Here's the basic message: be prepared to go all the way in integrating technology into job design, from great software and functional hardware to effective training and regular user feedback. Stopping short can be a disaster. And the value of reaching the finish line may surprise you.

Innovating without empathy rarely delivers the same kinds of results, particularly when it comes to customer-operators. Technology makes it possible to dramatically expand the customers operating role, but that doesn't necessarily translate into better numbers. Many banks learned this the hard way in the 1990s. As retail banks increased the number of low-cost channels for customers to use to serve themselves —voice-recognition systems, ATMs, online banking — the institutions inadvertently undermined their margins. That's because customers didn't necessarily migrate to the lower-cost solutions. Instead, many simply increased their numbers of transactions overall, still coming to the teller window to deposit their weekly paychecks while also hitting the ATM and checking their balance online. In some cases, these high-tech tools enabled customers to engage their finances at a deeper level, which then increased their demand for traditional, high-cost banking services. Here's the irony: these banks were trying to save money with online tools, but instead, they designed a more costly model. Customers became much more expensive to serve, which wasn't sustainable. When your goal is service excellence, we suggest taking the opposite approach. Customer job design, especially self-service design, works best when you first work to increase the quality of the service experience, to make the service more convenient or customized (or whatever drives value in your business).

IT tools that work are deeply thoughtful about the user experience, including how and when data is entered in the rhythm of a particular job. Ideally, they're developed in tandem with the role itself. This rarely happens. Typically, a job is designed, technology advances, and then the technology is piled on as an afterthought. The result — predictably — is an increased operational burden on employees and its familiar by-product: widespread resentment. In an excellent, ongoing discussion presented in his blog, Andrew McAfee of MIT discusses how to mitigate this risk and integrate IT productively into your organization.

Here's the basic message: be prepared to go all the way in integrating technology into job design, from great software and functional hardware to effective training and regular user feedback. Stopping short can be a disaster. And the value of reaching the finish line may surprise you.

Innovating without empathy rarely delivers the same kinds of results, particularly when it comes to customer-operators. Technology makes it possible to dramatically expand the customers operating role, but that doesn't necessarily translate into better numbers. Many banks learned this the hard way in the 1990s. As retail banks increased the number of low-cost channels for customers to use to serve themselves —voice-recognition systems, ATMs, online banking — the institutions inadvertently undermined their margins. That's because customers didn't necessarily migrate to the lower-cost solutions. Instead, many simply increased their numbers of transactions overall, still coming to the teller window to deposit their weekly paychecks while also hitting the ATM and checking their balance online. In some cases, these high-tech tools enabled customers to engage their finances at a deeper level, which then increased their demand for traditional, high-cost banking services. Here's the irony: these banks were trying to save money with online tools, but instead, they designed a more costly model. Customers became much more expensive to serve, which wasn't sustainable. When your goal is service excellence, we suggest taking the opposite approach. Customer job design, especially self-service design, works best when you first work to increase the quality of the service experience, to make the service more convenient or customized (or whatever drives value in your business).