An e-commerce platform, for example, might recommend products in real time based on a customer’s recent clicks, their preferences and current trends among similar users.

Combining historical data with forecasts and external data

Traditional personalization is also reactive, based on past data. hyper personalization is proactive, using predictive analytics to offer more relevant experiences. It analyzes patterns in customer data in order to predict future behaviors or preferences. That capability lets businesses anticipate customer needs before those needs are stated explicitly. This level of sophistication makes hyper personalization effective at creating meaningful engagement, raising conversion and building customer loyalty.

Implementing hyper personalization requires a robust, integrated data infrastructure and a commitment to data privacy. Businesses must handle sensitive data and customer data responsibly, and comply with privacy-protection regulation, in order to preserve trust.

hyper personalization is not just technology – it demands serious organizational readiness – it is a revolution

The heightened-personalization process is already under way, at one stage or another, in every organization. Can it be implemented within the setups that already exist?

Traditionally, organizations are set up around definitions and classifications known in advance. We are used to tying the service channel to the handling party, and the customer classification to the SLA and the service provider. The heightened-personalization revolution forces us to create a flatter and more flexible world.

To set and enable the handling party, the SLA and the other parameters that shape the service, the product, the price and the operation for every single interaction, we need an organizational structure that is flatter, more flexible and more complex. And a move to an operating model that supports this organizational transformation.

The change is sweeping and calls for adjustments on every front:

Technology, systems integration and data management

And on the organizational fronts: strategy, workforce, skills, compensation models, regulation and legal risk, operating and management methods, KPI’s, management routines and organization – every organizational component needs to be adapted to the new world.

hyper personalization creates business value on every front

hyper personalization is a powerful instrument in the customer economy and delivers benefits across many business fronts: an improved customer experience, higher customer engagement and with it stronger retention and loyalty, consistency across channels, revenue growth, operational efficiency, proactivity in service and in sales, better marketing ROI, deeper insight into customers

When will we succeed – when the technology meets the business and the organization

The move from personalized service to Hyper Personalization creates significant challenges, but also opportunities to improve the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. Advanced technologies let businesses deliver customer experiences that are distinctive and highly personalized. For that to succeed, the business and organizational thinking has to be adjusted on every front.

A comprehensive rollout of heightened personalization – covering both the technology adjustments and the matching organizational readiness – can drive accelerated business growth.

Sources:

What is hyper-personalization IBM

How Generative AI Is Driving Hyperpersonalization – Forbes

Hyper-Personalization vs. Personalization: Hyper-Personalizing the Customer Experience -mendix

The choice between creating a Tribe and running a cross-organizational process is a strategic decision for any organization, and especially for large companies contending with complex challenges across many domains.

Each model offers different advantages, and the right fit depends mainly on the complexity of the task and on what it demands in terms of organizational collaboration. In this article we examine both models, look at what each can contribute to the organization, and set out when to choose which.

Tribe – A Management Model of Autonomy and Innovation

Tribe is a model in which the organization is divided into small, focused teams called tribes. Each tribe concentrates on a particular goal or project while keeping full autonomy over how it works. The teams are independent and can decide how to carry out their tasks, all within the organization’s broader objectives.

The advantages of the Tribe are that working this way encourages integration and collaboration between different departments in the organization. The focused structure of tribes also makes it possible to respond quickly to cross-organizational change without getting stuck in internal bureaucracy.

Each team in a tribe works autonomously but in coordination, which allows more flexibility. Employees feel ownership of the process as a whole rather than of one narrow area, which raises motivation. Working in tribes also helps spread technical and operational knowledge across the organization.

That said, tribe work comes with no shortage of drawbacks. The tribe model requires coordination across many teams, and it is sometimes hard to ensure that every tribe works to the same method, which creates management complexity.

There is also potential for power struggles – because some tribes work toward similar goals, conflict can arise over resources, authority and even strategic direction. A further consideration is the constant coordination required between the teams inside a tribe and between different tribes, which can overload internal communication.

