Optimize the customer experience with intelligent automation

There’s no way to undersell the importance of delivering a stellar customer experience. Disappoint your customers at any point in the buying journey — whether onboarding or support and upsell — and you’ll put their loyalty at risk. That’s the best-case scenario. At worst, a poor experience is amplified through social media, putting real revenue from potential future customers at risk.

This incontrovertible truth is why so many organizations focus on the digital transformation of their businesses. Digital transformation technologies, including IoT and intelligent automation, can function as levers to achieve end-to-end process visibility and efficiency, which makes an organization more data-driven, responsive to customers and profitable.

IoT is a far-reaching system where an increasing number of physical devices — such as cars, appliances and production machinery — integrate with the internet and produce data on their usage. The advantage of IoT is in the real-time data it makes available across a series of online devices used throughout a company.

The data produced by IoT-enabled devices can paint a clear picture of customer experiences and business operations. An IoT-enabled organization can better understand how its people and assets, including machines and infrastructure, come together to produce value. However, data alone isn’t enough to create these outcomes, which is where intelligent automation comes into play.

An intelligent automation platform has the technology required to ingest data produced by IoT devices and draw insights from it. The platform can automate downstream tasks with robotic process automation (RPA) based on insights drawn and initiate workflows or call an organization’s IT pros to action around any pattern recognized in the data. IoT-enabled companies use intelligent automation to draw insights and begin to take action more quickly based on those insights.

Consider, for instance, a manufacturer that experiences a mechanical failure on the production line. Data delivered instantly from the broken machine is ingested by an intelligent automation platform, and the platform delivers a summarized alert to executives. The platform case management capability is triggered to pull in people resources from elsewhere to reorder new parts. These resources can trigger RPA on demand to automate any repetitive and tedious portion of the ordering process. The result is a more responsive organization with a healthy level of collaboration between people and technologies to better execute processes.

The ability to respond more quickly directly affects the customer experience. When factory floor or back office issues are resolved early, the customer won’t experience a disruption. Intelligent automation and IoT truly shines in giving employees insights and the time to enhance the customer experience. With routine tasks automated, customer-facing employees have more time to assess IoT-acquired insights and determine how to translate them into higher-value experiences for clients.

By incorporating intelligent automation technology, IoT-enabled companies can transform information-intensive processes and achieve higher levels of collaboration between people and technology. That means they’re able to work more efficiently and deliver great moments of customer engagement.

Companies must optimize operations and empower their people, so they can better serve customers. Intelligent automation makes it possible for people to build stronger customer relationships and processes consistently exceed expectations in an IoT-enabled company.

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