CASE STUDY
Redesigning a bottleneck into a human + Al hybrid service
Summary
A high-touch business required all clients to start with one of its services, creating a bottleneck that impeded revenue growth. The organization did not have enough demand to justify hiring to create additional capacity to deliver the initial service, so it needed another way to address the bottleneck.
I led the service redesign, vetting of the software product used in the redesign, and the experimentation process that resulted in a hybrid service that married the expertise and judgment of the team with the speed of AI. This created an opportunity to increase revenue by 124%, and it reduced labor input for the service by 87% without compromising the quality of the work or client satisfaction.
My role
project lead, facilitation, research, problem formulation, collaborative ideation, prototyping, software vetting and testing, implementation
What was true
The service required 4 weeks to execute end-to-end for every project, with much of that time requiring at least one team member to be fully dedicated to a single project.
While the organization’s team deeply understood the value of the initial service, clients did not. While they weren’t necessarily opposed to the service, they saw it as a barrier to speed, which is something the average client placed a premium on.
The team bought into the importance of starting client engagements with this service; however, they found much of the qualitative analysis to be tedious and time-consuming. While they believed there was room to be more efficient, they didn’t believe it was possible to move faster without producing substandard work and/or overworking.
What worked
We redesigned the service to address three key problems and constraints:
Clients valued speed, and this service impeded their ability to move quickly.
Team members feared that redesigning the service would result in burnout and/or substandard work.
The organization was pursuing growth without resources for additional headcount, and it was unwilling to allow clients to skip the initial service because it was important for the integrity of the work.
Stakeholders were deeply involved in the redesign and prototype testing, which included:
Testing of several approaches to integrate human expertise and judgement with the speed of AI, and testing of 3 software platforms.
Developing an SOP and customizing the AI to follow the organization’s methodology for qualitative analysis and adhere to privacy standards.
Quality control for inputs and outputs to ensure client satisfaction remained high.
Outcomes
Financial performance: Created the team capacity to increase revenue for this service by 109% and total revenue for the company by 124%.
Stakeholder experience: Clients moved faster and reported less friction with the timeline of projects. Team members were less stressed and reported that relationships with clients improved.
Operational alignment: This change unlocked resources that could be used to pursue the organization’s growth objectives.
Leadership focus: Leadership was able to focus on the more strategic aspects of growing the organization.