Ask a bank what it costs to bring on a new customer, get them onboarded, and look after them for the next five years, and someone in finance can usually pull up an answer within a day.
Ask the same question inside many parts of healthcare and community services, and you are more likely to get a long pause, followed by an honest “we don't actually know.”
We have sat in that pause more times than we can count.
It isn't that leaders in this sector don't know something is wrong. The P&L usually tells them that much already. What is missing is the why. Which parts of the customer journey are silently expensive. Which activities are actually creating value, and which ones just feel important because they always have been. Where skilled, well paid people are spending their time on work that could be simplified, standardised, or handed off entirely.
In practice, this tends to break down into three questions worth answering properly: what does it cost to bring a new customer in the door, what does it cost to get them properly set up in their first few months, and what does it cost to keep serving them well for as long as the relationship lasts. Most organisations can answer the first one. Fewer can answer the second. Almost none can answer the third with any confidence.
Large banks and insurers built this kind of visibility over a couple of decades, mostly out of necessity, mostly under regulatory pressure. Unit costs, operational drivers, a clear read on where value gets created or destroyed. Healthcare and community services are only just starting that same work, usually because funding pressure is forcing the question rather than choice.
An org chart has never once fixed a badly designed operating model, and it is not going to start now.
Without that visibility, it is genuinely hard to know what to fix. We see the same pattern play out again and again: an organisation restructures the team before it is redesigned how the work actually flows. New boxes on a chart, same broken handoffs underneath. An org chart has never once fixed a badly designed operating model, and it is not going to start now.
This matters for AI too, maybe more than people expect. Before asking where AI could help, we think the better first question is simpler: what does the work actually look like right now? What is front stage, in front of the customer, and what is back stage, running behind the scenes? Who does each task today, and why does it get done that way? Which parts genuinely need a human's judgement, and which ones are just habits dressed up as necessity?
The real opportunity isn't bolting AI onto however things happen to work today. It is understanding the flow of work well enough to redesign it, organising teams around that flow, and only then reaching for technology where it actually creates leverage.
We talk a lot about the Voice of the Customer and the Voice of Staff / Business, and both deserve the attention they get. But we would argue the “Voice of Finance” deserves an equal seat at that table. Until you understand where the time and the money are actually going, it is very hard to build something that's both good for customers and financially sustainable enough to keep being good for them.
Sudharsan Raghunathan
Founder, LeanCX | Sudharsan works with enterprise leaders to redesign how their organisations actually function by aligning people, process, and technology so transformation sticks.
leancx.com.au
