At the core of every successful corporate strategy and future vision lies the most crucial factor: humans. After all, behind every form or document is a person eagerly awaiting answers. Whether it’s veterans seeking disability claims or first-time homebuyers wondering if their mortgage loan application will be approved, businesses rely on people to keep them running smoothly. Without humans, there is no business.
Business leaders are constantly on the lookout for a strategy and the right technologies to bring their vision to life. They want a world where employees are engaged, manual work is automated across various departments, and they can truly deliver exceptional value to their customers and the world at large.
However, previous visions of an automated future often overlooked or undermined the human element in each step of the automation process. For instance, robotic process automation, a traditional rule-based solution, attempted to replace human intervention with programmed bots. But when these bots encountered issues or processes changed, humans had to step in to fill the gaps, leading to frustration for both employees and customers that could last for days.
Customer Expectations Have Changed
It’s important to recognize that customer expectations have evolved over time. Thanks to the likes of Amazon, people expect to receive packages in a single day. If customers are expecting cross-country shipments in less than 24 hours, imagine their expectations in a purely digital interaction.
Customers engage with organizations through various documents, such as images, forms, and content, which tell a human story. To provide the best assistance to your customers, you need to swiftly and accurately understand that story. And it all begins the moment their information enters your organization, making data processing the initial step toward creating a delightful customer experience.
The content received by your organization is inherently “human” in terms of its quality, condition, complexity, and variability. The influx of PDFs, mobile uploads, structured documents like tax forms, semi-structured pages like bank statements and invoices, and unstructured documents such as medical records, emails, and contracts creates a complex processing challenge that renders rule-based automation insufficiently scalable.
Companies must ensure that their customer experience doesn’t make them appear outdated, digitally inept, or incapable of delivering the personalized experience customers have come to expect. In fact, a recent survey conducted in 2020 revealed that nearly 80% of customers now anticipate a personalized customer experience.
Legacy Automation Technology Can’t Keep up with Today’s Demands
Legacy automation technology is ill-equipped to keep pace with the changing demands of customers. These outdated, rules-based approaches aim to replace humans with technology in specific parts of the workflow, addressing problems task-by-task.
To truly scale an automation initiative and synthesize the story hidden within the content customers submit into accurate, actionable data, organizations can turn to machine learning (ML).
By considering context, machines can learn to read and process documents with similar competence to humans. This deeper level of understanding unlocks process changes that benefit both employees and customers, bridging the gap between human understanding and machine efficiency.
Adopting a human-centered approach opens up opportunities to empower and enhance the experience for everyone involved in the business process, and ML is the only technology capable of providing this at scale.
A New era of Machine Learning has Arrived
Approaching automation with a human-centered mindset reduces the inefficiency of manual processing, boosts customer and employee satisfaction, and lowers costs. Achieving better customer outcomes is vital for attracting and retaining customers, and the best customer outcomes are attained by delivering an experience that surpasses that of the competition.
By providing personalized communications, quicker responses to customer queries, and superior service compared to your competitors, you can capture and retain customers. Adopting a human-centered approach to automation offers a multi-level competitive advantage from the get-go, and it all starts by placing customers at the heart of your objectives.
Human-centered automation also takes your employees into account, fostering a symbiotic relationship that enables them to provide better service, your customers to receive superior service, and your organization to achieve greater returns at scale.
To see what a human-centered approach looks like when purpose-built into an automation solution, watch an on-demand demo of the Hyperscience Platform.
