The third in my series of six issues relative to getting rid of paper focuses on what I call Input Irregularity. See also…
The issue of “Input Irregularity” has plagued organizations for years – How do I make sense of all the different forms of customer communication bombarding my organization?
However, in the era of Information Chaos, it’s getting a lot worse. This is no longer a question of paper and phone and email, but also tweets and Facebook posts and LinkedIn comments and Yelp comments and on and on and on.
Whenever I go on what my wife calls one of my “Angry Old Man with Social Clout” tirades (the latest centers are a godawful customer service experience with CheapestGMParts.com - I know, what did I expect from the name?), I usually get the same experience – and that’s from the companies that are GOOD at social listening. Usually, someone responds fairly quickly to a negative tweet; that’s good. But then, it is almost comical how you need to totally recreate the experience you have had, in all of its Input Irregularity madness, because the backend systems simply do not manage all of the various points of customer communication in a coherent way.
A lot of the problem centers around a failure to put coherent capture strategies in place. In most places, input adhocracy reigns supreme. It all starts at the earliest stage, where information touches the organization. Almost two-thirds of organizations (64%) that do scanning and capture have only the most rudimentary of implementations – they do either ad hoc scanning or only after a process is completed. This is ironic because the true ROI of capture comes in direct proportion to how hard you push the technology.
A look at the inputs associated with a process with a long history of automation and extremely high ROI – invoice processing – reveals the Input Irregularity mess that is characteristic of most organizations. For 49% of organizations, half or more of their invoices arrive electronically – for 30%, it’s three-quarters. So what do organizations do with these electronic inputs? Yes, you guessed it. 59% percent of organizations wind up printing out the invoice at some stage of the process; only 8% of organizations pass the electronic invoice directly along to a capture system.
Input Irregularity – Paper Dilemma No. 3. What are you doing about it?