One of the biggest challenges with any digital business transformation is resistance to change. Many organizations routinely run afoul of two issues when attempting to institute any type of change. The first is that in many cases the organization is attempting to force a change without thinking through the natural level of resistance there inevitably will be. Most individuals are not going to readily accept a change that they had little or no input into bringing about.
The second most overlooked aspect is that even when an organization seeks to collect feedback, many individuals are reluctant to give it.
Feedback, of course, is now more critical than ever. Many digital business transformation efforts are now foundering simply because the individuals impacted are either not accepting a process change or are finding ways around it by continuing to employ legacy processes. It may be naturally tempting to blame individuals for resisting change despite the obvious benefits to the organization. However, the truth of the matter is any process is only as good as the number of individuals that actually agree to embrace it.
Qualtrics and ServiceNow are making a case for obtaining more insight into how customers and employees are accepting change via a Qualtrics application that can now be downloaded via the ServiceNow app store. The two companies have been working together to integrate their respective offerings in a way that gives service agents deeper insights into end user experiences. The goal is to make it possible for service agents to incorporate that feedback in a way that enables organizations to more easily make adjustments, says Jay Choi, executive vice president and chief product officer for EmployeeXM at Qualtrics.
A survey provides those individuals with a less confrontation mechanism for sharing how they really feel about a process, he adds.
The integration between Qualtrics and ServiceNow also makes it easier to act on the feedback collected using the platform many organizations already rely on to manage IT services, says Manish Srivastava, vice president of product management for IT service management at ServiceNow.
Collecting feedback may seem an intuitively obvious thing to do, but it’s amazing how often it gets overlooked. Too many Digital CxOs are simply too invested in change to acknowledge any kind of negative feedback, so they don’t always produce the level of effort needed to impartially collect it. In an ideal world, the individuals collecting feedback should not be the same as the individuals that defined the processes the organization is trying to implement.
However, feedback needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The human condition is naturally resistant to change. It often takes time for individuals to psychologically adjust to a new process. No matter how convoluted the legacy process may have been, the amount of time and effort required to master a new process will often make individuals nostalgic for the legacy process. This provides a challenge and an opportunity to convert feedback being provided in criticism into something that is actually constructive.