The Cross-Organizational Process – A Model of Coordination and Lateral Collaboration

A cross-organizational process describes complex processes that require collaboration between different departments and disciplines in the organization. These are strategic, large-scale projects that require coordination across every department working together toward a shared goal.

The Cross-Organizational Process as Support for Strategic Projects

A successful cross-organizational process, one in which every department taking part genuinely collaborates with the others, supports the success of large-scale projects and organizational change. Coordination between different departments also makes it possible to create solutions that span and integrate several disciplines. A further advantage is the broadening of organizational knowledge and understanding: each department brings its own expertise into the process, which leads to well-grounded solutions.

The Five Principles for a Successful Cross-Organizational Process:

1. Defining a Critical Business Issue (CBI) – The driving force behind any process-improvement project is a critical problem with a direct impact on revenue, quality, cost or cycle time (usually a mix of these) and not improvement for its own sake. Therefore, the CBI must always be defined up front, in focused terms everyone agrees on.
2. Targets and Success Metrics – Clear targets must be defined, not only around the CBI but also on further metrics such as role clarity, systems alignment and cultural change. These metrics provide the guiding lines for the project and make it possible to assess its success.
3. Project Constraints and the Structure of the Leading Team– The constraints hold the new process within defined limits (such as the volume of resources or the technology systems in use), and set clear roles to lead the new project, usually the project management team, a lead team and a steering committee. You must also define the project TimeLine, including the deliverables of every stage in the process (mapping the current state, shaping the concept, and implementation).
4. A Deep Understanding of the Current State (IS) in order to understand the starting point and build an efficient future process. That way, when designing the Should process (the improved future process) we build on and preserve the strong points of the current state, while identifying and addressing today’s failure and pain points, and eliminating activities that add no value (redundancy, bottlenecks, unnecessary documentation, and any sequential activity that can be made parallel). In a typical project, the ratio between current-state analysis and the design, shaping and implementation of the new operating concept is 1:5.
5. Encouraging Creativity in Designing the Future Process (SHOULD) – Creating the optimal Should process takes creativity, so it is worth putting a diverse team on the task, one that can offer genuinely original thinking. You can even run a design competition, which can help reach a breakthrough. In most cases the final solution combines several of the ideas raised.

These principles provide a systematic, structured approach to improving organizational processes, with the emphasis on focus, measurement, deep understanding and innovation.

Tribe versus Cross-Organizational Process – When Should You Choose Each?

The choice between a Tribe and a cross-organizational process depends on the nature of the task and on the organization’s needs:

Tribe fits a focused task, where the work does not require broad collaboration between departments. It also fits tasks that demand a high degree of team autonomy and independence, and cases that call for innovation and a high degree of flexibility.

The cross-organizational process is the better fit for a strategic change or a large-scale project that requires central coordination, and for tasks that require close collaboration between different departments and disciplines . In general, when every organizational need has to be answered at once, as in enterprise-wide projects, the rollout of new systems or structural change, the cross-organizational process is the better instrument for the job.

In summary, choosing the right management model –Tribe or cross-organizational process – depends on the complexity and the type of task facing the organization. The Tribe suits tasks that call for autonomy and innovation in independent teams, while the cross-organizational process centers on lateral collaboration between departments. The right choice will help the organization avoid delays in its processes and raise the effectiveness of the system as a whole.

Choosing the management model is an important decision, and it is worth making a precise assessment of organizational needs and organizational culture before making it, so that the model you choose delivers the results you want.

We have put together a review of the main insights:

Demand for interactive service (as distinct from self-service) on digital platforms is now taken for granted. Start with the customer’s point of view. Demand for service over messaging is growing exponentially.

In a survey of the companies attending the conference, those already running service over written communication reported that 20-40% of interactive service is now handled on these platforms: 20% on synchronous communication such as chat, and 20% on asynchronous communication – WhatsApp, email and above all the company’s own app.

On the consumer side, we find very high openness to receiving service through written and digital channels, either as a substitute for the phone and the traditional channels or integrated with them. Demand is mainly for post-purchase service and information, returns and exchanges. In healthcare and in banking there is also openness to services carrying a personal, advisory element, such as a medical assessment or a loan application.

