Torrey Jones, Principal Consultant
A while back, one of our customers in the Intermountain West brought us an interesting challenge. This banking customer has multiple branches, and they were rolling out new cash machines in each of those branches. Periodically, during the initial stages of the rollout, these cash machines would seize up. Imagine you have a customer standing in front of a bank teller, trying to make a cash withdrawal from their account. The bank teller may not be trained on manually counting quantities of cash and is dependent upon the cash machine, which has just seized up and won't work. The fear, frustration, and concern from the teller and the customer is that the customer's account has been debited the proper amount of the withdrawal, but the cash machine has not distributed the funds.
This sort of scenario is a common occurrence in many customer-facing situations. Whether it be a cash machine at a regional credit union, as in this example, or a point-of-sale device at a clothing retailer, or a scale at your local deli that seizes up and refuses to work, the impact to the customer, as well as the employee trying to utilize the piece of equipment, can be increasingly detrimental to the end user experience.
The “end user experience” goes beyond the digital world and into the real world.
A phrase we hear more often in the technology industry these days is, “the end user experience”. Most of the time, the end user experience is referring to a user of an application, whether it a web application or mobile application. But the concept of the “end user experience” goes beyond the digital world and into the real world. In these real-world examples, does technology have a way to aid or potentially expedite resolution to problems? The answer is overwhelmingly yes, especially in environments that have this proliferation of IOT (Internet of Things) devices. Because the ‘I’ in IOT is for Internet, this directly implies network connectivity, and therefore network management capabilities of these types of devices.
This network connectivity is regularly overlooked and not leveraged by the solution providers.
As we move along the timeline of this digital transformation journey we’re all on, whether we want to be or not, solution providers have an obligation to their customers to consider all possible solutions to the challenges that face their enterprises.
In the case of our credit union customer, there were numerous challenges with personnel having the knowledge and the experience to remotely repair these seized up cash machines. Most challenges were related to the fact that they were in early stages of rollout, so the number of subject matter experts was nominal. In this example, only one engineer knew how to resolve these issues. Working with the customer’s subject matter expert, and leveraging the customer’s orchestration and ESM platforms, the GreenLight team developed a simplified solution that could be leveraged by the help desk as soon as a report of a seized cash machine came into the call center.
