How to leverage digital process automation to improve customer experience
How digital process automation democratizes automation and fosters a culture centered on innovation and building customer satisfaction
Add bookmark
Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered shifts in key customer behaviors that include the increased reliance on online interactions with companies. It has also highlighted the importance of automating processes to ensure efficiencies are not lost in the new context of hybrid-work models involving disparate teams.
Through the automation of end-to-end processes, digital process automation (DPA) provides a holistic organizational impact that traditional siloed automation technologies do not. Going beyond just focusing on individual tasks that will only benefit a specific person or group, DPA drives long-term organizational change by orchestrating automations in larger workflows and measures how entire business operations execute.
It can offer organizations a host of advantages that include time and cost savings, as well as improved experiences for both customers and employees. It provides the ability for organizations to reimagine old, broken processes and adapt them to work environments transformed by factors including the Covid-19 pandemic, new market dynamics and shifts in customer expectations.
This PEX Network report, produced in collaboration with Appian, investigates how DPA can help companies automate end-to-end processes with the view to optimize customer journeys in the hybrid-work model context. It features real-life stories and recommendations from the likes of BT Digital, Globe Telecom and the Deutsche Post DHL Group on leveraging DPA to deliver positive customer experiences and enable healthy business growth.
Optimizing customer journeys in hybrid work models
The disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemichas made digital access vital to the livelihoods of individuals and the survival of businesses. This has made it mission critical for organizations to provide online contact channels so customers can interact with organizations on a remote basis.
The importance of customer centers is highlighted in PEX Report 2022 where the findings of the global state-of-the-industry survey show that customer centers were the top department that drove process improvement during the pandemic at 35 percent.
With customer call volumes soaring and workforce levels suffering in response to the onset of the pandemic, Christian Smart, senior manager, automation center of excellence at UK-based next-generation home phone service BT Digital, notes that the telecoms operator decided to introduce an extra communication channel so customers could self-serve on certain tasks.
Smart says: “The aim was to get away from brick-and-mortar branches and shops, while stopping people [from] calling the centers.”
The company implemented an automated text message system which allows customers to book an engineer to resolve an issue. The end-to-end process takes 10 minutes and is driven at the pace of the customers, who can choose theday and time of the visit. Once the information is input, the integrated DPA tool passes the data to BT’s customer center systems. This workflow reduced traffic in customer centers by 32 percent.
“This was huge for remote-working employees, because they were not available to be in a center 24/7 on calls,” Smart says.
This reduction in traffic meant the company was able to keep a lot of contact centers open to focus on handling the most urgent calls. Smart adds that the ease of use of the automation process helped encourage a change in behavior for customers.
“Filling in an automated form is a much better experience [for the customer] than calling a center and hearing the waiting music,” remarks Smart.
The next section of the report delves into how DPA can help companies optimize end-to-end processes.
Using digital process automation to optimize end-to-end processes
The end-to-end approach to automation provided by DPA offers increased efficiency and enhanced access to real-time data for improved decision-making. The Deutsche Post DHL Group and its Global Business Services (GBS) team examined the success of a DPA tool deployed globally across the entire group for its 280,000 users that include both employees and vendors to drive automation orchestration from end to end.
The global logistics company used DPA to further connectivity within its operations, acting as an orchestrator of its tech stack and enabling end-to-end automation of 24 processes including in the global procurement help desk, to improve user experience for employees, customers and stakeholders. The result was the processing of more than two million end-to-end cases per year.
One process that benefitted from DPA is the duty VAT billing (DVB) process, which was almost entirely manual. Through DPA, it was automated end to end and the company achieved a 95 percent automation ratio, processing more than 50,000 invoices a day, saving both money and time.
Read PEX Report 2023: Global state of process excellence
Timo Neff, team lead, digital service implementation, digitalization for the GBS program at Deutsche Post DHL, explains the benefit of DPA in creating transparency around a process.
“An end-to-end system which is able to track one item from the beginning to the end of a process, allows a new level of transparency in regard to the process flow and bottlenecks, and on the value-adding activities [to benefit the customers],” Neff explains.
“I believe this is where the user experience becomes much better, because if you have transparency on your bottlenecks as a process owner, [the] areas that need to be improved are very clear. That is definitely something which pays off for the end customer and thus enables business growth,” he adds.
DPA was also utilized at Deutsche Post DHL to create a unique vendor master data management portal that improved the user experience for employees and customers. It eliminated the need for manual intervention by connecting various systems and has the ability to process the data of 1,000 vendors.