Tal Geva, VP Service at Migdal (a leading Israeli insurer), shared that WhatsApp service is Migdal’s flagship service. “We started small, with a human agent on a specific process: withdrawing funds, taking a loan. A few days later the customer wants to know what is happening, whether all the documents came through, and when the money will arrive: process status and document validity,” Tal recounts. “Then COVID arrived and turned the channel into a central one.

We opened the service to all customers and all topics, it worked well, we ran it that way for two years. In time we understood that exchanges calling for a softer, more substantive dialogue – what about my funds? what am I entitled to? should I open one? – were turning into long conversations, and we decided to concentrate the WhatsApp effort on a bot alone, which answers roughly 70% of inquiries.

For the remaining inquiries the bot lets the customer choose a slot for a phone conversation with a human agent and schedules the call.”

Where do we stand in the move from multichannel service (Multi Channel) to omnichannel service (Omnichannel)

An omnichannel maturity analysis we ran on the survey of conference participants shows that most companies are at the cross- channel stage. They offer the customer a range of channels to approach them through, each channel carries a different mix of services, and in many cases the customer is moved from one channel to another without real continuity.

Liat Menashe, head of the service operation at Strauss Water, recounts: “We were spread across every channel – chat, email, social networks, telephone. In 2022 we built a customer experience strategy, and one of its pillars was written communication and communication with customers in general.

We thought about the customer experience as a whole, and decided to focus the channels: WhatsApp was chosen as the central channel, we closed chat, we allow email outside business hours, and on social networks we accelerated the response. Broadly, we sharpened the operating concept.” Liat also notes that WhatsApp is a very sensitive channel, and recommends managing time-to-response: “If you don’t answer quickly, gaps open up. It needs watching.”

On customer experience we learn that four central principles deserve attention: trust, status feedback, information security, and the customer’s sense of control, so that they can move between channels at any stage of the service.

Amos Podim, head of the direct channels division at Discount Bank, said: “Over the past year we focused our efforts on the written channel, and took on the challenge – how do you enable a complete experience, starting and finishing in written communication… Banking is a complicated world.

We mapped what can be handled at tier 1, opened up permissions and authority to maximize resolution, and topics that cannot be closed at tier 1 move to tier 2 – the handling of complex inquiries. Where we identified that an exchange could not be completed in writing, we instructed a move to the phone channel.”

Asked whether the customer feels the move to tier 2, Amos answered that they are careful to work transparently with customers and to set expectations along the way. If the customer stays in control and informed, Amos notes, they will not go looking in other channels. “When we didn’t set expectations, we saw repeat calls and parallel inquiries across channels.”

Hila Friedman, head of the support system at Wolt, noted that all of their service is delivered in written communication only. They adapted the language and let agents chat with customers in natural language, mixing in emojis and humor. Hila notes that this significantly improves satisfaction with the service.

Does opening additional channels grow demand, or shift it between channels?

Conference participants shared both an impression and hard data that opening a new channel produces a rise in demand at first, but that over time volume shifts between the channels – provided the messaging channels deliver good, sufficient service. Companies reported a shift of roughly 30% of phone inquiries to the written channels, combining bots and parallel handling; over time this also produced efficiency improvement in response resources.

To Bot or Not to Bot

Elad Mizrahi, CEO of TIFF, presented the success story of rolling out the bot and artificial intelligence in Liveperson‘s Omnichannel system at McDonald’s, during preparations for a significant ramp up in the nationwide deployment of delivery service under COVID.

The use of the bot and of artificial intelligence made it possible, in a short space of time, to multiply response capacity by several hundred percent and to deliver efficient, self-learning handling – customer compensation, for example – and to manage the customer journey through an order with no agent involvement.

The question came up of whether to signal to the customer when they are talking to a bot and when to an agent.

Opinions went both ways. Uri Yonisi, of Bank Leumi, noted that when the service is delivered successfully it makes no difference to the customer who they are talking to. Nili Samberg of Clalit (Israel’s largest HMO) noted that in healthcare a human response is critical to the customer, people want to talk to someone.

