Hyperautomation is powered by machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and optical character recognition (OCR). In other words, hyperautomation is intelligence-added automation that expands business efficiency, improves decision-making capabilities, and builds a strong bedrock for innovation. Therefore, unsurprisingly, enterprise leaders are gearing up to optimize intelligent automation for their business advantages. Research predicts that the hyperautomation market size is growing steadily and will be worth $29.2 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 22.2%.

Unlocking business value at scale

Today, most businesses operate in volatile market environments. To succeed, they must satisfy discerned customers, survive intense competition, combat rising inflation rates, foster sustainability, adapt to emerging market trends, and constantly stay on top of their game. Enterprises can overcome all these roadblocks by embracing hyperautomation.

It allows them to shift their focus from repetitive, effort-intensive tasks to business-critical functions and larger business goals. Such streamlining of business priorities helps enterprises unlock new growth opportunities and increase operational efficiency. It ensures that decision-makers have access to richer, more accurate, and quicker insights that can give them granular visibility into enterprise-wide operations. This enables them to make more informed choices in real-time and improve resource utilization, data security, compliance adherence, and so much more. A report by Gartner suggests that by the year 2024 hyperautomation will reduce 69% of a manager’s work.

While robotic process automation (RPA) allows organizations to only transform the way they handle rule-based, repetitive processes, hyperautomation goes beyond this. It offers the value delivered by RPA and performs tasks that are outside RPA’s scope and require considerable human intervention, logical thinking, and critical perceptions at different stages.

Cost optimization is another key benefit of hyperautomation. Intelligently automated tasks, disruption-ready operations, and differentiated customer and employee experiences facilitated by hyperautomated processes can help enterprises reduce opex considerably. By turning key business processes into efficient digital workflows, hyperautomation forges a pathway into the future of work and expands revenue streams. The payoff? An innovation opportunity that benefits organizations, their employees, and customers, alike.

Discovering real-world value

It’s not just large-scale enterprises in any specific industry that have recognized and embraced the game-changing hyperautomation capabilities. In fact, according to a recent study by Gartner, 80% of hyperautomation offerings will limit industry specificity by 2024. It indicates that enterprises of all sizes across industries are jumping on the hyperautomation bandwagon with zeal.

For instance,  UBM, a global B2B media company has reduced its production expenses by 30% and shortened its time-to-market by using hyperautomated processes. Our previous blog post illustrated how the hospitality and travel industry is utilizing hyperautomation for contactless and easy check-ins and check-outs, quick responses to customer inquiries, and streamlined reservation processes. Likewise, game advertisers and developers have been leveraging hyperautomation to understand their target audience as well as streamline performance evaluation and make necessary creative iterations. Similarly, by using hyperautomated workflows, BFSI enterprises have been enhancing their marketing and sales, regulatory reporting, payment collections, lending operations, back-office processes, customer support, and digital banking offerings.

A study conducted on the US health industry has revealed that nearly $41 billion are annually paid to patients to compensate for the manual errors that occurred during clinical data processing. Fortunately, hyperautomation has started to change this. It irons out back-office operational inefficiencies, which in turn would support medical experts to improve clinical results and offer superior patient experiences. Many clinics have already introduced digital nurse avatars to communicate with patients as the first line of help. These hyperautomated bots ask relevant questions to patients for collecting an accurate account of their well-being and symptoms. It is then from this first-hand information that appropriate and timely medical assistance is directed, further diagnosis is decided, and contacts with medical centers are made.

Conclusion:

While the benefits of hyperautomation are quite promising, enterprises need a synergy of incremental, thoughtful approaches and the right tools to optimize the technology. And that’s where IGT Solutions can help. Our Customer 360 solution has enabled global brands with a single-pane, real-time 360-degree view of their customers. Powered by our hyperautomation-first offerings and expertise, enterprises have unlocked unprecedented efficiencies and business value. The aviation sector for example can utilize our AI/ML-powered Fare Note Interpreter to improve their transaction processing times by 80% and reduce refund processing errors by 99%. Enterprise across industries can similarly achieve large-scale transformations smoothly and bring about meaningful, sustainable change with us.

To know more about our services and solutions, and understand how they can help you pave the way to future-ready business operations, get in touch with us now.

Author:
Vitesh Kohli is an Intelligent Automation thought & execution leader with a track record of setting up CoE, best practices, robot delivery, managing change and extensive program and project management experience with a strong entrepreneurial background. Have strong expertise in leading Transformation -Intelligent Automation across industries. Strong knowledge of planning big robotics set-ups, cognitive-based chat products, multi-components automation and multi-product Tech solutions. He is a domain Expert and Hands-on Technologist using Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Automation and Conversational Commerce to solve business problems in large enterprises.

