Forward-thinking enterprises understand that great service is all about transforming the digital experiences of employees (EX) and customers (CX). Whilst this imperative isn’t new, it’s now more important than ever following the pandemic’s acceleration of digital-first customer behaviour. The bottom line is that a great CX can’t be achieved without a great EX: get both right and you are now delivering a more holistic Digital Experience Transformation, and everybody wins.
The Digital Experience Transformation challenge
Great service means designing and delivering fluid, instantaneous, digital service interactions that both employees and customers demand. However, examine the front-office environments of most organisations and you’ll see they’re missing out on these transformation opportunities.
The reality is that most organisations remain constrained by legacy back-end environments, manual, paper-heavy processes and the complexity and cost of fully digitising end-to-end services, from the front to the back-office – across every channel.
This is especially true within contact centres, where agents struggle to bring everything together and deliver positive brand experiences. They struggle to effectively navigate across multiple systems – up to 25 in some cases. This leads to high error rates, stress, costly inefficiencies and decreasing levels of productivity. And don’t forget, every employee requires training and experience to properly serve customers.
The impacts are clear. Industry stats reveal ever-longer call times, slower speed to answer and more abandoned calls. Add into the mix, low first call resolution, extra training costs and missed opportunities to upsell. And this is being magnified across some sectors that are experiencing a 10x increase in contact volumes. We’re talking about services that are slow, inefficient, low on quality and innovation – but high on staff and customer churn rates.
Clearly, current ways of working are simply unable to meet the ever-changing digital demands of employees and customers: generating ever-decreasing satisfaction – which is bad news for everybody.
Moving beyond current approaches
Over time, innovative technologies including RPA and intelligent automation have been trying to liberate enterprises from the complexity and cost of digitising end-to-end services, across legacy systems. But while these approaches are good at keeping legacy systems functioning – particularly in the back office, they’re not the best route to genuinely digitally transforming end-to-end services. In fact, most organisations are only automating parts of processes and partly delivering digital services.
With every second critical to offering the best level of service, this requires robots working in real-time: even intelligent automation isn’t designed to deliver this in isolation. Without additional abilities, robots can’t deliver the instant, on demand, digital interactions required by employees and customers – and certainly not as easily, effortlessly and cost-effectively as promised.
What’s required is an overlaying technological capability that enables human and multiple robot workers to seamlessly and securely co-work in real-time, at scale. It’s a capability that can deliver transformed, fluid, end-to-end, digital services, of any complexity and business function, that translate into transformed employee and customer experiences.
The Digital Experience Transformation catalyst
Enter ‘hyperautomation’ a Gartner-defined capability widely recognised as the evolution of RPA and intelligent automation. We’re talking about HyperAutomation now being strategically delivered in a cohesive platform, enabling each and every task within any end-to-end work process to be joined up and performed by the best ‘workers’ and ‘tools’; people, multi-vendor robots, hugely efficient mini bots, AI and digital tech.
We’re specifically talking about these workers and tools being intelligently orchestrated in real-time, using dynamic digital UI’s to seamlessly work together as unified “super resources”, precisely choreographed so they hugely simplify and enhance not only employee and customer interactions, but next best interactions too.
Now picture employees and customers effortlessly using dynamic digital interfaces and channels. In the background they’re securely, precisely coordinating robots to interact with legacy systems and AI, with multiple robots coordinating around a single task - while working ahead of time, in parallel to an action. There are also super-efficient mini bots making vast numbers of API calls – and all tasks being performed at warp-speed. Imagine employees effortlessly turning multiple unstructured data sources into usable insights and fluid customer experiences - across all channels.
Ultimately, these HyperAutomation capabilities provide a much faster, less labour-intensive, easier approach to traditional methods of improving end-to-end, digital services. Crucially, this can all be achieved with unmatched ease, speed and security - regardless of legacy IT environment constraints: generating ROI in months - not years.
This is because no coding, major system integration, process change, or mass data migration is required – HyperAutomation is a digital transformation layer that operates on top of any legacy IT estate. All multi-robot, multi-AI tool digital interactions are easily embedded into existing employee and customer systems to remove the need for retraining – including integrating to CRM, BPM, ERP, intranet sites and more.
Hyper-security and governance are also priorities, so all customer data is triple encrypted using a simple HTTPS tunnel with a public-private key encrypted data stream and a tamper-proof blockchain.
We’re pleased to say that these patented capabilities are now available solely within TrustPortal’s HyperAutomation platform.
Digital Experience Transformation realised
Here’s a real-world example of how the platform transforms employee and customer digital experiences across the contact centre.
1. A customer interaction via IVR immediately activates multiple robots to gather information from multiple systems and robots dynamically generate agent-friendly interfaces from this information dynamically adapted for the specific customer’s needs.
2. All of this is instantly performed before the call is transferred to an agent. So instead of the agent spending minutes working across multiple systems, robots immediately provide them with deep “Customer 360” insights.
3. Contextual AI tools also help agents to swiftly solve any issue, while robots perform further checks in the background – while providing agents with next best interactions and upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
4. These capabilities are immediately available to employees via dynamically generated digital interfaces, with robots helping at all stages of a process - across every channel including IVR, telephony, email, SMS, websites, mobile apps, chatbots.
These capabilities are immediately available to employees via dynamically generated digital interfaces, with robots helping at all stages of a process - across every channel including IVR, telephony, email, SMS, websites, mobile apps, chatbots.
So, we now have employees providing high quality services faster, without errors - requiring minimal training and without stress. Delighted customers are served much faster and receive a more consistent, interactive and accessible, experience.
Digital Experience Transformation use case
Since 2018, Telefónica Spain has been on a mission to transform ways of working across its 12,000-seat contact centre to deliver transformed digital experiences for its employees and customers. Telefónica achieves this exclusively using TrustPortal’s HyperAutomation platform, which is being continually proved and evolved in this demanding operating environment.
All Telefónica’s contact centre agents are using the platform via a single digital interface to deliver 85 transformed, end-to-end, digital services, across multiple channels – with unmatched ease, speed, integrity and scale. Telefónica has already achieved a staggering 50 million euros in savings, 50% faster service completion times and 30% cost reductions – while accelerating even greater work performance, quality, value and +5 Net Promoter scores. Telefonica is now looking to deliver wider-scale digital experience transformation for customers and employees, even higher productivity and further service innovations.
Final thoughts
HyperAutomation is all about augmenting, not replacing employees’ skills and cognition. It’s about removing their much-hated manual tasks within each process. Employees will always assist when technology reaches its limit, by using those innate skills that tech can’t offer. They’ll be applying insights from data to continually improve work, spending more time with customers, serving them faster, enhancing their experiences, empathizing, problem solving and innovating to drive growth.
The critical change is to shift your viewpoint, look through the same lens as your employee, client or citizen. If you are not designing, developing and delivering systems that have a positive impact on the experience of anyone interacting with them; it’s time for a new approach!