That speaks to the principle of control, or choice, which has to be maintained throughout the process: let the customer ask to move to a human agent.

Omnichannel operations have their own challenges too. Management methods, measurement and “real-time management” all have to be adapted to the nature of the activity. And the bots can be enlisted for that as well..

The managers noted that it is worth having versatile agents for backup, but that there is no need for every agent to be versatile across channels. Lior Farkash of Pelephone noted that they designated agents who can deliver service across combined channels and move the customer to a written channel in the course of an ongoing case. From that moment the inquiry is managed by that specific agent until it is closed.

Most of the managers shared that under load they rebalance agents across the channels in real time. Hila Friedman, head of the support system at Wolt, described how they enlisted the bots in shift management.

At peak hours or under load they defined the ability to widen the range of topics the bot answers, which routes fewer conversations to agents. The bot identifies the topic of the conversation, and against a clearly defined “traffic light” of urgency and load, the shift supervisors decide which conversations a bot answers and which an agent does.

Conference participants noted that they adapted the metrics and the management methods to the new world. They recommend tracking the number of interactions per inquiry, and managing several inquiries in parallel. Orit Dolgin, a digital service specialist, noted that these are different skills: the way agents are taught, managed and coached for written communication is different.

Orit also reminded us that the customer is not measured on SLA the way we are, so we need to find a way to let them continue the conversation without going through identification again or restarting through the bot.

To sum up, every panel participant noted that the move to Omnichannel sits at the heart of service work, and has to be built into the organizational strategy. It needs management attention and budget.. It is necessary, because it is what customers want, and it is well worth it, because in the end you really can drive efficiency, work off more accurate and better-targeted information, and deliver better service.

It is fair to say that the 21st century brought the communications revolution with it. Use of the full range of communication channels and internet media accelerated sharply from the very start of the century. Boundaries came down, and the intensified use of media and social networks now shapes significant processes across the world. This also has a decisive effect on the service and sales processes organizations deliver to their customers.

Today’s customers spend many hours of the day online in general, and in forums and social networks in particular. 56% do so mainly from a mobile device which, beyond its basic uses, serves as a “mobile office” and an always-available platform for browsing the internet and running dedicated apps.

In a reality where almost everything is becoming digital, every service leader understands the importance of creating digital service platforms for customers, because it is a genuine win-win situation.

On one side, the customer can consume services, complete transactions and get information wherever and whenever it suits them. On the other, the company achieves a significant saving in service costs, part of which the service leader can redirect toward strengthening customer loyalty and improving the service experience.

One of the central challenges I faced as the leader of a large and complex service operation was steering customer demand toward the digital platforms. Despite the digital reality around them, when it comes to customer service those customers are still in the habit of turning to the traditional alternative – the phone or the service counter.

Listen to the customer

Like every service leader, my first lesson was that the key to excellent service is listening to what the customer needs and fitting the solution to it. So I understood that steering demand from the traditional service platforms to the digital channels also has to begin with mapping the needs of the company’s customers, and I set out on the first task: segmenting the target populations, and analyzing the information each population consumes most often, including when and where it should be made available. It also meant identifying the most frequent contact reasons suited to self-service and building solutions for them, and examining carefully where the information should go deeper and where it should instead be trimmed and focused, before the customer loses patience and abandons the process. Finally, it meant deciding in which situations proactive service information is appropriate (with the customer’s consent, of course).

The mountain will not come to Muhammad…

Once the customer needs were defined, I moved on to mapping the existing touchpoints where the customer already is – the places they are used to getting service today. That is the most relevant meeting point at which to introduce them to the digital service.

We promoted the digital platforms in the IVR, on the company website, and in the forums where people discuss the company’s service. At the same time we used hold time to offer the digital options, make them easy to reach and play up their advantages.

