Virtual Assistants: Their Role in Superior CX & EX

The Digital era compels many companies to maintain continuous connections with their customers until the resolution of their queries or issues. As a result, with customer service as a top priority, the ideal customer experience allows consumers to communicate via the channel of their choosing while keeping the context of interactions intact. A limitless firm has a new operating system that incorporates a shift in thinking as well as the increased embrace of emerging technology. The conventional tethered and physical workflow is morphing into interactive customer communications through various digital channels.

The role of Virtual assistants is developing as businesses adapt to the Omni Channel experience which is increasingly being expected by their end customers. Though virtual assistants first appeared in the 1960s with ELIZA and IBM's Shoebox voice-activated calculators, this technology is now emerging as the go-to solution in the realm of customer experience.

A traditional virtual assistant may be conceived of as an application that responds to a user's voice or text command and does the work at hand. Emerging virtual assistants, on the other hand, are programs that integrate the use of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract information and complicated data from conversations in order to comprehend and process them.

Structured data with standardized rules can easily adapt to RPA solutions whereas unstructured data with less application of standardization utilized Cognitive automation, a virtual assistant is a next-level combo that can extract information and complicated data from a conversation using a voice and text-based interface.

Virtual Assistant algorithms develop the capacity to construct data models that detect and adapt behavior patterns by merging past data. With the inclusion of historical data, preferences, and other user information on a regular basis, a virtual assistant can answer difficult queries, offer suggestions and predictions, and even start a discussion.

Pre-programmed virtual assistants, which are more rule-based, with logic mapped out with a logical next step for various answers users might ask, are giving way to more complex and dynamic AI virtual assistants, which can be divided into two categories: NLP virtual assistants and machine learning virtual assistants. As a result, virtual assistants are becoming smarter by ditching automated chats and becoming more participatory, as seen by one of the most popular products on the market, Google Home, which knows each user's voice and issues a secure ID to each. The trend is also emerging to integrate different Virtual assistants, which can provide enhanced functionality to consumers and end-users.

However, there are certain privacy issues with AI-enabled virtual assistants that gather and retain user data indefinitely for better upgrades and user experience; this may be mitigated with strict data privacy rules from the corporations that provide this technology. After all, technology is a double-edged weapon that must be handled with caution.

Virtual Assistants have a chance to build a new digital workforce that will supplement human talents while also benefiting B2C and B2B end customers. Virtual assistant technology may be efficiently applied to external customer-facing use-cases using Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, assisting enterprises in meeting the demands of digital natives and growing omnichannel digital contact with Omnichannel digital virtual assistants. At the same time, with employee experience also becoming increasingly important in the delivery of holistic Total Stakeholder Experience, virtual assistants are playing an increasingly important role in enabling employees to perform their tasks with much more accuracy, speed, and efficiency. These assistants are used in a variety of formats including conversational text, guidance coaches, and even as “co-listeners” to a voice conversation and then providing guidance based on inferences derived from a vast database of previous interactions and persona-based profiling.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for virtual assistants available through a variety of interface formats!

Benchmarking Your CX Organization

 To develop your business, you must first improve the customer experience (CX)  that your business delivers to guarantee that your customers are well-served and have transformative interactions with your brand. For a fully connected, effortless CX that adds value to your consumers and business, you need a well-defined CX strategy and clear leadership.

It's good to see companies continuing to value customer experience as a key differentiator. Benchmarking assists businesses in understanding how these strategies and staff perform in comparison to rivals and what customers are truly saying.

Thus, for setting your organization up for long-term success, it's vital to take a critical step of Benchmarking.

The first step would be setting up KPIs such as Net promoter score, customer satisfaction scores, Customer acquisition and retention, Customer effort score, Average ratings across listing platforms, Volume and sentiment of online reviews, and Consumer engagement for Benchmarking Customer Experience that is important to compare to previous results both internally and outside.

Customer and Employees feedback - By interacting directly with your customers, blind spots in the organization can be identified and understood what’s not working.

