By Gautam Moorjani, Head of Product, SS&C Blue Prism

If there has been one constant consumer trend over the past 70 years, it is end customers’ demand for higher levels of convenience. The customer experience (CX) is the fastest-growing priority area for customer care leaders. This trend is driving the need for digital transformation.

Organizations are under immense pressure to deliver on expanding consumer expectations for digital solutions that offer personalized and seamless customer journeys. According to a recent McKinsey article, these challenges are unlikely to be solved at scale without AI and data analytics.

While most organizations seem to recognize the importance of digitalized CX, with 77% reporting they have established digital platforms, only 10% also say those platforms are fully scaled and adopted by customers. Improvement on the CX front is critical for businesses to remain viable long-term. Companies’ growing awareness of the need to digitalize amid insufficient human resources is driving no- and low-code adoption rates.

Ultimately, consumer expectations shape the trajectory of the future, and all signs indicate the future is digital CX.

Why is automation key to the future of CX?

Intelligent automation, especially the artificial intelligence (AI) component, enables an unprecedentedly proactive and tailored CX experience. The more consumers experience this service, the more they demand it from all businesses they engage with.

How do organizations optimize CX?

A comprehensive and flexible automation platform is vital. Businesses should seek a solution that seamlessly connects human employees and digital workers and reengineers processes quickly and accurately. The solution should also enable scaling across the enterprise for maximum business value.

An intelligent automation-powered contact center helps organizations deal with the overflow of consumer queries by reducing call times by up to 75%. Human workers collaborate with digital workers (automation) to reduce resolution times. Customer service agents are given a 360-degree view of every customer they interact with, as digital workers source information from across systems and databases, then provide it to the agent in a single, easy-to-use, consolidated interface. Agents can rapidly resolve issues with all the required information at their fingertips.

Digital workers deal with simple customer requests, which enables service agents to give customers with more complicated enquiries the time they need and deserve. Such service is critical for customer retention and only made possible by scaled automation. Backlogged queues of customer tickets are culled thanks to faster resolution times and digital workers’ end-to-end resolution of simple cases, not to mention the ability to operate at full capacity 24/7.

The addition of communications mining automation, which combines AI and natural language processing, empowers organizations with analytics sourced from all channels. The analysis can better understand customers and how they interact with the business throughout the customer journey.

In an illustration of a CX automation strategy, Lufthansa, the German airline, managed the surge in customer service demands caused by the pandemic. Overnight, flights were grounded, and CX became critical as millions of customers submitted change requests. The company needed a way to resolve unusual customer requests rapidly. With IA, the company could operate a digital workforce 24/7 and process over 100,000 customer transactions.

Beyond the contact center

More time for your workers means more time for your customers. By implementing business process automation to assist with logistics management, businesses realize cost and time savings to give organizations more time to service customers.

For this use case, organizations can use a solution combining RPA with AI to deliver data management. Workers no longer have to comb through reams of information manually. Digital workers consolidate data and provide reliable analytics to empower human workers to make value-adding decisions and drive innovation to better the customer experience.

For instance, a mortgage provider could use business process automation to improve operational efficiencies, leading to customers being serviced faster.

Anyone who has applied for a mortgage knows it’s a longwinded and painstaking process, requiring endless paperwork. Traditionally, workers processing applications must collate and manage the paperwork, ensuring the correct information is delivered to the right party.

With digital workers, much of this can be automated. Digital workers can automate checks, offer searches, generate paperwork and distribute the appropriate version to the correct party. Automations also fill in or highlight any missing gaps. Collaborating with a digital workforce enables providers to process more applications than humanly possible while also giving hours back to employees. Workers can then use this time to address more complicated case matters beyond the capability of a digital worker.

Getting on the right side of the competitive gap

End customers have more options than ever before. A company’s degree of digitalization is one of the leading factors determining where they cast their loyalty. With advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and RPA, businesses can deliver consumers a fast yet thorough and tailored experience. The benefits for enterprises are multifold: they attract and retain more customers, enhance worker satisfaction rates, and boost ROI and operational efficiency. No-code solutions enable businesses to drive digital transformation despite the tech skills shortage.

Business models across industries are changing to accommodate rapidly changing consumer behavior, and those failing to adapt risk being pushed out.