A high-end digital marketplace balanced value creation and change management in order to break out of their hesitation to change.

A company that had created a digital marketplace for high end physical assets was struggling to capitalize on market demand. The pandemic had led to an increase in consumer interest for their offering, but their business processes were not scaling.

The problem came down to a knowledge gap that existed between tenured staff and new hires. The company’s value was derived by the proprietary business process it had accumulated having sold thousands of properties, all of which had been encapsulated in a digital tool to guide staff on best practices for selling and servicing customers. Each time the business encountered a new customer criteria, they created a new rule in the software. This worked fine in the beginning when the workforce was small and the rules could be shared organically, but with each new rule the onboarding training time grew. Eventually, the ramp time for new hires became a tipping point, where onboarding became so overwhelming that staff churn became an impediment to growth. The business desperately needed to grow its workforce, and knew it needed to take a new approach. More rules would not solve the problem.

SVSG first conducted a digital assessment which revealed that the company, unbeknownst to management, had been collecting a rich data store that could be used to streamline much of the business process if the business shifted away from a rules based system to a machine learning based approach; wherein the software could leverage predictive analytics to continuously update customer and employee behavioral changes into the relevant product experiences. With these insights, SVSG designed a digital blueprint that provided a step by step implementation plan to overhaul the product and technology accordingly.

The plan provided a phased approach that balanced value creation and change management into delineated milestones. This allowed the company to break out of their analysis paralysis hesitation to change, and onto a meaningful digital transformation into a data and AI enabled business that could onboard new staff with ease.