Our CEO Fintan Murphy speaking at the Happeo Summit in Helsinki, Finland in August about Business Transformation Labs and how to use them as part of your Happeo Deployment.
Video Transcription:
I want to talk about Digital Transformation from our perspective, and what we’ve done. I thought I might start just by defining what business transformation is because it comes under a bunch of different headings. Sometimes you might hear it being called innovation labs, innovation workshops. Sometimes customers might have innovation councils or digital transformation labs, cloud transformation. It comes under all of these different headings and it’s really primarily the same thing, but maybe slight different tweaks that people have on them. And when we think about business transformation, most of our customers start with stuff like email and calendar. We would have been moving on to document and cloud storage and then moving onto stuff like business process improvement, which is really where the business transformation piece comes in. And this is very often where you would run these business transformation labs and the kind of digital workspace piece or traditionally internet.
I really think that Happeo fits really nicely into that, and then a lot of customers will move on to maybe doing bespoke development solutions as well. Google’s Transformation Lab. So start by inspiring the customer. So you want to show them examples of other companies or other departments similar to theirs that have also gone through this process of business transformation and have come out the other end. If you’re working with someone in the retail sector, try to find retail examples. If you’re working with the HR team, try to find HR examples, things like that. It makes it easier for the customers to actually identify with the inspiration and to kind of be inspired easier. Then you move onto the discovery bit and the discovery bit is essentially them looking at their business processes and mapping out those old business processes. That’s the start of the discovery bit. And it’s interesting because people actually get really excited about this because it’s often the first time in their working lives that they’ve ever kind of stopped and taken a few hours or a half day out of their working life to look at these business processes that maybe they’ve had to do for years, and possibly or probably they hate.
Then we move on to prototyping and prototyping is where you actually prototype out the solution. So you look at the solution that you want to map it to, whether it’s Happeo or indeed Office 365, Microsoft does their own version of this, or google and you prototype out the solution. And this is where we come in as partners very much. And you do need people when you have the customers broken into teams. The minimum number I like as about 15 because you can have three teams of five.
And then the last thing that we kind of leave customers with is that it’s an iterative process, that the transformation lab itself isn’t the beginning and the end. It’s actually just the start of the innovation journey and that it’s something that they should be coming back to kind of time and time again. So just some customer examples, I kind of feel like a photo says a thousand words. One thing to note with this is that expectation management is hugely important. For customers, they often think when they’re coming to these things, the actual employees think that there may be coming to a training session and particularly I find in a Happeo deployment where they’re like, “Oh, this is for the Happeo thing, isn’t it? And they have their laptops out, they think they’re going to maybe listen to some trainer and actually get some work done.
And so when they realise that it’s a workshop and they have to get up on their feet, and they’re actually going to be using whiteboards and post-it notes and brainstorming stuff out that’s to do with their sort of general day to day work, they can often be quite surprised. So it’s important in the communication piece prior to the actual transformation lab that you make sure that it’s communicated with the attendees, that it’s not going to be this sort of standard training piece. It’s going to be a workshop. I often send photos with the invitation, so that people have an idea of what to expect. Does that make sense? Yeah. And these are just a couple of customers that we’ve worked with over the few years.
I just wanted to make this point that you’re trying to find what Google call these quick wins. So you saw them brainstorming out the ideas here and the business processes. Before they go to the prototyping stage, you want them to look at the different processes in their businesses, and they need to decide, “Is changing this process going to have a high impact or low impact? Is it going to be easy to execute or hard to execute?” Okay, so easy to execute might be I create a Google forum from something that was super manual. That’s a very common example. And hard to implement might be I need to hire three developers that are going to take six months. So this is where we come in as Google engineers or sales people and we’re trying to help them decide that you’re trying to find those quick wins, because you want them to leave that room having solved some business problem. That’s what you want.
When to use transformation labs. So this is kind of important, and I’ve just got three examples here. A lot of people aren’t sure when they should maybe use transformation labs. First is in a G Suite deployment, so you can actually use it as part of a G Suite deployment. Google don’t always do this, but maybe before you get to the stage that you deploy Google Drive, you might run a transformation lab to try and help increase adoption of something like Google Drive or something like Google Sites. Another great reason is low G Suite adoption. Hopefully, you’ve never had a customer score of this low. This is a customer that moved away from G Suite so it’s okay. But if you’ve got a low adoption score, like in one sense it’s not good, but if you see it dropping down, hopefully not this low, but you see it dropping down from the 80s, maybe to the 50s, you know there’s something wrong with that account.
That’s a time that you could engage with that customer and say, “Hey, we’ve got this thing called a Business Transformational Lab. Have you heard about it?” Explain what it is, try and sell it in and I would even recommend if it was a big customer, an important customer to discount it or maybe do a free transformation lab. It’s a half day of your time but if it’s a big important customer, it may very well be worth it. The other thing is re-engagement with a customer kind of leads from the previous one, that it’s a way of re-engaging with customers. Customers may be that you haven’t had as much engagement with before, it’s a great way of just reconnecting with them. So what are the benefits? They see increased product adoption within G Suite accounts that you’ve actually run Transformation Labs in.
Google have seen over the years that there is increased adoption. It increases customer satisfaction. Hopefully all your customers are this happy or happy as this guy. It increases the customer satisfaction with G Suite, with Happeo, with whatever product that you’ve done the transformation lab on. You now have teams within that customer that are using the product more and leveraging more from this investment that they’ve already made. And obviously, it leads to increased renewal rates, which is fantastic.
Let’s talk about it as part of a Happeo deployment. Two methodologies that I’ve discovered there could be more, but these are the two that I’ve come up with. My methodology one for the transformational lab was essentially removing Google Sites and replacing it with Happeo. And so you’re kind of running a more general G Suite business transformation lab, and all you’re doing is saying instead of using Google Sites as your digital workspace, Happeo then replaces that.
I like this method, I think it’s easier for us to do. We’re more familiar with G Suite transformation lab so it’s definitely easy as a first. And the second methodology is just to be a little bit more specific and say, “Well, it’s primarily Happeo I’m focused on, and that I want to map the particular business processes to.” So some of the outcomes, again, not dissimilar from the G Suite one we found increased adoption of Happeo within customers that we run the transformation labs with, you get some great case studies, which is fantastic. I’m sure we all do it as part of our communication or our change management, that we want to communicate some use cases or case studies internally in the business.
This is how the HR team are using Happeo, this is how the sales team are using Happeo. It gives you some fantastic use cases, so that was hugely valuable. And it’s a service that partners can re-sell. So now I’m staying engaged with that customer. I don’t need to do any more training with them, the actual deployment’s over, but suddenly there’s this service that I can continue to sell in and continue to engage with this customer.
A couple of next steps. Use some Google Templates if this is something that you’re interested in. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Go onto to Google Cloud Connect and check out some of Google’s templates. You can just reuse those. Do the Google Training. Google have specifically focused on transformation labs, so I would recommend that your teams go to that and obviously get that training. And run it with some of your customers, run it with smaller customers. Do you know what I mean? So for those of you that haven’t check it out, transformationgallery.withgoogle.com. Loads of amazing examples of business transformation on there. I mean recommend sending your customers to this anyway. Yes, I would recommend packaging the service. So like change management, business transformation, digital workspace, they all go together really nicely. They match each other and it’s interesting that so many of us focus on business transformation and change management.