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Essential business tools can be a big lifesaver for you! One such tool is Customer Relationship Management, or simply CRM.

CRM is a handy tool that helps you improve your sales, service quality, and customer interactions. Whether you generate and track new leads and opportunities, want to fix your sales process, or wish to retain existing customers, the CRM tool can help you optimize all these processes. Hence, all businesses, especially small businesses, need a CRM to grow their customer base and revenue.

How can you benefit from a CRM, as a small business?

• CRM helps to channel your sales funnel
• Marketing and sales teams get a 360-degree view of customers and visibility into sales opportunities.
• Get visibility by tracking each part of your sales process with a visual deal pipeline and dashboards, thus enabling you to forecast better.
• Qualify leads for better sales conversions, which leads to increased revenue.
• Adapt a process quickly for connecting with customers without wasting much time.
• Provide your team with task automation opportunities such as entering data and sending a greeting or introductory emails by using the CRM tool

What to look for when selecting CRM software?

Custom Configuration: Being a small business, you are trying new things rather than following a guidebook. You must look for customization or configuration options to modify the CRM tool according to your business needs.

Budget-Friendly: Small businesses seeking CRM tools usually look for the most cost-efficient option; however, if your budget is low and you want to know the usefulness of the CRM tool, it is better to try a free CRM. There are many budget-friendly CRM tools available in the market.

After-sales support: You may or may not have a dedicated IT department as a small business. So, ensure that the CRM you choose has an excellent customer support team for quickly solving technical issues.

Choosing the right CRM for your business:

Choosing the right CRM system can be difficult as a decision-maker. With so many CRM options, each with a different set of tools and features, identifying the right one for your small business is quite challenging. Hence here are a few tips that will guide you:

Specifications of features: To start, be clear about what you need the CRM system to do for you, as there are many different CRM software with many features to choose from. Once you know your goal, you know which CRM will work best for your business.

Business Growth and Scalability: Choose a CRM that can scale as your business grows. It should be flexible enough to your changing business needs as your organization grows and evolves rapidly.

User Access & Roles: Choosing the right CRM system allows marketing and sales teams to work on one unified platform. The more users you include, the better it is, as all of them will have a unified view of what is happening in the sales department. Make sure the CRM you choose has defined roles and permissions.

Customer Support or After Sales Service: Customer service differentiates a good CRM from an average one. As a small business owner, time and resources are premium commodities. A small business should look for a CRM tool that provides good customer support and multichannel communication.

Integration with marketing: Marketing is the heart and soul of any business. A good CRM tool/software should offer a perspective view of each lead, previous customers, and current customers. This can include their related data like demographics, contacts, value, margins, and products purchased. Such data can provide well-structured marketing campaigns and allows you to build landing pages, email marketing, score and qualify leads, and run multichannel marketing campaigns.

Conclusion:

Choosing the right CRM for your small and medium business can improve your team’s productivity and help accelerate sales.

Why IGT Solutions?

IGT Solutions provides omnichannel CRM solutions for customers of different industry verticals. We help you achieve exponential results and excellence in transforming your CRM system by ensuring all interactions and touchpoints are focused and delivered in your chosen business industry.

Author:

Himanshu Gandhi is a Project Manager at IGT Solution’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA). He has 14 years of diverse work experience as a Senior Consultant and Project Manager for Digital Transformation across Airlines, Food and Beverage, and Banking industry. He can be reached at Himanshu.gandhi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.

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However, Gartner predicts that by 2022, 50% of the brands may fail to unify their customer engagement channels, providing a fragmented customer experience that lacks cohesion, reliability, and context. To win business from customers undeniably influenced by the quality of brand interactions, it is now pivotal to invest in an omnichannel experience strategy that can make frictionless and personalized engagement possible for multiple touchpoints across their journey. It empowers enterprises to inspire customer delight by proactively offering more purchase and fulfillment options and successfully navigate channel disruptions to defend the integrity of their diverse revenue streams.

Extracting the optimum value of customer experience

So, considering its mission-criticality, how should a company that intends to go to market with an omnichannel experience delivery plan for its customers trigger the required transformation? Essentially, such a shift calls for a reimagination of how an organization approaches customer experience from a technological and cultural standpoint. It involves investment in top-line digital engineering skills and design thinking expertise that can meaningfully decode the brand-consumer dialogue across channels and attach the patterns of preferences to profitable business outcomes with confidence. True omnichannel experience is the sum of a host of incremental changes that include:

Re-engineering the CRM fundamentals making the landscape agile enough for deep API-backed integration with multiple channels. An intuitive and connected CRM is the heart of an impactful omnichannel CRM strategy that can deliver a 360-degrees view into customer behavior by assimilating sources such as social media activities, emails, incident tickets, and service desk cases into a single source of truth. This integrated approach is key to weaving personalized experiences that are holistic and resonate with actual customer needs.

