WORK

FROM Transforms AAA’s Back Office Experience​

OVERVIEW

The American Automotive Association, Inc. (AAA) offers roadside assistance, hotel booking, and map routing to their 61 million members across 32 motorclubs and over 1,000 branches in North America and Canada.

AAA identified opportunities to improve its invoicing and billing processes to minimize errors, increase data accuracy, and achieve efficiencies in the back office, while providing its partners, employees and customers a better overall experience. The company’s leadership reached out to FROM to develop the strategy that helped to execute AAA’s objectives.

APPROACH

  • Understand the customer - FROM conducted ethnographic research, deployed surveys and interviewed a wide range of stakeholders to develop empathy for the target audiences. Once a thorough understanding of both the desired outcomes and current friction points were attained, FROM utilized design thinking to develop the vision and future state.
  • Map the customer journey - Breaking down each step in the journey illuminated the issues in the current process, and identified the key levers to improve the experience at scale. A root cause analysis was completed on over a hundred friction points and prioritized for impact, leading to a compelling vision of the future.
  • Build the future - FROM presented a digital strategy to address all pain points and proposed several technology solutions, such as AI, robotic process automations, and interactive portals that maintain flexibility for each club, but still gain efficiencies from a unified process.
  • Optimize the short term - while working on the long-term objectives, FROM was able to identify opportunities that had immediate effects on the user experience and ROI.
  • Lead the change - FROM conducted several Design Thinking and alignment workshops to encourage communication, creativity, transparency, and unity across clubs.

RESULTS

  • Provided great ROI with less than 1 year payback
  • Created an agreed upon Roadmap to deliver the vision across the company and clubs
  • Delivered a transformational vision for scalability included 5 digital enablers, 6 digital capabilities, and 11 capability initiatives

CONCLUSION

Successful, large-scale initiatives require many data points to minimize risks and identify root causes.

Transparency and communication are critical to unify the work of organizations with multiple, independent groups.

Transformations that minimize human error can both help employees focus on their work and ensure data accuracy.

Finding short-term solutions while working towards a larger objective can help reduce the time necessary to achieve long-term goals and immediately ease glaring points of pain.

FROM was able to deliver all of the above through their five-step roadmap for digital transformation and design thinking workshop.