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Teaser: Going forward, customer experience is King. My personal consumer buying habits have changed primarily to digital because I can research everything online, check product reviews, get YouTube videos on product usage, look at user forums and have items I purchase arrive at my home the next day. Shame on us if we don’t forward-focus on customer and employee experience in the B2B sector as well. And to optimize experiences across the board, new business process management and intelligent technologies that bring automation, integration, and customization into the workplace are required of every enterprise, large and small alike.
As companies reflect back on their 2019 operations, leaders will realize they have a huge opportunity to streamline their processes in 2020 and beyond to grow efficiency and create stronger employee and customer relationships. Executives must try to bridge the experience gap in terms of what people expect and what organizations actually deliver. A $1.6 trillion problem in which frustrated people look elsewhere for better experiences, it will be more important than ever before for businesses to address the experience gap.
To do this, we can expect companies to reinvigorate business processes across the organization. Process management in the digital workplace should start and end with intelligent technologies that bring automation, integration and customization into the workplace and ultimately result in better customer experiences as well.
Data Silos No More: Intelligent Business Process Management Becomes a “Must-Have”
Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware that they cannot operate in siloed environments. For small and large organizations alike, data silos are walls, blocking employees from accessing necessary information and preventing them from accomplishing their day-to-day tasks. With all of this in mind, businesses’ must begin to put greater emphasis on process efficiencies to increase employee productivity, empower engagement and simplify workflows – all wrapped in a beautiful experience.
To achieve this level of efficiency and engagement, it is likely that we’ll begin to see organizations say goodbye to Business Process Management (BPM) of years past and revive it with intelligent technologies. I expect to see conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), robotic process automation (RPA) and more to become more directly embedded into processes to relay critical information to different areas of the business in real-time. Because of this, employees will have more time to work on strategic deliverables, enjoying the benefits of intelligent, automated data integration.
As businesses increasingly adopt intelligent processes, they should monitor said processes to ensure they are getting the full benefits of the technology. Overall, they should ultimately look to create a bottleneck-free environment where silos are eliminated and productivity is strong across the organization.
Beyond Data Integration: Improving Customer Experience
Businesses will either struggle or flourish with customer experience management this year. As internal employees reap the benefits of intelligent workplace technology, organizations should simultaneously focus on positively impacting their external customer workflow.
To do this, we’ll see a convergence of experience management with business process development. Greater access to customer insights will enable businesses to address problems and shift workflows in real-time, based on unique data provided by individual customers. With backend customer data available, businesses will alleviate pain points of the past and create stronger transparency to better support customers.
Hybrid & Customization will be King
With organizations putting a greater emphasis on process integration, the industry should expect to see an increasing number of businesses turn to the hybrid cloud to manage the data stemming from these processes. As companies examine the benefits of on-premise versus cloud, we’ll see an affinity towards hybrid-based models. Hybrid environments provide a heightened level of customization for businesses to modify their workflows according to their unique business objectives.
Once they’ve adopted hybrid environments, businesses should look to customize their shared digital workspaces. Hybrid environments should house platforms that eliminate the need for employees to go from one system to the next to gain access to important information. Every task should be completed in a common, transparent environment. Having such an easily accessible, centralized system in place will drive employee productivity and engagement. With the customizable experience economy coming to the workplace, employees will be happier and as a result, businesses will be stronger.
Keeping it all Secure
With the increasingly prominent threat of cyberattacks on infrastructures, organizations will need to adopt disruptive solutions to prevent attacks on their infrastructure this year. As organizations work to add transparency into their environments, making sure data that is shared across the business is secure is vital to successful operation. As threats become increasingly apparent, businesses must adapt and implement the correct technologies and methodologies to ensure they are keeping a close eye on how their critical data assets are being put to use. To paraphrase Uncle Ben advising Peter Parker (quoting Voltaire): With great data power comes great data responsibility.
Creating a common user experience across enterprises will be imperative to business success this year, and the years to come. Businesseses must implement customizable hybrid platforms and create strategies to keep all data flowing through the business in a common, secure location. The experience economy has arrived and ensuring that all members of an organization experience the benefits of intelligent, integrated platforms will drive both employee engagement and customer success.