A recent McKinsey & Company article sheds new insights on the importance of the human factor when automating business processes. According to the article, “while organizations are often tempted to use automation to eliminate work, looking at the customer experience for growth opportunities can maximize returns on automation investments.”
At QuandaGo, we couldn’t agree more.
Now, here’s the hard part. According to the 2018 McKinsey global survey, while three quarters of respondents have started automating business processes, many find the returns failing to meet expectations. This is happening for two reasons:
- Failure to consider ‘hand-offs’ between departments and people — According to McKinsey, automating processes that affect “upstream or downstream handoffs and connections” can bring new inefficiencies into your organization.
- Limiting scope of automation to eliminating work — By focusing on task elimination only, companies can inadvertently trade short-term wins for long-long term gains, as well as miss bigger opportunities to improve the customer and agent experiences.
Sound familiar?
Below, we offer some tips to get your automation initiatives off to a good start, and positioned to deliver value over the long term. Take a look:
- Connect in all your data sources — Not surprisingly, the more data accessible to AI and automating workflows, the better your systems will perform—as well as your agents. Make sure you can integrate all data sources, have a sound data management strategy, and the safeguards in place to ensure accuracy, privacy and compliance.
- Focus on automating workflows end-to-end — Automating just a single step in a customer journey, or one part of the company that carries out a single task can be short-sighted. A better strategy is to look at customer journeys across all the people, processes and departments they touch, automating where appropriate in the context of the entire workflow.
- Factor in the human impact — Of course AI and machine learning will automate some tasks completely. But striving only for this result misses the true potential of AI in the contact center and beyond. Whether tasks are eliminated or intelligence is augmented, the real benefit of this new technology lies in its ability to help people. This includes both customers with innovative self-service applications and agents with more data and information at their fingertips than ever before.
If you’re ready to start automating business processes at your company, let us show you how with a 30-minute personalized DEMO on the QuandaGo Connected Experience Platform. We can help you look for automation opportunities specific to your current business and contact center operations, and provide recommendations for success.
Sign up for your FREE DEMO today!
For additional tips and insights, you can find the complete McKinsey article here.