Using reputation management software that uses natural language processing (NLP) can help you to evaluate client comments as one approach to gauge consumer sentiment. It might provide insight into the precise issues that need to be addressed in order to improve your client experience.

Another method is to use Voice of the Customer initiatives, which are aimed at gathering and evaluating customer feedback in order to find chances for operational or product changes, which helps to achieve the ultimate objective of increasing customer acquisition and retention.

Comparing the most recent available scores to these earlier scores can assist you to determine what is and isn't working with your client experience when you begin your benchmarking CX.

Competitive Advantage via Benchmarking – we must focus on our customer experience via Client satisfaction to create a loyal customer base and keep business away from our rivals. When we're evaluating our company's performance, look at how our rivals are doing via internet reviews and social media mentions to get a sense of how they're doing and what areas they're having trouble with. With this kind of study, we should be able to pinpoint areas where we can enhance our client experience and address some of their concerns, perhaps luring them to our company.

With at least one-to-one comparisons, the aim should be to figure out where your competitors are outperforming us, where we can improve, and how our customer experience stacks up against the competition.

Benchmark revenue measurements can reveal where our team spends more, less, or the same as comparable organizations of our size, and these insights can help us better allocate our company's resources.

Benchmarking in fact forces us to evaluate ourselves in comparison to other organizations in our industry, rather than our own prior success, and holding our firm to industry standards maintains the focus on becoming the best among competitors.

Identifying the relevant KPIs, gathering consumer insights, and evaluating our achievements against the industry are only the beginnings of a customer-centric organizational transformation.

Benchmarking and improving customer experience is a long-term marketing strategy which is a long-term investment after adoption

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

With an ever-expanding spectrum of digital technologies and tools at our disposal, the distinction between digital and physical customer experience is becoming increasingly hazy. For competitive marketers, digital channels are becoming increasingly vital in supporting their whole customer experience strategy.

In my opinion, companies will, increasingly, compete on customer experience as a focused area alongside their product or service, thus they will be prepared to pay more for a great customer experience.

A successful digital experience plan needs organizations to consider how digital interfaces fit into their customer engagement strategy, which utilizes customer data and provides businesses with customer insights to improve digital interaction across interfaces and boost customer retention.

In order to promote genuine gains, digital customer experience management must become an executive priority and fit with the overall business strategy. Delivering a seamless experience across individual customer contact points by leveraging unified communications as a service is a fantastic example of channel flexibility when consumers want to remain engaged with the same agent across digital channels.

This may be accomplished by deploying cloud management solutions that allow customers to switch between your brand's multiple channels, therefore addressing the growing need for response time, which customers rank as critical when they have a customer service query.

Companies must make the effort to completely map and understand their customer journey in order to increase customer engagement scores, where consumers are willing to share data with you in exchange for personalized experiences that make their journey easier, easy, and convenient.

When the objective is to decrease consumer friction and effort, it's critical to build complicated systems that simplify client interactions as every move in the firm has an influence on the consumers in some manner, hence companies must be aligned towards customer-centricity.

This is possible with the help of a specialized digital team that specifies alignment and synergies with other relevant business divisions. This team must define KPIs to push the organization's and culture's thinking toward digital transformation and customer experience, as well as simplify processes to generate efficiency and reduce redundancies.

When you simplify your digital journey and offer tailored digital experiences for your consumers, you achieve customer satisfaction with less effort, which leads to an increase in your customer lifetime value.

Brands that have a strong CX strategy make a concerted effort to connect company goals with these consumer expectations.

Customer Experience – What to measure to get it right

 Customer Experience – What to measure to get it right

Link between customer experience and business performance is directly dependent on breaking down overall experience into smaller insights based on your company's specific goals and different stages of the customer journey. Customers are willing to spend more money to buy from a firm that provides good customer service. Thus, to attract, engage, and keep consumers, organizations are increasingly investing in a customer experience platform.

Companies need a mechanism to quantify the success of their efforts when they devote substantial portions of their money to improving customer experience projects. Thus, you may devise a goal-oriented strategy to decide which KPIs are most suited to measuring your success.