Simple, simple, simple

To accelerate the shift of demand to the digital channels, it is important to understand that one of the main keys to success is the simplicity of the process. Almost every service leader knows the obstacles that come with the fear of compromising customer privacy, and the demands that information security officers and company legal counsel make in order to guard against it. I identified this as a critical junction and enlisted the relevant people in creative thinking about it.

If you have decided that the customer will need to register for a “personal area” in order to consume the service, it is essential to invest thought and effort in making that process as short as possible, because a long process is a significant barrier to consuming service digitally. Work hard to drop registration questions that are really marketing questions about consumption habits. True, they matter a great deal to the marketing team, for tailoring offers and lifting revenue.

But every extra line in the registration process costs you the patience of another few hundred customers on their way to digital service.

We realized that the average customer does not consume services from me on a daily or weekly basis. So alongside a full registration process, we chose to build an interface for “quick actions” that requires no prior registration. We simplified authentication as far as possible, for example by sending a one-time password to the customer’s mobile number as recorded in the company’s systems, or by using another identifier such as an ID number.

The human option is always an option

At the entry point to the digital service platform, it is important not to remove the option of a human agent entirely.

We chose to give the digital options prominence and easy access and to set out their advantages, but alongside them we kept the option of the old traditional route the customer is used to. Customer surveys show unmistakably that withholding the human option creates antagonism and drives customers away from the digital platform.

An incentive as a trigger for building usage habits. The overwhelming majority of customers are accustomed to the traditional service platforms. Steering demand to the digital channels means changing habits and educating the market to consume services digitally, alongside building the alternative in the best and most convenient way, so that whoever chooses it will choose it again.

You need an incentive to secure that first choice and give yourself the chance to prove that the platform is convenient, friendly and reliable. To that end, we enlisted the relevant functions in the company to put together a substantial benefits package for using the digital service. For example, product benefits, discounted purchase of value-added products, discounts on dedicated marketing plans, discounts for setting up payment arrangements, waived fees and so on.

The website is not necessarily the center of gravity. When the task is steering demand to digital, the end justifies the means. The company website is a means, not an end. If the customer finds it easier to consume services through online forums, a service app or email, we will be there for them.

True, the marketing team cares about traffic to the company site. But when it comes to steering service demand, the central task is to get to the place where the customer already is, where and when it suits them to consume services, and that is where we will be for them.

The process is trial and error. In service, what matters most is staying attentive to the customer and learning and correcting on the move. To produce sustained improvement over time you have to listen to customers all the way through: measure, survey, hear, analyze and investigate.

We built daily tracking and control processes to follow usage patterns across all the platforms, in the service of continuous improvement. A customer used a digital service for the first time? We created a survey tailored to the relevant platform, to understand satisfaction, willingness to keep using it in future, and which services the customer sees as relevant in digital and which not, and why.

A customer used a digital service once and then stopped, going back to the traditional channels? We approached those customers, debriefed them, checked, asked and drew conclusions for improvement. On a daily basis we analyzed the end-to-end funnel into the digital service processes: how many entries on each platform, where processes are abandoned and what the root causes are.

We then adjusted the processes and the platforms in line with the findings.

Digital service is not the future, it is already the present. The customers are already there, and all that is left is to build them the simple, convenient, reliable and worthwhile solution, so that they choose this platform again and again and enjoy service that is available wherever and whenever they choose.

And yes, it is clear to everyone that the company, for its part, benefits from steering demand to a cheaper and more efficient platform.

A platform that is convenient, accessible and fitted to the customer, combined with benefits, discounts and promotions, or dedicated marketing plans available only through digital service – that is a winning formula.

Did we already say win-win situation?

7I’s helps you look beyond selling skills and service skills. Three operational components are your added value for driving efficiency in sales and service operations without changing the offering or the supporting systems.

Opportunities and Critical Moments

In service and in sales alike, you can treat every interaction as a standalone event, but the process is better managed end to end. A sales process begins with a lead. Will it become an opportunity? Will it become a sale? How many opportunities are never converted, giving way to easier, fresher ones?

Managing the sales process from the moment the lead is generated through to service delivery, and creating visibility by defining the right KPIs along the way, will deliver a significant improvement in how well opportunities are converted.