Related PEX Network article: Scale up process improvement through automation
The integration of DPA platforms into established business ecosystems can be challenging. Organizations need tools to capture data from processes in order to understand the customers’ value chain and focus the initiative on the moments that matter most to customers.
Malcolm Ross, VP, product strategy and deputy CTO at Appian, believes the biggest challenge is in ensuring that companies understand all the upstream and downstream systems that require integration.
Trying to understand everything upfront can give organizations better insight into the actual depth of the initiative. In order to do this they should list all the relevant stakeholders and ensure each gives feedback on what systems are involved and who else they may need to consult with.
Ross says: “A lot of the time organizations discover that what was once a simple initiative is actually far more complex.
“Understanding how you connect each system [across an end-to-end process] is important as many organizations employ a mix of modern and legacy systems and databases,” he notes. “Some systems can have pre-built connectors ready to use, while others may need new integrations to be built from scratch. You may even have some that do not use modern APIs and you will need to figure out how to integrate that system.”
He adds that this is where having a fully featured platform comes into play, with a library of pre-built connectors being a great starting point.
“The ability to create new integrations with low-code, or even use robotic process automation (RPA) to connect to a system will ensure you can take full advantage of the systems and data needed to be successful,” Ross states.
Low-code can help in DPA initiatives due to its ease of use and deployment citizen developers. Traditional development is slow, not easy to adapt over time and adds complexity. Low-code provides users with pre-built components, easy drag-and-drop design and the ability to collaborate across business and IT. This enables rapid development and deployment of new workflows and applications. It can also democratize the automation of customer-facing steps of processes.
According to Ross, low-code is “the speed component that helps organizations adapt rapidly when change occurs – it is fast, adaptable and does not add technical debt to organizations” and should be a priority.
“When organizations want to transform with DPA, a low-code approach should be top of mind,” Ross says. “Customer expectations, internal business goals, even how and where we work, can all change quickly and that speed to change is where low-code fits into DPA.”
The next section of this report looks into how DPA can help organizations drive a culture of innovation.
Driving a culture of innovation through low-code DPA
Through low-code and citizen developers, automation can be democratized across a company, creating a virtuous circle where the benefits of automating processes are understood across the business, thus fostering increased initiatives.
Related PEX Network report: The importance of leveraging low-code to democratize process automation
Globe Telecom defines citizen development as a program that enables everyone to build applications without coding knowledge. With the support of IT, it aims to overcome challenges of automations initiatives such as a tedious approval process, the extensive financial investment or lack of resources to put them to fruition.
As head of emerging technologies at Globe Telecom, Francis Pugeda is leading the experimentation into transformative technologies and trends before they reach their disruptive potential.
He believes that low-code and no-code have allowed a tremendous amount of automation to be developed and helps fostering the culture around it “because it has empowered employees to be able to create and deliver whatever it takes to get the result”.
At Globe Telecom in 2021, 180 low-code and no-code applications were developed by staff as a result of the initiative.
Democratizing automation can lead the way to innovation, with new processes being implemented faster, thus making companies more agile in their offerings to customers. BT Digital’s Smart says employees who adopt a low-code approach are transformed as “the light bulbs start going off in their heads – when they learn the tool themselves, they cannot stop from trying to automate as much as possible”.
Related article: Driving a culture of continuous innovation in financial services
Employees who utilize low-code can see the change much quicker because they have developed the requirement themselves. Smart adds: “They send a request and it takes weeks to see it happen in front of them instead of waiting months. That kind of reactive delivery really helps with uptake on the teams.”
Coupled with an agile mind-set and fast cycles, this approach can also help companies buy into innovation and leverage intelligent automation (IA) technologies. Appian’s Ross recommends that organizations should look into DPA platforms with integrated IA features to prevent having to conduct a separate IA vendor selection process at a later date.
“Organizations should start with a full toolbox of capabilities and be able to select the right tool for the right use case,” he says.
Over the coming years, Ross sees the inclusion of native process mining and RPA capabilities in DPA platforms increasing in importance. This is due to the ability to discover, design and automate processes all within the same platform, which will help organizations adapt and transform even faster.
In the future, one can foresee that the attractiveness of DPA tools will lead to increased investment from companies, which will in turn become cheaper to acquire. Through them, companies will be able to innovate and cater to evolving customer expectations by automating end-to-end processes quickly and efficiently.
The democratization of automation will help foster a culture centered around innovation and will lead the way for organizations to integrate IA capabilities. This will help businesses to remain competitive and adapt their offering as quickly as possible to customers.
This report was originally published on October 18, 2021.
How do you leverage DPA in your organization? Let us know in the comments below.
