What is Business Process Automation and How Can We Best Leverage It?
Customer expectations continue to evolve to meet and match their always-on existence. The connected customer expects immediacy and simplicity. They want experiences that are personalized, readily-available, consistent, meaningful, convenient, and secure — regardless of the touchpoint. As individuals, we expect to be understood by the brands with whom we choose to do business. We count on technology to work. We expect things to be automatic. When we get what we need, we feel understood. We feel connected. As customers, we don’t care about the challenges companies face when trying to meet our growing expectations. We don’t have empathy for the complexities of their business – industry regulations, ever-changing requirements, operational siloes, technological infrastructure, competitive threats, economic climates, and emerging channels. However, we expect brands to have empathy for us. We have minimal tolerance for poor experiences. We demand not to be treated as another business transaction – but rather, as individuals.
So how do businesses cope today with these rapidly evolving times and demands and still keep a strong emphasis on a positive customer experience?
With having to find new ways to communicate and keep customers connected and engaged at all times, comes the need to truly leverage the power of technology and view it as the engine behind this digital revolution. Technological innovation encompasses nearly every facet of human life these days and businesses need to be mindful in knowing their customer base, understanding their needs and finding niche opportunities to incorporate technology as a means to connect with their customer on a greater, deeper and more meaningful level. Whether you are in the banking industry and want to offer easy pay options on the go for billing and investing or in healthcare where you have access to medical cards and records on the go or even a parent wanting to leverage an app whilst at work to see their child play and go about their day- each of these scenarios require some sort of technological insertion into that individuals daily life.
With the untapped potential of technological innovation comes the need to migrate to a more digitized mindset.
But how do you become more digital-oriented? How do you get your employees to think digital and make the transition to digital when things work currently for your existing business objectives, and there is no perceived need to disrupt existing processes? It’s simple – ask your customers what it is that they really want, how they want it and think about how internally even taking a few simple steps to automate a workflow, digitize a manual process or optimize your resources more efficiently on meaningful tasks can achieve such great results and produce even more ambitious long-term business objectives. At the very least- a business could firstly look at how they communicate with their customers. Is this communication accessible? Through a platform in which your customers engage in and prefer to be contacted? Do you have the right messaging to these customers through their preferred channel? According to Frontier, embracing a digital, forward-looking mindset across your business has another less obvious—but equally important—benefit. Adopting new technologies and embracing change provides an enormous competitive advantage. For example, small businesses can be much more adaptable with business changes than large corporations if they go digital and can respond immediately to any shifts. According to Gartner, Eighty-seven percent of senior business leaders say digitalization is a company priority and 79% of corporate strategists say it is reinventing their business — creating new revenue streams in new ways.
Through the power of technology and the need for automation, small and medium-sized enterprises can focus on connecting with their customers in a quicker, relevant and more applicable way. The industry term for this is business process.
Business Process Automation is the use of software (and software integration), to streamline and transform the way companies manage internal workflows in order to save money, create more efficiencies and optimize their resources. While digital transformation started decades ago, the acceleration and magnitude to which technology is utilized in everyday business and customer interactions has increased exponentially. The need to transform, evolve and keep up with customer demands puts the stakes very high – and the competitive thirst to be on the forefront of our customers’ minds when they do business with us is paramount. According to Forrester predictions, the impact of automaton has never been more evident and the topic has been foremost on decision makers’ minds, and every organization going through process re-engineering exercises to determine which commodity tasks make the most sense to automate.
Quadient’s Business Process Automation (BPA) solutions help small and medium-sized organizations optimize operational costs, improve the customer and employee experience, and drive business growth by automating business-critical outbound and inbound processes. Our solutions leverage existing core systems and enable business user control over crucial interactions with an organizations’ most valuable asset – the customer. The result is greater efficiency through the elimination of manual processes, improved customer experience, and greater control over regulatory compliance. As Forbes insights stated in their report conducted in partnership with IBM, There is great momentum across nearly every industry as organizations embrace intelligent automation. KPMG predicts an acceleration of investment in intelligent automation, with overall spending expected to reach $232 billion by 2025 compared with an estimated $12.4 billion today.1 but even that massive growth does not tell the whole story. Intelligent automation is not a simple technology deployment; it is about business and operating model transformation. As your organization decides to take the steps towards a more scalable intelligent platform and an automated workflow management system, keep in mind that Quadient can help your organization with business process automation. Find out more on Quadient.com.
