In this uncertain market, businesses are under immense pressure to meet rapidly shifting consumer expectations. A customer-centric business strategy can be a differentiator, with digital transformation a vital part of the equation.
Customer experience (CX) continues to be heavily tied to emotion, with even minor improvements to customer experience quality making a difference. According to Forrester Research, 54 percent of customers who report feeling valued and appreciated were willing to forgive companies when they make mistakes.;
Improvement on the CX front is critical for businesses to remain viable long term, with digital solutions that offer personalized and seamless customer interactions.
While most organizations seem to recognize the importance of digitalized CX, with 77 percent reporting they have established digital platforms, only 10 percent also say those platforms are fully scaled and adopted by customers. Companies' growing awareness of the need to digitalize amid insufficient human resources is driving the adoption of no-code solutions.
Intelligent automation, especially the artificial intelligence (AI) component, enables an unprecedentedly proactive and tailored CX experience. Today's savvy consumers have come to expect it, giving companies that embrace it a competitive advantage.
As businesses seek a solution that seamlessly connects human employees and digital workers, a comprehensive and flexible intelligent automation platform is key. It enables companies to reengineer processes quickly and accurately. The solution should also enable scaling across the enterprise for maximum business value.
An intelligent automation-powered contact center helps organizations deal with the overflow of consumer issues by reducing call times by up to 75 percent. Human workers collaborate with digital workers to reduce resolution times. Customer service agents are given a 360-degree view of every customer, as digital workers source information from across systems and databases and then provide it to the agent in a single, easy-to-use, consolidated interface. Agents can rapidly resolve issues with all the required information at their fingertips.
Digital workers deal with simple customer requests, which enables service agents to give customers with more complicated enquiries the time they need and deserve. Such service is critical for customer retention and only made possible by scaled automation. A backlog of customer tickets are dealt with thanks to faster resolution times and digital workers' end-to-end resolution of simple cases, not to mention the ability to operate at full capacity 24/7.
You can turn any email into a workflow with communications mining automation. By combining AI and natural language processing, you can extract valuable information from emails, calls, notes, chats, tickets, and so on, to better understand customers' needs and your internal processes. When companies automate decision-making insights, it helps accelerate time to value and eliminate wasted opportunities.
Digital solutions that increase productivity have a positive impact on the customer experience. For example, the Michigan-based power company DTE unlocked new efficiencies by automating processes to cross-check errors in bills. Now bills requiring human review have been cut in half, and a further 35 processes across customer service, finance, HR, and corporate have been automated, saving DTE 250,000 hours per year.
In another example, the financial management firm Invesco gained back 3 million minutes by automating many front-office and back-office tasks. Digital workers also help complete 10,000 daily transaction reports for client services per month, greatly reducing the time needed to complete a report. This frees up resources to focus on value-added client work.
Beyond the Contact Center
Organizations should combine robotic process automation (RPA) with AI for data management. Digital workers consolidate data and provide reliable analytics to empower human workers to make value-adding decisions and drive innovation to better the customer experience. Workers no longer have to comb through reams of information manually. A mortgage provider could use business process automation to improve operational efficiencies, leading to customers being serviced faster. Anyone who has applied for a mortgage knows it's a long-winded and pain-staking process, requiring endless paperwork. Traditionally, workers processing applications must collate and manage the paperwork, ensuring the correct information is delivered to the right party. With digital workers, much of this can be automated. Digital workers can automate checks, offer searches, generate paperwork, and distribute the appropriate version to the correct party. Automations also fill in or highlight gaps.
Collaborating with a digital workforce enables providers to process more applications than humanly possible while also giving hours back to employees. Workers can then use this time to address more complicated case matters beyond the capability of a digital worker.
The customer experience is the fastest-growing priority area for customer care leaders, and today's challenges are unlikely to be solved at scale without AI and data analytics.
End customers have more options than ever before, and a company's degree of digitalization is one of the leading factors when it comes to customer loyalty. With advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and RPA, businesses can deliver consumers a fast yet thorough and tailored experience.
The benefits of digital CX for enterprises are multifold: they attract and retain more customers, enhance worker satisfaction, and boost ROI and operational efficiency. No-code solutions enable businesses to drive digital transformation despite the tech skills shortage. Business models across industries are changing to accommodate rapidly changing consumer behavior, and those failing to adapt risk being pushed out.
Gautam Moorjani is general manager of intelligent automation solutions at SS&C Technologies.