How Process Automation Helps Create a Customer-Centric Organization and a Better Experience for Customers

Insights, thoughts, and good advice from intelligent automation expert Pedro Berrocoso

In a recent episode of my podcast ?#BeyondCXM – Customer Experience Management weitergedacht? I had the opportunity to talk to automation expert Pedro Berrocoso . My question to Pedro: ?To what extent does #processautomation help us create a customer-centric organization and a better #customerexperience??.

Pedro is an expert in #digitaltransformation and #intelligentautomation with more than 25 years of experience in business process optimization and transformation projects. Until recently, he led the Center of Excellence for Digital Innovation and Intelligent Automation in a global shared services function of an international biopharmaceutical company and was responsible for enabling innovative ways of working and automating processes in procurement, finance, and contact center. Pedro also works on topics related to #digitalliteracy, #citizendevelopment, and change processes as part of his area of expertise. He is a speaker at events and coaches companies for the successful implementation of automation programs.

While I also contributed to the content of our podcast episode to a minor extent, I want to solely reproduce Pedro’s statements here. It is his statements that make this episode so valuable for everyone in #customerexperiencemanagement or #marketing – or even process automation. And because of that, I thought it was worth translating them from German to English and thus making them accessible to a broader audience.

Here we go:

?There are several aspects to intelligent automation, but first and foremost it is about a holistic approach that supports productivity and efficiency improvement in companies through the use of new technologies.?

?Productivity improvement is about speeding up processes with Robotic Process Automation on the one hand, and on the other hand freeing up capacity and time of employees through automation for higher value add activities.?

?But it is also about quality assurance; there are processes that machines can perform better and with fewer errors compared to humans.?

?In the use of technology, a distinction must be made between technology that processes structured data for process automation and technology that uses artificial intelligence and unstructured data to support humans for personalized service to customers.?

?Along the customer journey, one should primarily automate repetitive activities and layer human contacts where best fitting.?

?Process automation creates space and time to focus on what humans do best: providing personalized service and thereby generating more value for the customer.?

?We should first determine where there are frictions along the customer journey. And decide which activities can be outsourced to a virtual assistant and which interactions can be optimized using self-service applications so that customers reach their destination more quickly.?

?In contact centers, you often find that there are a lot of problems that do not require personal contact but can be solved very quickly using forms and a virtual AI-based assistant.?

?In projects, we found that there were always the same queries on three or four specific topics, which cost the agents a lot of time, and today can easily be answered as self-service by the customers themselves.?

?With virtual assistants, we have to distinguish between voice-based and text-based chatbots. Depending on the point of contact, one or the other makes more sense.?

?The customer expectation is to be able to communicate with a company via different channels. We need to take an omnichannel approach.?

?There is a lot of data on contact points with customers that tells you where there are weak points along the customer journey and what can be improved in terms of a good customer experience. Here, it is also important to experiment until you achieve the optimal flow in the interaction, also by means of simulating a process in collaboration with the customers.?

?In addition to data-based process design, customer journey mapping and design thinking are well suited for optimizing processes.????

?We have used the feedback from customer service to develop personas, which we have used to create a basic understanding among all those involved of where the shoe pinches.?

?In customer journey mapping workshops with representatives from the business units, we quickly realized that it was possible to help customers by automating processes.?

?Today, with the help of technology in the field of intelligent automation, we can work with data that represents how the sequence of process steps really takes place. To do this, we use process mining and task mining to read logs and data fields from systems that reveal an entire customer journey.?

?From the aggregated data of a large number of customer journeys, we can see where the variances lie, where, for example, too much time builds up, or where there are some frictions that can easily be reduced.?

?With process mining, you can select the best possible process for customers and optimize it accordingly.?

?Companies like airlines today know how to use new technologies to design end-to-end customer experiences that impress with customer centricity.?

?An airline is most customer-centric when it flies at all. So, the best evidence of customer centricity is still the smooth execution of the service.?

?Successful process automation requires the development of digital competencies and the participation of employees in the change process.?

?Automation supports the supply chain in generating better transparency about the flow of goods and in better predicting requirements and prioritizing them fairly for customers.?

?In principle, automation leads to better alignment with customer centricity - on the one hand, by optimizing the service catalog with self-service and virtual assistants, and on the other hand, by enabling business cases and operations to be redesigned with unstructured data.?

?Designing the best combination of self-service, automation and personal customer contact is key.?

?Automation provides employees with the ability to focus on what is important, thereby influencing motivation to provide a better experience for customers.?

?It is important to prepare employees for the change and let them participate in an active role in Digital Transformation and automation.?

?To support the corporate culture, the management team must be able to clearly demonstrate how the Digital Transformation and the vision of the end state will be realized with the participation of employees.?

?For data security and ethics in the processing of customer data, it is also necessary to have the opportunity for customers to self-determine how their own data is processed.?

?The key to acceptance and eliminating ethical concerns about data collection and processing involves full transparency, a good information policy, governance on processes, and self-determination on how the data is further processed by the customer.?

Should you speak German, here are the links to the original recording:

Apple: https://apple.co/3pg6k7Y

Deezer: https://bit.ly/3uIdGCb

Podigee: https://bit.ly/2V1zLiL

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3wRpmUw

YouTube: https://bit.ly/2Trj5B4