We want to find our team's most cumbersome back-office workflows to target for AI automation, but employee interviews are taking too long. How can we uncover these friction points directly from operational data?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Owners often rely on anecdotal feedback during quarterly planning to find operational bottlenecks, but your systems already contain the truth. You can uncover genuine operational friction by mining internal data directly.

Use a simple 30-line script with an automation tool like Playwright or Python to scrape and categorize public and private confessions of operational pain. Focus your search across three data sources:

- Internal support tickets and customer service logs. Extract recurring search terms, repetitive customer complaints, and tickets that require multi-day resolution times.
- Internal communication channels and email threads. Search for common phrases like waiting on approval, missing file, or manual update to pinpoint where handoffs stall.
- Job postings and exit interview feedback. Review your own hiring descriptions for operational roles. If job ads list hours spent on data re-entry, cross-checking spreadsheets, or filing documents, you have found a prime target for automation.

Once you extract this data, cluster the results into an operational friction report. Bring the top three friction points to your next Level 10 Meeting™ as Issues to IDS®. Automating these proven pain points frees your team from administrative drag and produces immediate operational traction.