Customer acquisition, engagement, and retention may be identified as three strategic facets of the customer experience.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is frequently used to appraise a brand, service, or product in general and is critical for determining your standing with your consumers. With a lower NPS, you'll need to work more to change your consumers' minds about your firm. A rise or reduction in NPS assists you in forecasting future revenue gains or losses as It is widely accepted, and benchmarks are available.

To calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. While NPS tells you where you stand, it doesn’t tell you why you got that score. To get better information, we usually increase the number of questions that explore the customer’s thoughts.

2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is highly interactive and an easy-to-use customer satisfaction metric. It’s an excellent technique to find out what your consumers are thinking about you at the moment. Customer retention is boosted in organizations with high customer satisfaction. This metric helps gather up-to-date feedback since it can be calculated fast, usually within hours or less following a customer’s use of a product or service. This allows us to quickly reduce any friction that might be affecting their business across all channels, ensuring optimal customer experience

3. Customer churn rate

The customer churn rate indicates how many of your customers have abandoned your products or services. It can also be considered as lost business value over a period. Low Churn rate indicates that your customers are happy with the level of service you provide. Thus lowering Churn rate is critical step towards Customer retention as retaining existing consumers is substantially less expensive than acquiring new customers. More importantly, when we combine the churn rate metrics with other operational data, we can identify churn patterns, which can help us identify where your CX issues really are and get insights on how to address them.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Experience Score (CES) is a transactional indicator that evaluates how simple a single solution is to use and it entails client participation. It is critical to provide an easy-to-use experience in order to increase client satisfaction leading to retention. Thus using this statistic for identifying the sources of distraction, it is possible to reduce churn in a cost-effective manner. This metric helps improve the customer experience by showing places where improvements can be made to make things easier for customers.

5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a forecast of the net profit earned over the course of a customer's whole future relationship. It may be assessed as a business value that a customer contributes to a firm throughout the course of their relationship

6. Average Resolution Time

The average resolution time is a customer service KPI that measures how long it takes an organization to handle a client issue. This customer service statistic is closely related to client satisfaction and represents the effectiveness of the team. Fast resolutions are the most important aspect of a positive customer service experience.

One can better determine which levers to pull in order to influence client's experience when one can relate to the customer experience measure results to what transpired in the transaction. It's critical to comprehend how the customer experience influences consumer behavior which in turn affects your business.

However, it is not required to monitor all metrics unless you know what you want to do with them. The trick is to measure the one that is important to your business. Most businesses track 2-5 key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to customer experience and most of them benefit from focusing on just one customer experience indicator and one associated behavioral parameter. It is not required to measure all of them. One must choose the metric which is most important to one’s business.

First powered flight on another planet !

Even as this pandemic ravages this planet, humans continue to make progress. On Monday the 19^th of April, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieved the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is a small, lightweight, drone-like helicopter that was carried on the Perseverance rover. They launched from Earth together in July 2020 and landed on Mars on Feb. 19, 2021. To me, this is one of those historic moments, when the entire civilization can be proud that humanity’s quest for searching life beyond our own shores is slowly bearing fruits. Even as a vast majority of us are fighting one of the worst pandemics in recent memory, our thirst for science and the discoveries it affords us has not been extinguished. And just like that, humans can now fly on other planets!

Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL. It had to be this way, because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundreds of millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, and hence Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was not observable from Earth in real-time. While this may sound very disappointing to sci-fi fans, this technological demonstration will help humans create new missions to Mars and other places in the solar system using not just rovers, but helicopters as well. We are informed that humans are already planning similar flying crafts to be deployed on one of the largest satellites of Saturn which is popularly called Titan. Achieving flight on another planet means that our approach to planetary exploration will change.

According to NASA Associate Administrator for Science (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-succeeds-in-historic-first-flight) “Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Zurbuchen said. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked. As an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration.”

Ingenuity’s sole mission is to demonstrate that flight on another planet is feasible. This first flight was full of unknowns. The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight. In the early morning of April 19, Ingenuity spun up its rotors, climbed to a height of three meters where it hovered for about 30 seconds, performing a rotation while doing so, and then safely landed back on the surface of Mars. The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf commercial parts that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission.

