10 Ways Digital Transformation Can Help Your Business

Overview

Everyone likes a good list, right?  This blog is meant to highlight benefits of digital transformation for small and midsize business or SMB.  For clarity, Gartner defines small business as those who have less than 100 employees and midsized business as those having less than 1,000.  Let’s also take a quick look at and level set on what is digital transformation.  Digital transformation is a big and important topic that comprises several different technologies.  The three main ones we find ourselves bringing to SMB clients repeatedly include RPA, Conversational AI and Cognitive AI.

RPA or robotic process automation is software that is programmed to do repetitive rules-based tasks so that people do not have to.  An RPA bot uses and launches various business applications, much like a human would by reading screens, pointing, and clicking, copying and pasting, and typing in different applications.  Conversational AI helps humans and software applications communicate through spoken and written language and uses NLP natural language processing tools to do this.  Cognitive AI technology mimics human behavior and simulates human thought processes to find solutions to complex problems.  These are all enormously powerful tools.  Smartly deploying any of them or deploying them in combination really brings about the benefits of digital transformation.

Now for our list … Here are 10 ways digital transformation can help your business. 

1. Lower Costs
   The cost of RPA is typically 1/3 the cost of a human required to do the same job.  Various surveys and studies have found that 30-35% of company’s human resource costs are dedicated to non-productive and repetitive tasks.  If these tasks can be automated a significant amount of cost savings can be achieved.
2. Improve Accuracy
   An RPA bot never gets tired, never gets bored and never gets distracted like a human can.  Therefore, a bot never or rarely makes mistakes.  When there are inaccuracies related to bots it usually comes back to poor input data or needing to tweak the design of a bot by the human developer.  Study after study point out near flawless accuracy once automation projects are completed.
3. Increase Productivity
   Various surveys and studies have found that 30-35% of company’s human resource costs are dedicated to non-productive and repetitive tasks.  If these tasks can be automated with RPA, Conversational AI and Cognitive AI, a significant amount of cost savings can be achieved.  The humans who also were formerly doing this work can now do other higher value work.
4. Increase Profits
   By increasing productivity, reducing errors, and lowering costs businesses can do more, and do all of it more accurately.  Customer’s interactions can happen around the clock 24/7 and 365 days a year.  More sales and more transactions can be achieved through this additional work and increased productivity.  All of this drives top line growth and profits.
5. Data Collection
   Bots can be deployed anywhere in a business and can always be running.  Bots can continuously be monitoring business functions and reporting and updating information for later analysis.  Bots will always record, capture and report information the same way, … all the time, and never deviate from processes.  This consistency and availability can be a game changer for data collection.
6. Better Data Based Decisions
   Another one of the benefits of business process automation is improved insights and analytics.  This allows for better data-based decisions to be made either in the moment, or after analysis.  Bots can be used to collect more and better data and to analyze and report business data.  Bots can automatically run dashboards, publish, and share them.  This reporting capability, the reliable capture of data, and automation of business analytics is often an overlooked way for digital transformation to help a business.
7. Improved Customer Insight
   Using a bot to interact with customers on the front end can result in the easy capture of important customer data.  A bot never loses or misplaces information and never forgets to report or update data.  The automation of data collection and the guarantee that it is getting captured and placed in the applications and programs of a business can do wonders for accurate, prompt, and complete collection of data related to transactions, customer interaction, and behavior.  Bots can be used to automatically fill data required for the CRM & ERP tools that are already in place.
8. Improved Customer Satisfaction
   Today’s customers increasingly prefer self-service interaction with a bot versus interacting with humans for basic and routine tasks and transactions.  Increasingly, people expect and even welcome the efficiency that comes with elegant automation.  Well-designed IPA or intelligent process automation not only saves time for a company but also for its customers.  Bots can be available any time of the day so that customers can be served whenever they like.  Omnichannel communication can also allow them to be served wherever they are too.
9. Compliance
   If a business needs to know, document and record for audit or compliance purposes how a particular repetitive task is completed, RPA can be a great tool to leverage.  Many businesses have compliance requirements and bots can perform predefined sets of instructions and do them the same way every time and never get distracted or deviate from a required and pre-defined workflow.  Bot’s tasks can easily be captured and logged, and therefore, provide an easy to access accurate audit trail.
10. Increased Worker Satisfaction
    Digital transformation is all about unlocking human potential and using the right tools for repetitive work and for completing work when humans are not able to do it.  Increased worker time and energy that is unleashed by offloading mundane, routine, and monotonous tasks can be dedicated to critical and creative thinking, as well as innovation.  Employees can also spend time on the highest value customer engagements.  All of this will make workers be and feel more valuable and they will be making a greater contribution to a business.  This, without a doubt, increases employee satisfaction.

Conclusion

That is a long and interesting list of the benefits of digital transformation.  We could have listed more … but 10 is a nice round number!  Smart businesses are looking to continuously improve.  Using the latest technology tools is a surefire way to do this.  The adoption of digital transformation is growing fast and will continue to accelerate.  Digital transformation solutions like RPA, Conversational AI and Cognitive AI can be easily deployed on top of existing business applications.  This greatly reduces any roadblocks for SMBs to leverage digital transformation.  Knowing where to start, or how to start, can still be a challenge, however.  This is where companies like Valenta can help.  We can provide digital transformation consulting, outsourced personnel and managed services. AI Website

We are exclusively focused on SMB clients.  If you would like to learn more, please contact us here:  Contact us