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Improving the Customer Experience with Smart Process Applications

This is an age of customer service, and businesses have more pressure than ever to deliver convenient, fast and accessible customer solutions. With the touch of a button or swipe of a screen, consumers gain instant access to any information they demand, at the exact moment they demand it. Social, apps and one-click purchasing are fundamentally changing the way consumers interact with businesses. In fact, customer service expectations are so great that businesses often struggle to succeed – 24/7 service is expected, immediate follow-up is demanded and any business misstep is recorded in the public eye for all to view.  Those who wish to stay ahead of the competition know it’s vital to deliver an exceptional experience for their connected consumers.

A new generation of applications has emerged to meet the evolving demands, making it easier to support highly variable, people-intensive business activities. They’re called Smart Process Applications - or SPAs. In a recent AIIM study supported by K2, information professionals weighed in on the capabilities of SPAs, including specific use case experiences, drivers for improved case management tools, and feature sets needed for modern case management.

This study found that case managers are having trouble meeting customer expectations for speed of response. In fact, it was the number one reported pain point of business processes. Marketers and C-level executives alike know that in today’s mobile world, where new technologies and hot trends influence switching behavior more than ever, customer service and exceptional experiences are the most important factors of customer retention, so finding a flexible and agile solution to respond to customer needs is top of mind.  Fortunately, there seems to be hope in SPAs. And, they seem to be working.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they have already achieved successful outcomes from using SPAs, including faster, more consistent customer response times, faster end-to-end process times, and greater flexibility for staff members.

In today’s highly competitive, social media-driven environment, faster and more consistent customer response time is crucial; it can significantly improve customer experience and save the organization a lot of money. It can also help with a big issue facing financial institutions, as rules-driven compliance processes that are also flexible can make responses to regulatory changes much simpler.

Customer facing organizations are constantly looking for new and better ways to provide exceptional service. This study revealed that case managers are aching for automation to deliver faster response times. Eighty percent reported that automated classification, recognition and routing of inbound content would be a great help to their business. And the number one desired feature of modern case management systems is flexible workflows to empower employees on the frontlines to quickly and easily respond to changing customer, business and environmental needs by interacting on the fly and adding comments to workflows.

Many organizations are at a loss of how to even begin to evaluate for the need of this new application. The first step is to examine current business processes and needs, then see how SPAs can fill the gap to better meet the demanding expectations of customers. The expectations from customers are only going to increase over time and, as the pace of these demands evolve, the technologies and solutions organizations offer must advance as well.

To download the AIIM study, please visit: http://content.k2.com/aiim_70114000002UmHv. For more resources from K2, please visit: http://community.k2.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/Resources.

SPA Infographic

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