It’s incredible to see how much technology has changed in just over a century and a half. From coal-burning steam-powered engines and using whale oil to landing on other planets and flying through their thin atmosphere. What will the next century look like? Will we finally break the light speed barrier and visit nearby stars and hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

 

As we run around our humdrum lives, largely oblivious to the nature of reality around us, only observing a a minuscule portion of this version of reality called our universe, there are forces shaping all that we can see, touch, experience, and then everything else that we cannot.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) – “In physics, there are four observed fundamental interactions (also known as fundamental forces) that form the basis of all known interactions in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces.” So, all of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, and now some physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

The search for a fifth force has increased in recent decades due to two discoveries in cosmology that are not explained by current theories. It has been discovered that most of the mass of the universe is accounted for by an unknown form of matter called dark matter. Most physicists believe that dark matter consists of new, undiscovered subatomic particles, but some believe that it could be related to an unknown fundamental force. Second, it has also recently been discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which has been attributed to a form of energy called dark energy. Some physicists speculate that a form of dark energy called quintessence could be a fifth force.

The findings come from physicists at Fermilab, the US Department of Energy Office’s national laboratory.

According to Silicon Repulic – (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/force-of-nature-physics) – “In the Muon g-2 experiment, the scientists exposed muons to an intense magnetic field by sending them around a 50-foot-diameter magnetised ring at Fermilab. When doing this, the team found the muons wobbled in unpredictable ways, defying the fundamental theory of how particles interact.”

“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment.

We’re quite familiar with the first two forces. Gravity pins us to Earth and pulls us around the sun, while electromagnetism keeps the lights on. The other two forces are less obvious to us because they govern interactions at the tiniest scales. The strong force binds matter together, while the weak nuclear force describes the radioactive decay of atoms

The Fermilab experiment builds on a previous experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory around 20 years ago. Elsewhere, there have been other experiments hinting at a new kind of physics. Last month, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva found unstable particles that fail to decay as the standard model suggests.

However, we might find it difficult to measure this new force. Gravity, for example, is such a weak force that the gravitational interaction between two objects is only significant when one of them has a great mass. Therefore, it takes very sensitive equipment to measure gravitational interactions between objects that are small compared to a planet.

The existence of fifth and more forces, fundamental to nature, have been speculated for decades. The study of physics and the search a new force of nature, in many ways, is a search for who we are, why are we here and what is this reality all about, or even whether are other realities or planes of existence which we have been, hitherto, unaware of. Imagine, with our current standard model of cosmology, our understanding of the universe falls astonishingly short – we still don’t know all the laws of nature and furthermore, we still don’t know what constitutes almost 95% of our universe or stranger still – why is there such a massive imbalance between matter/ anti-matter. There have been false alarms of course. So we may have to wait a while before we know whether a new particle and its potential fifth force will revolutionize physics or take its place atop the dustbin of debunked and discarded discoveries such as the now-infamous cold fusion! 

May the festival of colors brighten your life with happiness, health, and success. Wishing you and your family. Happy colorful and safe Holi !

#happiness #holi2021 #holifestival

Building and Sustaining the Digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond

COVID-19 outbreak is a world-changing phenomenon that will have long-lasting implications for our global economy. It’s a once in a generation global impact event. This is the opportunity for each SERVICE PROVIDER to conduct an organizational re-framing of their pre-COVID business model, behaviors & practices. Flexibility and adaptability in operational control whilst continuing to operate as close to the prescribed core organizational culture, are the traits that will secure their futures.

We are witnessing that:

·       Pandemic has severely disrupted production processes.

·       Digital has helped through the rapid scale-up of platforms resulting in changes to the traditional boundaries of firms.

·       With the advent of new business models, digital platform first firms have been able to evolve rapidly. The year 2020 can be described as the year that “a forced test of many things we had thought about but not tried.”

