Intelligent Information: Improving the Customer Experience

A recent consumer magazine survey showed that over 25% of the general public has had cause for complaint about their interactions with a product or service provider in the last year, and 64% would be put off switching their business to a company that had a poor reputation for customer service. “How satisfied are you with the service you received?” is no longer the key question for customer satisfaction measures. “How easy was the company to deal with?” and “How well did they understand your needs?” provide much better indicators. Knowing your customer and interacting with them smoothly, consistently and promptly is the best recipe for acquiring, and most of all, retaining your customer in today’s world.

Of course, this requires an integrated approach between front-office and back office processes, and no organization has an unlimited staffing budget in either of these areas. The first productivity revolution in back-office processes has been the concept of “straight-through” transactional processing, establishing an electronic workflow starting with digitalization and data capture. However, knowledge workers increasingly spend their time dealing with exceptions that don’t have a fixed workflow, or a defined outcome, or require more specific interaction with the customer. Plenty of business processes do not even have a basic set of rules that can be automated. To achieve the next level of productivity we need a more intelligent application of automation, using the technology to learn as much as possible about the customer and the nature of their interactions with the business. We can then automate things like multi-source capture, transaction matching, exception analysis, portfolio assessment, and sentiment analysis. In this way, when the knowledge worker does become involved, whether they are front-desk, back-office, case-management, or sales staff, they can much more quickly assess priorities and set actions.

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