Service works the same way: it is built out of critical moments. Between the customer’s first approach and their satisfaction with the resolution, the customer may encounter several different parts of the organization, decision points, failure points and frustration.

Beyond the damage to service levels and satisfaction, all of this ultimately costs the organization a great deal of money in repeat calls and back-office work. Defining the critical moments in the process and managing the flow between them, much as you would manage a sales opportunity, produces early warning of failures, maximizes the chances of a “satisfied customer” and gets the most out of your resources.

Making the Most of Service and Sales Agent Time

Skilled service agents, and skilled sales agents even more so, are an expensive resource and often one in short supply. It is worth checking periodically that the way work processes and selling methods are defined maximizes the time these skilled people spend selling or serving.

In most of the studies we have run, we found that the average salesperson, like the average service agent, spends only about 50% of their time actually serving or selling. The rest goes to adjacent activities: administration, research, building data sets and chasing people around the organization. No one can guarantee that a sales or service agent will spend 100% of their time in front of customers.

But managing agent time against predefined targets produces a marked improvement, adjacent activities can certainly be reduced by redesigning the process, and sometimes they are better handed to cheaper resources.

Optimizing Service and Sales Channels

Service and sales channels are reinvented daily. What was once concentrated in face-to-face channels, walk-in points, stores and service centers, expanded substantially to the telephone two decades ago, and in recent years has expanded substantially to online channels.

Which services are worth offering online? All of them? To every population? The answers follow from the nature of the business and, above all, from the organization’s business strategy.

Map channel effectiveness against the organization’s goals – service / sales / growing share of customer / improving satisfaction / image – combine that with a cost analysis for each channel, and align it to the parameters that shape customer perception, such as availability, accessibility, complexity of the task, cost and so on.

You can then set the priority of services and channels by segment, and optimize how customers are routed to the channels that suit them best. The result is effective use of resources in the channels that pay off most for the product and the customer.

Most organizations tend to invest in running each unit autonomously, with its own set of metrics, goals and actions, and not always with reference to the next or previous link in the supply chain or the production chain. That approach creates gaps and bottlenecks between departments, and over time it also breeds antagonism and “negative” competition between them.

Creating synergy means managing the work process at an additional level – the level of the interfaces. At 7I’s we have developed a method that improves interface management by dividing the work process into segments, where the boundaries of each segment sit inside two adjoining processes. This puts managerial focus on bridging the continuity that a cross-organizational process demands, and on improving the work interfaces.

7I’s, the operational strategy firm, helps its clients strengthen their work interfaces by applying a distinctive management method that treats the work segment as an organic unit.

What is a segment?

A segment is an interface process between two adjacent processes in the service or supply chain, with its boundaries sitting at the heart of each stage of the process. Every segment has a designated manager, who is not necessarily the manager of either process in practice but does hold a role in one of the links within the segment. Better still, the preference is to appoint a senior employee from the company’s management pipeline.

Segments within a cross-organizational process in freight forwarding

How do you manage a segment?

The segment manager must define a mandate for the segment together with a working team drawn from employees on both links of the interface. The mandate sets out a set of goals, metrics and actions for the segment’s success, tied to the company’s goals and targets.

Through the working year, the segment owner manages the interface process between the two departments using interface meetings, cross-training, identification of bottlenecks at the points of contact, and the creation of effective teamwork between the two departments.

Beyond the clear gain of a well-run interface, and the commitment and broader perspective it builds in employees, managing a segment is also a way to develop the segment manager and to learn about their managerial capability.

When a patient is discharged from hospital, they are handed a discharge summary and instructions for continued care.

Arranging an appointment with the right physician, and getting the information from the hospital to the treating physician at the HMO (Israeli health fund), remain the responsibility of the insured member.

How many patients actually know the bureaucracy, or what the correct process even is? It falls to the member to convert the hospital’s instructions into the appropriate referrals and funding approvals at the HMO; to explain to the HMO physician what treatment was given and on what basis the decisions were made; to obtain the right medications through the HMO; and to arrange their own follow-up at the frequency and urgency the hospital defined – blood tests, imaging and so on, which are not available at the HMOs within the intervals those instructions require.