Building and sustaining a digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond would require:

·       Introducing flexible and adaptable operational controls to secure SERVICE PROVIDER’s future.

·       Skill & hire for technologies such WFH, digitally secure online presence, blockchain, and IoT.

·       And most importantly, enhanced Investments in automation space as the next big thing.

COVID-19 induced pandemic and disruption is being seen as the catalyst for a global reset and the acceleration of digital transformation. Across the organization, everyone must recognize that, for a business to achieve sustained innovation excellence, it is very important that an innovative mindset must be integral to every employee’s job profile. Also, Leaderships teams need to measure and reward innovation so that it becomes a core competency that drives priority-setting, resource allocation, talent acquisition, and the development of influential leaders.

New age leadership teams know that many old ways of working are basically incompatible with a successful digital transformation culture and a tremendous, yet subtle cultural change is required. Given that every company is different, according to Protiviti (https://www.protiviti.com/IN-en/insights/bpro102) the leadership teams should consider whether the organization is a digital follower, expert, or leader:

• Digital follower — under this category, a given company has developed a digital strategy and has a proven track record delivering on digital initiatives, which are typically focused on discrete aspects of the customer journey as well as internal process automation.
• Digital expert — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of adopting emerging technologies has achieved high levels of process automation and quantitatively manages digital aspects of its strategy enterprise-wide.
• Digital leader — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of disrupting traditional business models; digital aspects of strategic plans are continually improved based on lessons learned and predictive indicators.

Other experts tend to agree. According to the Danish business leader and leadership author Torben Rick (https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/culture/culture-change-is-key-in-digital-transformation/) , digital transformation isn’t really about technology, it’s about organizational agility - and culture plays a vital role in the digital transformation of any business.

Building and sustaining a culture of digitalization is also the new core for each organization making an attempt to grapple with the onslaught of economic process fuelled by digital disruption from its competition. digitalization is regarding permitting technology to drive your organization – your product, services, client interactions, and core operations – so as to maneuver quicker. However, digitalization conjointly needs an organizational culture where folks are both ready and willing to adapt. Thus, digital culture and transformation go hand in hand. Ignore culture and risk transformation failure. Rick identifies digital culture transformation as leading the adoption of recent technology; it's the shift from ancient, analog culture, wherever choices area unit supported marketing research, careful business cases, and careful in-house reportage, to a digitally-driven surrounding, wherever choices area unit created by cross-functional groups supported live customer-centric information. It’s being ready to fail quickly instead of being averse to risk.

Organizations don’t transform, people do.

Digital culture is a company-wide change in mindset and behavior that has a good chance of succeeding only if it is instilled from those at the top. Leaders need to demonstrate their enthusiasm for new technologies and be prepared to develop new skills themselves in order to empower people to transform within the organization.

But then one might question, why all this fuss around digital and digital culture? Well, as it turns out, with empirical evidence, it does appear that digital organizations move faster, favoring continuous iteration over refining a product or service to perfection before launching it. Another fundamental tenet of digital culture that is highlighted in multiple articles is the great benefit of flattening organizational charts. When collaboration across teams is encouraged and valued over individual effort, and employees are trusted to make judgment calls – no matter what their role – empowerment follows, and this empowerment fuels motivation, which can lead to faster decision making and, ultimately, more wins.

As the teams learn to collaborate, the organization will become more transparent, and finally, as digital culture embeds in the business, the organization’s focus will inherently shift outward. Outside expertise and customer feedback will be sought-after rather than feared as the organizational culture changes into an agile and resilient digital powerhouse.

To summarize, digital transformation depends on having a digital culture supporting it because digital culture:

·      Enables focus on customer needs rather than internal processes

·      promotes agile thinking

·      places high emphasis on collaboration

·      drives transformation

·      empowers workers across the company

Creating a customer-centric value chain through Digital Transformation

Customer Journeys and resultant experience has been impacted severely due to the pandemic. When the lockdowns initiated and people started working from home, a lot of our daily habits, rituals, and work-related practices become digital. It affected us both as service providers and as customers or consumers. I believe that this digital-first customer behavior is here to stay. 

