Digital Transformation: Digitizing the Value Stream

Digitization is having a tremendous impact on all industries. From a technology perspective digitization means disruptive mega-trends in Connectivity, Social, Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Cloud, and Mobility. However, the success or survival rate of enterprises will very much depend upon the robust digitization of their value streams. Borrowing a compelling perspective from Theory of Constraints: “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”

What does that mean for a digital enterprise: Especially the ones that are attempting to evolve, improve, and transform its customer experiences (actually most if not all)? Well, it means customer interactions are not optimized just by focusing on the call center or self-serving customer channel interactions: Web or mobile or customer service representatives (CSRs) or increasingly intelligent interactive voice response systems (IVRs). Optimizing the front channel customer interaction is of course critical and important. However, the customer promotion scores (an objective assessment of the customer experience) will depend on the aggregation of tasks that involve multiple business units to resolve the customer request. For instance fixing a broken appliance might involve the CSR, the warranty department, the field service, and finance. Unfortunately, event in this modern era of digitization, most organizations are siloed. It is not enough to just focus on the responsiveness of the CSR, the elegance of the Web or mobile app for customer service or just the front customer interaction channels. These are of course important. But they are part of the end-to-end value stream that needs to be strong and responsive through all the stages of the value chain.

Therefore, in reality each customer interaction, independent of the source or channel, typically ends up involving multiple business units that need to work harmoniously to respond to the customer. Take account opening at, say, a financial organization. Several “links” come into play in the end-to-end value stream for opening the account. If any of the links is weak or has a problem, the entire chain will suffer. These “links” are stages or milestones in the overall end-to-end chain of business units collaborating towards the same objective: the timely and high quality responsiveness to the customer requests.

Digital enterprises are realizing that the end-to-end chain of value work assigned to different units is as strong as the weakest link. The entire stream needs to be digitized and optimized: not just individual links within business units. Dynamic Case Management (DCM) automation that supports stage-based design and automation is a powerful enabler of value stream optimization and governance. The speed by which KPIs and end-to-end value streams are associated with dynamic cases is critical. Automation and business activity monitoring allows the digital enterprise be responsive to potential weaknesses and take corrective actions: in real-time. DCM can connect the front office to the back office and run across all channels to deliver a consistent, end-to-end experience. Sub-cases handled by different teams or organizations are all aggregated through the holistic case to meet a specific customer objective. All the links or stages can be kept in control in real-time – with digitized policies for escalation as needed.