There are many driving factors for organizations to adapt and implement new technological advancements: better performance, speed of delivery, increased profits, better customer experience, and improved efficiency. When organizations switched from physical mail to telephone, the key driving factor was to connect with customers instantly and to engage them directly to understand their needs first-hand and address their needs on time, every time. In the process of building efficiency, they built connections with customers, creating professional bonds and lasting relationships.
Organizations began to focus internally with their own employees and not only their customers. They went on further, improvising the technology by bringing in automated dialer's followed by predictive dialer's connecting the employee with only those customers who answer the call, efficiently saving the wasted time of dialing and unanswered phone calls. In this way, the focus was to create and deliver a better experience to people, both internally and externally.
Always, and Always Will Be
Though there are many factors that determine the success of any technological advancement, what ultimately decides the success is the degree of impact and the value created to the people involved. Leaders at all levels need to focus on employee empowerment. One of the best ways to achieve this is through technology.
Through task mining and process mining, now we have the ability to discover and identify all those tasks that could be hampering the performance of individuals and teams. By eliminating those tasks, people can now excel by building on their core skills and performing their roles better. For example, a simple data entry or data normalization activity could take away hours from one’s schedule, limiting them from focusing on their key function. Even a highly skilled individual will be struggling to perform at their best if such mundane tasks interfere with their routine.
The whole idea of omni-channel platforms being introduced was so teams could switch from one channel of communication to another with ease and the customer on the other end will have a better experience with a seamless transition. Today, a consumer can easily switch between a simple text message to a telephonic call or a video conference with smooth efficiency.
People at the Core
Today’s new and emerging technology is blending the digital and physical world, creating an impact in healthcare, finance, and education. Apps on mobile devices, services offered through the cloud applications, and the internet of things, all in general are delivering more value to people both at individual and business levels. These technologies are gathering more data than ever which is enormously impacting the way businesses operate. Customers, partners, and employees are encouraged daily by the introduction of the new and latest technologies. They are, however, equally frustrated that there are many activities they inevitably complete the same way they have been doing for decades. On a personal level, they get to experience advancements through machine learning. For example, they get a prompt from their mobile apps about the nearby restaurants based on their recent food orders. On the business end, they still have to do tasks the older, tedious way such as manually preparing the invoices, importing receipts for processing expense claims, manually extracting data from PDF before importing them to their host system, or downloading attachments and saving them for further processing.
Ensuring Workplace Technology Continues to Empower
While technology is continuing to enable people, businesses need to identify processes that might still create a stumbling block for their employees’ performance. With so many advancements, companies still fall into the category of “technology laggards” as they continue to operate in the old fashion which leads to dissatisfied employees with negative perception towards their employers. By addressing the operational challenges through automation, employees can have the additional time to build solutions through a more creative way. RPA technology allows teams to eliminate time consuming tasks and support personnel in more creative work and innovation. With a high adaption rate, organizations seek the help of RPA solutions to bring efficiency, scale, and empowerment throughout the organization.