After all, what matters to customers is their experience derived throughout the journey when dealing with your brand. It doesn't matter to your customer as to what your processes are, whether your SOPs are documented in a certain way or whether you have a funnel of some sort through which you are categorizing your prospect or customer – what matters to them is their experience, across the channel of the interaction of their choice and at the time of their choosing. That's a big sort of a dilemma. As a company, as a brand, we are used to thinking about the process, while the customers have always been thinking about the experience. There seems to be a big disconnect. No wonder, in spite of massive investments by brands in streamlining their processes and attempts to enhance customer experience, the customer perception conveys a big departure from what brands think and what customers experience.

Digital, among other things, can facilitate in bridging the gap between the business process and customer journey. That's the best thing that digital technology affords us as brands or service providers when it comes to customer-centric value chains is that it can allow us to have much more control of the measurement and hence improvement in customer journeys and hence customer experience. However, there are certain rules that we have to follow which include the cycle of Predict, Intervene, Collaborate, and Integrate.

The following aspects are crucial to creating a customer-centric value chain:

·       The ability to predict in advance what the customer experience is going to be is a crucial advantage in delivering a superior customer experience. However, questions remain as to what this ability constitutes. Is it going to be a score that one calculates, based on a lot of factors? Well, as it happens, there’s a lot of factors, based on the demographic based on the past transaction history, based on their service, complaints that, have come to you or to your competitors. However, the more data points that we collect better becomes our ability to predict the kind of experience we are or can deliver. This is a crucial pillar of the customer-centric value chain. The focus is the customer and not the process itself.

·       Then next is the ‘intervene’ part. Once one can predict, the next logical question is what can be done about an adverse experience about to happen. Being able to intervene in real-time is critical and that makes one relevant as a brand for the customer in that moment of truth. Can we design the systems in such a way that relevant intervention happens at the right time in the journey?

·       The third part is ‘collaborate’. Being able to collaborate in bringing the automation and human experience from both the employee side and the customer side together at that moment. This is also where the human part comes in. So you intervene and then are able to collaborate through an omnichannel engagement system where your employee, with your subject matter expert, can be tagged into that particular moment of truth and become contextualized to what the customer is reaching out there for and imagine the system being able to tag the right subject matter expertise from within the same automation system (for example a chatbot). So that's the collaborative part in bringing the human experience and both from the employee side, and the customer side together at that moment.

·       The fourth part is the ‘integrate’ part. Being able to integrate that flow mix into the core business process and provide seamless and continuous services even if one of the components fails. Once that happens, the great experience can be delivered, so your ERP, the back office, your CRM and when you combine all that together, you get an amazing value chain that's making your customers happy, excited, big advocates a few at the same time, making you money as well.

We all know customer experience delivery through various services comes at the top in the BPO industry. Even though the BPO industry has been facing many challenges in current times, we should keep eye on the ball in order to get through these difficult times. Customer-centric processes are the new normal where we are adjusting our business models according to the needs of the customer.

Traditional approaches, however, do not work when the operation is in thousands of agent’s homes. We witness that a lot of businesses often rely on their documented culture when challenged on how they wish to work. Yet culture is ethereal. Non-physical. Difficult to prove. But there’s little doubt it exists in every Service provider, especially BPO businesses. Service Providers or BPOs typically employ operating culture with a great practical purpose as compared to many other sectors. This may be because of the desired ability to influence the behavior of a large number of associates in an environment with relatively low numbers of managers & supervisors since managing large groups of people requires procedural controls to guarantee steady and predictable output. However, this also presents a dilemma of delivering consistent and predictable, and most importantly positive customer experiences across various touchpoints with different associates and other backend systems participating in the whole journey.

These days, thousands of contact center advisors and back-office staff are working from home with little or no managerial ‘eyes’ on behavior. How can the operation be evidentially controlled? How can Data Security be guaranteed? How can BPOs ensure that the operating culture is consistent, especially in a very dispersed and distributed workforce?

