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When business processes and digital innovation collide
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the most modern way to refer to outsourcing companies, and this term was coined for a very good reason. After all, one of the main specialties of a BPO partner like Conectys is helping clients implement and maximize solid business processes. Through our many years of working with a wide variety of clients in this way, we’ve learned that such processes must be adequately supported by technology, business intelligence, and people in order to succeed.
Since digital innovation has upended the stale, inefficient business processes of old, updated, and effective processes are now table stakes for growing companies. What we’re seeing through this shift is compelling. Not only are business processes themselves being transformed; but there is also a domino effect with other aspects of the business being impacted by the shift as well.
Here are three areas of business that are being impacted as a result of using digital process innovation.
Organizational structure.
Think about all the business processes that are core to your company’s infrastructure. Although there are endless possibilities, a large portion of these processes likely fall under admin, operations, IT, or customer service. If your business begins embracing outsourced customer service, enabled by technologies like Salesforce and Zendesk for example, the very structure of your customer service department must change as well.
So digital process innovation may mean your teams need to be configured differently, and in some cases, positions may be revamped entirely. Team members may no longer need to execute on your strategy as they had in the past, rather moving into the role of enablement and management of the technology. In other cases, new positions may need to be created. Your role may evolve into one that assists in rolling out new process innovations across the organization, or you may find your company needs someone solely dedicated to processing management. Either way, digital innovation is all but guaranteed to shake up your organizational structure – and that’s a good thing.
Pricing & Profitability.
Business owners often embrace digital innovation in order to streamline their jobs and make their teams more productive. But it can also be a key pillar of operational cost reduction, and therefore contribute to increased profitability. Some recent business research concluded that “both product innovation and process innovation impact pricing policy.” And separate research that was done found certain businesses “could realize a five percent increase in revenue attributed to operations by using virtualization, automation, and other digital technologies.”
In addition to cutting costs on the operational end, digitizing business processes – when done the right way – should offer you a single source of truth for your data. Through uniting your data and having access to real-time reporting (more on this below), you can better handle price management and make adjustments as needed depending on the market, your costs, customer demand, and more.
Reporting.
If there’s one area that digital innovation has completely revolutionized, it’s safe to say reporting is it. Previously, department managers would cobble together whatever numbers they were able to access sales, customer satisfaction, and so on. Then they would piece together a PowerPoint presentation that attempted to explain these limited numbers and provide possible reasons behind them. A lot of this process included guesswork, and the end result often failed to provide actionable insight and clear direction for moving forward.
Fast-forward to today’s era of digital innovation. Digitized processes like customer service feedback systems (e.g. NPS and CSAT), platforms that offer real-time visibility into downtime and outages, digitally optimized agent training and onboarding – and more – have made it possible (and, dare we say, easy) to capture and report on accurate data. Your executive team no longer has to wonder about how your contact center is improving with customer service; they can simply review your metrics. And you no longer have to scramble to find this information; it’s all there waiting for you to pull it into a relevant and useful report.
So, how are your business processes? Have you embraced digital innovation yet?
