By The gap between customer and employee expectations, and how fast businesses can adapt, is getting wider every day. Leading consumer brands like Amazon and Apple have raised the bar when it comes to offering personalized digital experiences and self-service options, and today’s customers now expect the same experience from their banks and insurance companies.
To address customer and employee expectations, organizations have been embarking on digital transformation journeys for years. By 2020, organizations worldwide had already spent 1.3 trillion dollars on digital initiatives, and that number is expected to continue growing by 10.4 percent each year1.
Despite these staggering figures, organizations can’t seem to move as fast as customers and employees want. Outdated legacy systems, manual processes, and unstructured data are just a few of the obstacles standing in the way.
In our recent webinar, our Director of Strategic Partnerships, David Goldberg, joined Darren Collins, Product Manager of Business UX and Core Applications at Quadient, to discuss how organizations can achieve their digital transformation goals and provide self-serve options to transform the customer experience.
In this blog, we’ll explore the top takeaways.
The underlying challenges
Organizations in the midst of digital transformations often get stalled by legacy systems and integrations. These roadblocks result in projects moving at a snail’s pace, only rolling out once customer expectations have changed. In fact, 55% percent of digital leaders say that their business demands get in the way of accelerating their digital strategy2.
And, when processes that are meant to be digitized get ignored, they remain manual, costly, error-prone, and complex. Today, customers interact in channels, like phone, email, AI chatbot, video chat, all of which produce unstructured data that can’t be used by downstream systems.
How to solve for them
1. Backlog rationalization
Instead of thinking every process needs to be tackled at once, it’s important for organizations to understand which processes are consuming the most resources, and:
- Which processes require the most manual tasks?
- Identify processes that are causing problems, like high form abandonment rates, poor customer experience feedback, or cause a drop in employee productivity
- Understand which processes are consuming the most resources in the organization
- Speak with employees, like frontline or back-office staff to ask them which processes take them the most time and cause the most friction
By transforming the processes and putting user experience top of mind, organizations can drive immediate impact. A well-crafted digital experience will create positive outcomes, like increased completion rates, simplified onboarding, and increased revenue.
2. Put the end-user first
High-level leadership at large organizations often make assumptions about which processes they need to change or prioritize when it comes to digitization.
However, before just taking a shot in the dark, organizations should:
- Identify key pain points by looking at case logs, call center scripts, CSAT scores, and where drop-offs occur, and then map them to the customer journey
- Interview stakeholders, like customers and employees for this process to outline the pain points
Once pain points and processes have been identified, business users can build and prototype solutions. In most cases, those closest to the process know what needs to be fixed and instead of waiting for IT to have time to help, they can deploy a solution to a select group of customers and gather feedback.
For example, a small test group of employees can try out a new application or maintenance form. Based on their feedback, you can keep building improvements so that when it’s delivered, you can be sure it’s what customers are looking for. When it comes to putting end users first, speed of delivery and a quick feedback loop is imperative.
3. Deliver organizational efficiency
By evaluating which processes need to be addressed and getting end user feedback along the way, your organization will be more streamlined and there will be less fractured experiences, less manual activities, and a reduction in error rates.
And, instead of sending data to different systems and communications platforms, you can use one platform that can deploy solutions for in-store/branch, online, and phone, for a true omnichannel experience. Not only will this be easier to maintain, it’s also easier to deploy and it can allow you to augment existing systems without ripping and replacing them.
That’s because the single platform generates structured data, which can be used by downstream systems. Structured data is valuable to digitization at scale, driving operational efficiencies, and reducing operational costs.
Sources and credits
1 Spending on digital transformation technologies and services worldwide from 2017 to 2025 Statista, 2021