Bringing insights from live customer interactions across channels to optimize the experience and providing a seamless omnichannel experience.  Today’s customer journeys aren’t straightforward and linear but an inter-connected series of handoffs between traditional and modern digital channels that can vary significantly. Providing a seamless handoff across all channels and ensuring that we have a customer 360 view is of paramount importance to ensure customer delight. This approach leverages cognitive technologies like Machine Learning, Natural language processing (NLP) and AI which helps create a personalized customer experience and plays a decisive role in improving customer satisfaction & brand recall and trimming the persisting marketing overheads.

Implementing customer analytics on top of the omnichannel CRM database, tailoring bespoke reports and customized dashboards that can permit various end-users within the value chain to be more customer-centric. Customer Experience Analytics, Retention Analytics, and Marketing Analytics offer end-to-end visibility into the brand-customer interactions across multiple channels, allowing marketing decision-makers to discover latent trends for realigning strategies.

Augmenting agent productivity with the proper training and tools that allow team members to embrace the culture of omnichannel commitment to the customer. It involves breaking down silos and sharing leads and customer information across the marketing ecosystem. Also, in an omnichannel environment where enterprise systems are integrated with third-party applications to enhance productivity, operating on multidimensional customer data needs adequate guidance to prevent the breach of customer data protection and privacy norms, mitigating security and reputational risks.

Business Impacts

A decisive move towards delivering seamless omnichannel experiences can unlock a new horizon of business opportunities, transform customer loyalty and convert them into promoters. Apart from this it helps improve operational efficiency, reveal new business streams, and elevate during and after-sales service quality. While ensuring round-the-clock availability, an omnichannel strategy can address the conventional inadequacies of face-to-face interactions like the short attention span of agents by distributing the workloads across various channels improving overall customer satisfaction.

Also, merging all digital marketing channels into a composite CRM with a customer 360 offers a complete view of the user persona, allowing marketing campaigns to be fine-tuned to relevance. Further, the availability of cross-channel customer datasets allows limitless analytics, equipping marketers to understand customer behavior patterns better and preempt foreseeable changes.

Conclusion

The omnichannel experience, while complex to orchestrate, is a critical differentiator in a closely contested market. Here, partnering with a digital engineering leader that can seamlessly converge the best of digital and in-person customer interactions to drive experience delivery is no short of strategic advantage. It can empower organizations to be nimble and pull ahead of the curve by delivering on overt customer requirements and subliminal expectations reflected through behavioral cues.

Sources: Salesforce, Gartner

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Artificial Intelligence and Digitalization are creating new waves of change across industries and empowering them to meet customers’ ever-changing expectations. Customer 360 – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytic framework, aids companies to efficiently create a workflow best-suited for their customer requirements, facilitating enriched customer experience.

Market Scenario

The market landscape of each segment, from retail, travel to hospitality, showcases significant disparities. While the retail market is booming, the travel and hospitality sector is yet to embark on growth.

Industries like: travel and hospitality are still facing the brunt of the pandemic, and there’s significant disruption in ensuing safety measures in international and domestic travel. Also, hotels, resorts, home-shaping platforms like Airbnb have faced a considerable jolt.  While these industries are recuperating, polishing their work structure will help them build greater resilience and stability, putting them on the growth path.

According to recent studies, about the retail sector, in 2019, the global sales generated by the retail market were approximately $25 trillion, with a forecast to reach $27 trillion by 2022. The retail market is flourishing – whether it is physical, in-store retail, or online retailing/e-commerce channels. One of the core reasons is that retailers are constantly fine-tuning their daily operations using digitalization and new-age technologies. Gaining insights and analytics helped them drive a better consumer experience which opened up new business opportunities.

Customer 360

The advent of intelligent technologies like Customer 360 caters to the needs of the modern-day customer, enabling them to connect with brands and have instant access to informative content through multiple channels. These channels include mobile apps, customer support, online communities, social media marketing, and many more. Such customer-relevant data can be processed and analyzed to personalize the customer experience in real-time.

The success driver for any service organization is the customer happiness index. Service providers in retail, travel, and hospitality can stand out by combining customer interaction footprints through all channels. With a 360-degree view of customers, service providers can offer personalized services best suited for their customers, augmenting their overall experience.

Customer 360 Benefits

Today, it has become challenging for most industries to meet the demands of the widely scattered customers -geographically and demographically. While most companies have opted for digitalization into their workflow, how to drive value from it still remains the big question. It is important for companies to understand their digitization capabilities, and implementing the same in their operations shall empower them with better analytical tools, reduce their costs, and expand their businesses.

