Your business processes’ quality and alignment are vital to delivering a good, optimised customer experience. Poor business processes cause frustration among customers and employees and cost a lot of time and money.
Organisations need to design and manage the workflows of the business processes properly. Organisations can do this by making clever use of automation and AI.
When buying complex products or services, it is unfortunate that many business processes and associated workflows do not work correctly. Think about financial products like mortgages and business loans. It often leads to customer irritation and frustration, which in some cases can even lead to the rejection of a deal.
For example, applying for a mortgage takes a very long time. On average, the time between the consultation with the mortgage adviser and the final approval takes 4 to 8 weeks. Sometimes, it even takes so long that you must submit the same documents again because they have expired. Sometimes things only come up at the end, which could have been tackled much earlier with a good workflow. For example, someone with a medical condition must pay a higher premium for certain financial products, such as life insurance, than someone who is entirely healthy. It can also happen if a life insurance policy is linked to a mortgage. With the proper workflows, you can immediately gain insight into this so that the customer is not faced with a nasty surprise afterwards, such as a very high premium.
Monstrosities
Business processes and workflows can be real monsters if they are not properly managed. For managers and employees alike, processes are often a black box. The processes were once built, then grew and mutated several times. As a result, the overview got lost, and the processes became incomprehensible. It results in inefficiency and a lot of manual work done by employees because they start working around the process. The result is long waiting times for customers and lots of frustration. The customer and the employees have to take too many detours to come to a deal.
It can be done differently with the help of smart technology and AI. It doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive. Companies can also start small, for example, with a chatbot that points out missing documents in the file to the mortgage officer or the customer. That is already a considerable efficiency step.
We advise many clients to start with process mining in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation. This is a suite of solutions for which you only start paying when you use the solution. You can start small and expand as required. A logical next step could be robot-assisted process automation (RPA).
Garage session
Customers often do not know where to start when modernising their business processes. They hold so-called Garage Sessions at IBM to map out and redesign the processes. For this, they make use of visualisations and innovative tooling. In a special room, people from your organisation, together with specialists from SoftwareONE and IBM, examine the bottlenecks in the current situation. In complex situations, suppliers you work with can also join in. The new workflows are designed jointly, under the direction of a Client Technical Architect.
The ONE
SoftwareONE is happy to help you design and manage your end-to-end workflows with intelligent technology. The ONE also makes your company future-proof. Are you ready for the journey?