Digital is playing a key role in addressing all these aspects. Systems and practices intertwine together to provide a perfectly monitored, yet more collaborative environment, with virtual assistants (aka bots) not only helping automate tasks to bring efficiencies but also helping keep associates aligned with the culture of the organization. This brings benefits in areas of both experience and efficiency as well as ensuring compliance.

Customer-centric processes are the new normal where we are required to adjust our business models, practices, and processes according to the needs of the customer with a predict, intervene, collaborate and integrate cycle.

Overcoming Digital Challenges with Learning & Development

A lot of businesses, across the world, are disconnected digitally and may not have access to workers with the relevant skills and are hence facing multiple challenges in their business environments. Employees also, have scant little protection and usually do not have the necessary flexibility or skills to adapt to the markets in which they operate. These challenges can be faced, however, we need to embrace technology, and training programs need to be upgraded to equip our employees with the best skills.

The rapid evolution and adoption of technology on a widespread scale and further accelerated by the virus pandemic has led to a pressing need for businesses to adapt. While there is no doubt that the current situation induced by the pandemic is amplifying the adoption of new technologies, advancements in technology were already changing the world, from standards of living of the species to the very nature of work we do. It can be observed that even before the advent of the current pandemic, some features of the state of technological progress aka digital transformation were especially relevant.

The workforce imperatives of automation, digitization, and other similar technological trends are significant, and BPOs will need to invest in and hire for radically different skillsets and capabilities in which digitization could affect their businesses.

Main Workforce Skill related challenges facing business today include:

·      A Significant mismatch between technologies available & skills of the existing workforce

·      How to rapidly access or hire workers with the right skills amidst a challenging business environment

Overcoming these challenges require:

·      Alignment with a digital transformation goals of the organization by redefining individuals’ roles and responsibilities.

·      Adequate investment in training from top to bottom levels; for example, we have initiated large scale programs, remotely delivered, for employees to re-skill themselves in various digital technologies

·      Innovative and online virtual training methodologies which allow self-paced learning and certifications.

·      Incentivize through career growth options linked to self-paced re-skilling by employees.

One finds that one has to adapt to new processes and new tools to stay relevant. To further empower the Digital workforce, organizations need to first redefine individuals’ roles and responsibilities to align them with a transformation goal, which can further help in clarifying the roles and capabilities that the company needs.

We need to have Digital learning as an integral part of growth and career development

With a lot of the focus right now on employees, we have to reskill and redirect the workforce as needed — as one of the keys to delivering digital transformation for an organization.

With changing times, employees should start going back to the blackboard and reskill themselves for the new technologies and domains in their organizations. Success in the current business environment requires both digital-savvy leaders and employees with the required capabilities to make changes happen. We know that there are numerous ways in which companies with successful transformation record are enabling employees to embrace changes, however, two methods stand out.

The first method relates to reinforcing new models of working, methods, and behaviors as well, through formal mechanisms, long proved that it supports the organizational change.

Another is giving the workers a say on where exactly the digitization could and should be adopted. It has been observed that businesses are more likely to succeed when employees have a say in generating their own ideas about where digitization might support. To ensure that workers in key roles play parts in reinforcing change it is essential to empower the workforce. Success, largely, depends on both senior leaders and those employees and other stakeholders who are engaged during the transformation!

Supporting Workforce Amid COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the globe, organizations across all sectors have struggled to stabilize operations and put in place new guidelines to protect the health of their employees while maintaining service to their customers. CORONA pandemic has both immediate and long-lasting implications for how people work and participate in society. Also, it is critical to assess how organizations are creating ways to assure their customer base that service delivery operations will continue with the necessary quality, productivity, security, and compliance aspects in place.

