Digital business transformation – three ways to cut costs and streamline process

Digital business transformation, or simply digital transformation, is a buzz phrase that keeps reappearing in technology and business discussions, but how exactly can it help you to further your organization? Why does it matter? 

In our latest article, we highlight three ways to cut costs and streamline processes through digital business transformation. 

1. Use digital ‘barriers’ to free up resources in your customer support team 

When you have a physical team to manage, in any department, the constant worry of overheads is ever-present. Will there be enough revenue to cover the costs of the team and the investments you want to make to improve your part of the business? Will the contribution margin expected by the shareholders be enough? Am I doing enough to satisfy my internal and external customers? And that’s before we even get into optimizing your workforce with productivity tools and tactics, to ensure that resources are being used smartly and effectively. 

But what if we told you that, through the use of Verint Community and Web Self-Service you can place a digital barrier in front of your support team to address the ‘low-hanging’ fruit of the customer service and support requests, while simultaneously providing a higher level of service to your customers? 

How so? This can be done in a number of ways. Firstly, through the use of question and answer forums customers can self-serve, self-solve or crowdsource issue resolution 24×7.  From an Internet browser or mobile  , customers can ask questions and find answers on a range of your business’ products and services. Answers may come in two forms. The first, is in the form of conversational knowledge that is continuously generated and perfected with use as a result of forum interactions. The second, in the form of curated articles or knowledge that’s been approved and published by your organization. 

Another method is to use Verint’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant to automate human-like chats.  Supported with conversational and curated knowledge, Intelligent Virtual Assistant is used to filter conversations that need more ‘real life’ assistance from those that don’t, freeing up more time for your support staff to solve more critical issues. 

These are just two examples of how organizations streamline support services, without compromising the customer service experience. 

2. Deploy digital business tools to increase the productivity of your workforce 

Sometimes, it’s the simple tools that can be the most effective. The tools that you wonder how you ever did without. 

One example of this is teams and departments within an organization using secure tools such as private messaging  or intranet forums or activity streams to communicate with co-workers and collaborators on-the-fly without the inefficiencies and distractions caused by email distribution lists and the reply-all responses. Productivity is increased by cutting down on time usually reserved for sit-down meetings in boardrooms, lengthy web conferences and ‘coffee stops’ at desks at the other end of the office. Put simply, digital collaboration tools allow for more efficient working, and the ‘paper’ trail comments features and activity streams  in Verint Community, means it’s easy to pick up a co-worker’s ask or task at a random point, and share workloads. And, unlike the traditional and inefficient email distribution list approach, Verint Community users that have enabled email notifications for the conversations, can “mute” future email notifications on the topic unless they are specifically @mentioned to engage. Think about how great that feature alone is! 

3. Gain customer feedback digitally to inform your overall business transformation strategy 

To complete the cycle, a great way to further improve your processes as you continue through digital transformation, is to use the tools and tactics that will amplify the voice of your customers. This means providing a secure and private platform for your customers to voice their concerns and queries online, so your business can learn where the best opportunities are for growth and improvement. 

Verint Community provides feedback-orientated features right out-of-the-box, including discussion forums,  question and answer forums, polling and voting, comments, ratings, and ideation.  All of these are supported with robust reporting to provide top-down and granular views of engagement. All of these tools can be used to crowdsource for ideas, handle direct customer queries and give you a wide-angle view on the topics, pain-points and wishes your customers and potential customers are talking about. After all, your customers are inevitably going to talk about your brand, your products, services and processes, so why not have them talk about it somewhere where you can get involved with the discussion.  Offer help and become part of the solution. Transparency equals trust. 

Speak to our experts about transforming your business digitally 

If the idea of making gains to your business’ performance through streamlined costs, increased productivity and more insight on customer needs appeals to you, then you might want to speak to one of our experts for more information. Start your digital transformation today!