It is clear that today most of the responsibility for a clean discharge into the community rests on the patient’s shoulders, and that may well be why 1 in 5 patients admitted to an internal medicine department were there in the month before the new admission.

Research shows this is not inevitable: changing processes and infrastructure, in the community and in the hospitals alike, can improve outcomes for patients and for the public at large.

Israel and the rest of the world are both grappling with readmissions. Data published by the Ministry of Health in 2013 show that –

• Roughly 20% of all admissions to internal medicine departments are readmissions within a month, and 8% are readmissions within a week. The figure has held steady for years, with no discernible trend.
• The readmission rate rises with age: at 75, 25% of admissions are readmissions within a month. The longer the index (first) admission, the higher the likelihood of returning to an internal medicine department.
• Widen the measurement window and the picture is starker: patients admitted to an internal medicine department today are 2.42 times more likely to be admitted again within the next six months than people with no prior admission.
• Patients with certain conditions – malignancies, renal failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure in particular – sit in a markedly higher risk group for readmission (1). That raises the question of whether there is genuine potential to reduce readmissions, or whether they are simply the natural course of disease progression.
• No correlation was found between the number of beds in a hospital and its readmission rate

There is no doubt this is a phenomenon that carries a heavy price – from the health and wellbeing of the patient through to measures of public and economic efficiency. Many health systems are preoccupied with readmissions and with how to prevent them.

Estimates in the literature put the share of readmissions that could be avoided at between 9% and 50%, with a median of 30% (2,3), and most prevention approaches address the infrastructure and processes behind optimal continuity of care across acute and community providers.

Who owns continuity of care?

Continuity of care is the process by which a patient moves between inpatient institutions and the community, and back again.

Patients who have completed the acute phase of an illness often need an orderly handover to the community – one party or more who knows how to build and execute the appropriate follow-on intervention plan. It is well established that better continuity of care delivers better medicine, reduces costs and raises satisfaction among patients and clinicians alike (10). Without real continuity, the risk of readmission, of complications and of rising expenditure all climb.

The quality of continuity of care depends, among other things, on the working relationship between the organizations involved in the process – the hospitals and the community providers.

The HMOs and the hospitals are two large organizations within the health system that run a supplier-customer relationship between them: the HMOs pay the hospitals for the services their members receive. Spending on inpatient days accounts for a substantial share of HMO budgets – 41% of HMO community-sector operating expenditure goes on hospitalization (4).

The Ministry of Health has a strong interest in securing continuity of care, both clinically and in public and economic terms, and it is indeed the regulator on the subject.

At the same time, the Ministry owns 11 public hospitals in Israel – so it sets policy on one hand and carries operational responsibility on the other. That dual role weighs heavily on the relationship between the HMOs and the hospitals, with the Ministry sitting at the heart of the conflict, holding both ends of the stick.

Between 2011 and 2013 the Ministry of Health ran a support scheme for the HMOs designed to push them to reduce readmissions, with a target of moving from 20% to 17% (worth ₪300-400 million a year).

To that end the Ministry allocated ₪40 million to be shared among the HMOs that managed to cut readmissions by 10% in 2012 and by 20% in 2013 (5). At the end of the period, however, the Ministry determined that no HMO had met the target.

In the United States, by contrast, where there is no public health system of the kind Israel operates, a mechanism of fines on hospitals tied to readmissions was introduced in 2010. A study tracking the effects covered 48 million admissions and showed a significant fall in the readmission rate, around 15% on average. (6)

Return to Israel and examine how a patient moves from acute inpatient institutions to continued care in the community, and it becomes clear that most of the responsibility for coordinating, implementing and securing continuity of care sits with the patient.

Every HMO has set up an internal unit intended to safeguard continuity of care, yet many patients still run into difficulty in the transitions between hospital and community. Those difficulties come down to missing processes and infrastructure for receiving the patient back into the community, and they can push the patient to choose the emergency room again the moment a problem surfaces.