Companies now have huge customer interaction with them, thanks to digitalization. With customer 360, it’s easier for companies to segregate their customers into different categories by analyzing their patterns, purchase behavior, social media interactions, interests and geographies, and ancillary sales.

Customer 360  in Retail Sector:

Retail brands are constantly looking to boost their marketing KPIs and enrich customer experiences. However, they face challenges like dealing with various data sources and disparate systems, making it difficult to create and manage a centralized index of records.

With customer 360, brands are now able to connect with external systems for new analytics and have access to master customer product data. Brands are enabled with a clear and single view of the customer. Customer 360 allows an automated combination of integrated workflow capabilities, and companies can now improve cross-team collaboration and understand relevant data to use. Useful information such as customers’ profiles, preferences, different transactions, and their relationships with other suppliers empowers them to develop innovative marketing and advertising strategies enabling growth. For example:

Customer 360 enhances FMCG retail’s merchandising and marketing activities and provides a single view of the product, pricing, and promotions. A digital analytic assistant offers customers with latest trends in aspects of grocery and hard goods. It also provides predictive analytics, which proves beneficial for future actions to be taken. With alerts and notifications about the latest events and customer behavior patterns, retailers can scale their businesses.

Customer 360  Driving Business

Customer 360 also provides the Next Best Offer analytics, which uses predictive analytics to identify the product or services that the customer needs. This data helps to add an extra dash of personalization to the customer’s experience. Customer 360 helps retain the loyalty of customers and stitches together an offer that meets their requirements.

IGT Solutions provides Customer 360- Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytics that aids companies to understand their customer profiles, purchase behavior, customer engagements, and preferences with Customer 360 intelligence. This technology’s vast suite of features facilitates the unique identification of customers, situations, and decision-making propensities, enabling contextual and actionable recommendations to drive the subsequent optimal outcome.

Companies can leverage IGT’s Customer 360 to deliver hyper-personalized services to their customers. The framework identifies and segregates different areas of personalization under ‘NORC’, ensuring that valuable insights are extracted from the enormous data volumes NORC is related to the travel sector.

Customer 360 in Travel:

Travel companies can now eliminate silos with the help of Customer 360 and effectively manage their online and offline interactions. These companies are now capable of interacting seamlessly with their customers using real-time communication. For example:

Airline companies are now enabling customers to interact with them across multiple channels, providing them with ease of use and flexibility. Customers can directly call or use apps and social media to make reservations and raise queries or complaints. In case of any disruptions, travel companies can respond to their customer queries faster with the right message and the right channel.

Ticket bookings from all touchpoints are integrated into the cloud. Airline Company’s reservation and customer experience teams now have access to a unified view of customer interactions. During Covid-19, customers’ calls and queries were handled effectively by airline companies using Customer 360. Also, companies were successful in transitioning their teams from the workplace to work from home successfully.

Other Added Benefits:

• If travel plans have been changed or cancelled, eligible customers can now receive their compensations in less than 24 hours which traditionally used to take four to six weeks.
• Today, people simply don’t wish to buy a ticket but also want to be informed on various hotel options, events to attend while on stay, commute, and others.
• Airline ticket systems can now compare pricing with more accurate data from the cloud using Customer 360 predictive analytics and data discovery capabilities.

Personalization –Key Driver for Success

Industries’ complete range of ancillary services is often neglected, leading to poor customer experience. The cause can be primarily because of the lack or incomplete customer behaviour profile. Even through OTA or any other channel, the seller cannot anticipate the right ancillary service for the customer and therefore misses out on a great revenue generation opportunity.

By analyzing past behavior, social media activities, and customers’ online behavior, travel service firms can target the right cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and use the right channel. Customer 360 view provides ease of operations by providing a dynamic view of tested data. Customer 360’s data discovery capabilities help get accurate data from the cloud, which can be later applied across all verticals enabling them to grab the attention of more customers and retain the present ones.

Customer 360 Personalization in Hospitality

Hospitality industries are now proactive in analyzing revenue generation by collecting information from various venues and understanding customer activities. They can now make enhanced data-based operational decisions that will benefit both- the hotels and customers. For example:

• Hospitality segments can now update or inform customers or prospective customers in real-time using the marketing cloud over email, SMS, and Push notifications.
• Hotels can now segment customers by demographics, age, preference; and change their offerings dynamically. It can now add a personalization touch and create a WOW factor for its customers.

Customer 360 can amplify business operations with deeper analytics and customer data widening the scope for business scalability.

Sources: Statista

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