Digital tech implementations have moving parts that require up-front focus and planning to avoid costly fixes and delays.

Implementations can be thrown off track by blind spots that add costs and time, and result in a lack of confidence in the overall solution. At Bridgeforce, we routinely help clients identify blind spots and take steps to ensure a smooth implementation. Here is our list of the top five of 10 critical blind spots to watch for — all of which can be managed and avoided if you take action early.

Top Five Blind Spots to Watch for When Implementing Digital Technology

1. “Out of the Box” Descriptions

The vendor’s generic screen text and customer journeys are written for all clients. You’ll need to customize it for your organization with unique messaging and copy, customer journey flows, branding and opt-in/opt-out experiences. The blind spot risk is that customization and development adds to your timeline and costs.

Steps to take:
Secure Involvement: Engage compliance, customer experience and marketing teams when vendors are providing demos so each group can ask the appropriate questions to ensure that they get what they need from this solution.

Identify SME Assessment: Before vendor selection is complete, require that each business partner assess the work effort and resource needs to make required changes. Then you can determine the impact on the project timeline and budget. This sets expectations and informs effort and subsequent timelines.

2. Not Using Vendor’s Service Providers

Think twice before taking a pass on your vendor’s selected providers. There are four major integrations that must be considered: payments, SMS, emails and letters. Generally, using the vendor’s partners will be an easier onboarding experience with less required customization. The blind spot risk is that difficulty with onboarding and customization adds to your timeline and costs.

Steps to take:
Interrogate During Vendor Demos: Discuss available integrations during vendor demos so that you can make an informed assessment. This way, you can weigh trade-offs of using vendor partners against internal or enterprise solutions. The output of this key decision has a direct impact on your timeline and budget.

3. Lack of Source System Knowledge

You’ll need small and medium enterprises that have in-depth knowledge of all the affected source systems to properly map data for placement files and return files. The blind spot risk is that not having the source system familiarity could add weeks and months to the deployment timeline, depending on how many systems your bank uses.

Steps to take:
Plan Ahead: Determine early in the process what data will be passed to the vendor in the daily placement file. Ensure that you know how the data that is returned to the source systems will be mapped. Then, begin sourcing those items.

4. Counting on the Vendor for Operationalization

Operationalizing the digital solution falls entirely within your bank, because a software company defines a completed installation only as “deployment of the software.” Vendors aren’t focused on your operations — but you should be. The blind spot risk is you slow progress if you’re slow to recognize the need to operationalize, which can extend your timeframe and add costs if the vendor has to pause activity.

Steps to take:
Build Operationalization into Your Timeline: Ensure that your implementation plan considers time for strategy design and coding, messaging content creation and deployment, reporting design, procedure updates, integration with control self-assessments and analytics. Vendors may provide some light support in configuring the application parameters, but anything else beyond that is not their core business model.

Create Workflow in Advance: Predetermine your processes and workflows. For example, is the goal of digital collections to drive more self-service, or to improve interaction that ultimately connects to an agent? The end-to-end internal operational experience and external customer experience is unique to each organization—yours is no exception.

5. Timeline Based on Vendor’s Standard Deployment

The vendor will assume that several key dependencies have been finalized by your organization, such as strategy design. This can create unrealistic, often ambitious timelines. The blind spot risk is the danger of setting false expectations across the organization. The necessary adjustments that you’ll need to make to an unrealistic timeline will lengthen the completion time and could negatively influence staff perceptions.

Steps to take:
Determine Current State Readiness: Standard deployment schedules are achievable if your organization is ready. To ensure readiness, complete an initial working session and assessment.

Tackle these and five more blind spots head on before they negatively impact your implementation. Click here to see the all 10 blind spots and their fixes.