The challenges in the move to the community may be bureaucratic – the time it takes to convert a prescription into medication, or a referral into an available community appointment – or purely clinical, in understanding the instructions the hospital gave and applying them.

Meaningful continuity of care, built on infrastructure, processes, measurement and incentives in the hospitals and in community institutions alike, can deliver the change required to prevent readmissions.

Rolling out tools to predict readmission and to identify the population at preventable risk will let the HMOs focus their processes and infrastructure on the patients whose readmission can actually be prevented, rather than on the edges.

• Information sharing between hospital and community, and back the other way. Israel has come a long way technologically here, and a substantial share of the information is now visible on both sides. Even so, there is a long road left before every citizen has a single medical record. A complete file that travels with us between HMOs and, of course, between the acute stages and community care. That is what would allow genuine continuity of diagnosis, medication and the design of an appropriate intervention plan.
• Discharge planning in the hospital, covering: assessment of the patient’s needs for discharge home, with a focus on functional needs; guidance for patients and, where required, for family members or carers; review of the medications the patient takes and updating them as needed; transfer of information to the next treating party in the hospital, or coordination of care with community providers; and follow-up audit through home visits and/or telephone calls after discharge from hospital.
  Building intervention processes to bridge hospital and community. Every HMO has a body that acts as the patient’s bridge between hospital and community. It is responsible for coordinating continuity of care in practice.
  These bodies need to implement processes and working tools that reduce and prevent readmissions – among them rapid conversion of prescriptions and referrals (ideally before the discharge itself), booking specialist appointments and bringing them forward where necessary, and a full handover to the next party in the community, the one who will manage continued care.
• Timely follow up – the ideal timing for a follow-up appointment with the community physician after discharge is not known. Many studies have examined the relationship between the timing of the first community follow-up and readmission, and most show a fall in readmission rates among patients given an appointment on discharge (7). It is also known that 50% of patients who require readmission within 30 days of discharge had not yet been seen by a community physician (8). That said, a large retrospective study of close to 5,000 discharges from Mayo Clinic hospitals found no relationship between the timing of the post-discharge follow-up appointment and readmission (9).

Processes and infrastructure in the community

As noted, the question of who is responsible for securing continuity of care is fundamental to preventing readmissions, and the HMOs need to implement processes and working tools in the community too if they are to prevent the next admission. Untangling bureaucracy, availability of specialist appointments, conversion of prescriptions and referrals – all of these have to keep running after the coordinating body has left the picture.

Once the working processes are in place, they need to be backed by targets, measurement and incentives for everyone involved:

• Measuring effectiveness through process metrics – for example, the share of discharged patients contacted proactively within a week; assessment of readmission risk by a community nurse or physician; the share of discharged patients in the risk group whose follow-on care recommendations were actually carried out (prescriptions filled, referrals and tests completed, and so on)
• Performance metrics – actual readmissions within the intervention group. Intervention by multidisciplinary units for complex patients, such as the home hospitalization units the HMOs run today. Those same units can also run a month-long prevention program until the patient is stabilized (usually a patient carrying a heavy disease burden), before responsibility passes to the home clinic.
• Monitoring at-risk patients (COPD, CHF) – a process already in place at several HMOs.
• And last, though important and not yet studied at scale, is educating the patient and building their own ability to prevent readmission. This matters a great deal in chronic patients, and particularly in heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients, who carry an especially high risk of readmission. The estimate is that in these cases educational intervention can cut the number of readmissions by as much as 40% (10).

In summary, as the population ages, readmission rates will place a growing load on health systems in Israel and worldwide. Cutting them by even a few percentage points would deliver meaningful savings in money, time and morbidity, and would materially improve the quality of care.

The question of who is responsible for coordinating and implementing continuity of care in the community is the question now facing the HMOs and the Ministry of Health. Placing responsibility for part of the solution on the community and the hospitals rather than on the patient, changing processes at the transition points, and proactive HMO intervention that starts at the discharge stage, could all prove key to preventing the next readmission.