Customers buy from companies that offer them the best, most seamless and simplest digital experience.
In today's world, speed is everything. Being first to market and delivering new features, fixing bugs or shipping products within a day demonstrably improves the user experience and customer satisfaction. Digitised business processes contribute to this and are a must in an increasingly globalised world to meet the expectations of your users and customers.
Automation and digitisation of processes for a consistently positive customer experience?
As consumers, customers and employees, we are spoiled. Large e-commerce companies like Amazon have achieved an almost 100% automation rate in direct sales processes. This enables them to offer a unique and seamless user experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey: from first contact to receiving the package at your doorstep to returning it to their warehouse.
We log in to our bank account and can easily check any transaction we have ever made. The transactions are automatically processed by your bank's ERP system and transmitted to a web interface. And all of this happens in the blink of an eye and without human intervention.
Do you remember when you had to call an airline to book a flight for your next business trip or holiday? Do you remember all the hassle you had with that? You had to speak to customer service, provide your payment details and then received the confirmation and tickets by post. Today, you only need to search for flights on the internet, pay and you can get started.
Customer experience: the key to success?
And what about B2B sales processes? Ask yourself how long your company takes to respond to a contact form? An hour? One or two days, or even longer? Do you have an automatic delivery system to notify the responsible employees? Do you automatically follow up after a certain period of time? Do you send an automatic thank-you message after the form is submitted?
That is precisely why you should contact your customers promptly. If they do not hear from you within a very short time, they are most likely to switch to one of your competitors.
So if you look more closely, automated and digitised business processes are everywhere, hard to miss and part of our daily lives.
Are you wondering what benefits you can achieve with the digitisation and automation of business processes? Find out more here.
Digitisation is on the rise and more important than ever
In many industries, business processes are being fundamentally redesigned to meet the expectations of customers and users. Companies that do it right can offer lower prices due to lower costs, better operational controls and fewer risks.
But it is not enough to digitise an existing process. These processes are often one-sided, difficult to grasp and not state-of-the-art.
Digital processes should be easy to follow and structured in a way that simplifies individual steps for your users or customers. You should never simply copy and paste an analogue process into a digital environment, but rather redesign it from the ground up, combining best practices with digital capabilities.
This means
- removing project steps that do not add value to reduce complexity,
- reducing the number of documents required (often one is more than enough),
- automating decision steps and notifications,
- and reducing the number of responsible parties to a minimum.
Digitised business processes and data collection
To meet today's standards and outpace your competitors, collecting and analysing data is the key to business success. Digitised business processes enable you to capture important data more easily and subsequently make better decisions. For example, you can collect customer support data on SLAs to improve your ITSM process, or data on customer behaviour in digital marketing to enhance website content, ads, and KPIs.
However, the digitisation of business processes is only the beginning. To accommodate the new processes, operating models, skills, organisational structures, and roles often need to be redesigned.
Collaboration between business teams
Marketing or sales teams should work closely together and incorporate data into their decision-making process to engage customers throughout their entire journey. For example, marketing can learn how long and how often a specific visitor has spent on particular pages before contacting sales. This data can then be used by sales in future customer conversations.
Customer support and success teams can use digital tools such as Jira Service Management and well-designed support portals in conjunction with a Help Center to build a self-service solution. This allows them to focus exclusively on high-priority support tickets that require personal customer interaction. According to ServiceNow and Gartner, the use of modern ITSM solutions reduces personal contact by 40% and 72%, respectively, compared to contact via phone and email.
Redesigning and digitising a process is the first step. To fully exploit digital opportunities, new roles must be created within your teams. Roles such as Data Analyst / Scientist and User Experience Designer are two of the most important.
Conclusion
The digitisation of business processes can be driven for countless reasons or by business teams. However, before you begin, you should ask yourself: "What purpose and goal do I want to achieve?"
If you think about this beforehand, the next steps and questions you need to answer will be easier. Questions such as: Which tools or software do we need? Do we need to hire new staff to manage the implementation of digitisation or be responsible for achieving the desired goals? How do I ensure that existing employees are able to use the new tools? Are trainings required? Do I need to commission an expert?
With digitisation, you can not only increase your performance or save money, but also engage and delight your customers (directly and indirectly), leading to a better customer experience and greater satisfaction.
