By Johan van Heerden, Vice
President of Engineering, K2
Digital technologies can power true and lasting business
transformation. Today, most companies have digitization strategies in place,
with goals that vary from improving employee efficiency and reducing costs to
minimizing risk and enhancing regulatory compliance programs.
While digital
transformation objectives do depend on the industry, company size and business
priorities, there is one goal that seems to remain consistent across all
companies-namely, creating an exceptional customer experience.
This makes good
business sense, given that today's customer is the ultimate driver of the
digital transformation movement. Well-connected through various digital tools
and apps, modern customers expect their needs to be met quickly and seamlessly
by their businesses of choice. Being able to leverage digital capabilities to
meet these demands and create high-quality customer experiences is becoming
critical to business growth, brand longevity and competitive prowess.
For example,
experience-led companies have 1.6 times higher customer satisfaction rates.
In addition, consumers who have an emotional connection
with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value. These are powerful data points
that reflect just how influential the customer is in your company's journey
toward digital transformation.
The tools for transformation
In this context,
your company needs digital tools that are agile, intelligent and designed to
meet multiple business and customer requirements. No technology can provide all
this value on its own, which is why many customer-centric companies are taking
a three-pronged approach to build business optimization apps that combines
artificial intelligence, digital process automation and robotic process
automation.
Let's look at how these technology categories can work
together to deliver a successful customer-centric digital transformation strategy.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) -
Cognitive services perform tasks that would normally require human
intelligence, helping speed up processes and meet customers' needs faster. AI
capabilities include deciphering meaning from unstructured data, learning from
experience and synthesizing natural language.
customer experience.
For example, AI can be used to extract text from customer emails, pull out
relevant data points and then use that data as reference points for the
company's chatbots that interact with external customers, ensuring consistent
questions are effectively answered.
Digital process automation (DPA) - DPA refers to a set of workflow design tools that allow you to
standardize and automate internal processes across your business to boost
employee productivity, improve data accessibility and enhance the customer
journey.
Previously
time-draining, routine work can be automated, allowing staff to concentrate on
more strategic, empowering components of their roles. This could include paying
more attention to key accounts and solving complex customer problems more
rapidly. Ultimately, DPA can be used as a tool to make your business more
efficient and responsive.
Robotic process automation (RPA) - RPA is the execution engine for processing rule-based, data-centric
tasks using the same applications and systems that human employees utilize. An
RPA "bot" can mimic the keystrokes and mouse clicks that a staff member would
carry out, thus automating repetitive internal tasks.
This technology can
increase accuracy and throughput. And from a customer perspective, electronic
bots can eliminate errors and speed up back-office tasks, enabling staff to
conduct customer-facing processes more efficiently.
How these capabilities work together
AI, DPA and RPA can
be combined to meet customer expectations more effectively and with much less
manual effort.
For example, when a
customer encounters an issue during an interaction with a company and submits a
request to the business via email, an RPA bot can automatically intercept the
email and draw on AI/cognitive technology capabilities to extract context and
determine the appropriate response to the customer.
The RPA bot can then
escalate the customer request into the DPA platform for process management and
collaboration. Here, the DPA technology can update the customer request with
the additional information and assign tasks to the relevant resources to take
actions that will effectively address the customer's request. These resources
could be RPA bots or humans, depending on the nature and complexity of the
actions required.
Looking ahead
Ultimately, the success of a digital
transformation strategy depends on its ability to improve the experience of the
customers using your system and interacting with your brand.
Forward-thinking organizations understand this
and are narrowing in on leading-edge technologies like DPA, RPA and AI to
optimize the user experience during digital transformation and foster a more
loyal following from customers.
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About the Author
Johan van Heerden is the vice president of
engineering with K2. He has been with the company for 15 years with experience
delivering and managing K2's cloud solutions across North America and the
company's global partners. Johan has a proven track record working and
leading in the computer software industry. Prior to joining K2, he was a
software developer with Mayibuye Group.