BPOs created resilient, coordinated business continuity plans to reflect the new reality and moved with unprecedented speed: for example, within days, we enabled thousands of workers to work from home, shipping & installing desktops and other enabling infrastructure

Now comes the challenge of making it work as a ‘Business as Usual’ practice. Contemporary BPO operations are now located across a significantly larger geography, in many more locations. Lower levels of direct supervisory control…. but with the same resources to manage

BPOs are dealing with immediate imperatives of support for workforce during these times which include:

·       Looking after the health, safety, and well-being of remote working personnel

·       Reinforce culture and connection with employees

·       Scale an effective remote-working model

·       Ramp up workforce flexibility

New systems of engagement for employees are being put into place. What was once a fringe, nice to have employee monitoring and engagement platform has now suddenly become a critical must-have tool for a geographically and individually dispersed workforce. Collaboration platforms are now driving new levels of supervisory monitoring and coaching efficiency. These platforms and associated practices have been largely derived from consumer technologies to which certain pockets of the world are already addicted. This obviously alleviates the problem of training the already collaboration savvy (e.g. WhatsApp users in their personal lives) users to adapt to very similar-looking technologies now slowly spreading into the enterprise world.

Of course with BPOs being dependent heavily on ‘tribal knowledge’ for achieving efficiencies and economies of scale, this presents a slightly different problem towards taking this knowledge amongst a dispersed workforce. 

Covid -19 and its impact on the Workforce in BPO industry

Global lockdowns have severely disrupted the life of the traditional BPO industry. However, at the same time, it has also been opening new avenues. Will the changes in the Digital workforce management play out the escalating challenges faced by the traditional BPO industry during the COVID-19 global lockdown?

Some of the following notions will be challenged severely over the coming months:

·      A wide belief that one simply can’t move thousands of agents into a work-at-home model without a massive disruption

·      Remote work may not be productive enough

·      Security is a major challenge

·      GIG may not stand as a serious option for the BPO industry.

It was widely believed that one simply can’t move thousands of agents into a work-at-home model without massive disruption. Especially when call volumes in some industries are going through the roof. When COVID hit India, the scramble was on to move workers out of densely packed contact centers to their homes. Stretched managers had even more loaded on their shoulders to make it happen, and quickly. To use a metaphor; BPOs had to deliver an oil and filter change to an engine whilst they were still running... during mid-flight.

Also, prior to 2020, there was a lot of skepticism in some circles about the value of digitization and digital transformation; the rapidness of this change is the key highlight. Pandemic changed things overnight. For example, a certain organization went from 500 odd VPN users to over 9000 in a matter of a couple of weeks. COVID-19 pandemic has made us learn, the hard way, that technology will aide us in fighting any future disasters.

How will these changes play out in the Covid-19 world?

A critical step for BPOs is to develop clear workforce strategies to help determine the digital skills and capabilities that they currently have—and will need—to meet their future goals

Digital driven re-skilling of the Workforce is necessary along with an opportunity for BPOs to conduct an organizational transformation & re-framing of their pre-COVID business model, behaviors & practices. As it turns out, in coming months we will see that to manage and mitigate the impact on their workforces, businesses must see that:

•       Digital technology will improve people’s ability to work from home or anywhere. New Geographies will open for BPOs to source talent from.

•       At many companies’ employees may not commute all the time. It’s widely expected that many will have at least a hybrid virtual component, even when the industry goes back to in-person or “in-office”.

•       Digital has created seismic shifts in the mix of skills required to succeed in the labour market. It has also changed the terms of work, giving rise to work from anywhere, short-term assignments, aiding the rise of GIG economy and its foray into BPO space.

•       Automation and related technologies will help the organization become resilient to future pandemics. Optimizing the processes helps make the operations flexible

We believe that digital transformation, pervasive connectivity, and openness to “try” GIG will be a game-changer for BPO in the coming months and years

How would a billion year old civilization look like?

One of the most ancient and perhaps the most enduring questions that humankind has been asking since picking up the first stone and striking fire has been around the topic – are we alone? Why does loneliness bother us is very simple – we evolved as social creatures, comforted in each other’s company and yet prone to slaughter each other if things get too crowded either physically or intellectually…

But the question does keep us engaged – are we alone? And what if we are not, and then what would other intelligent life look like. Would we even recognize it if it was sufficiently advanced? Would it even be biological in nature anymore? What kind of energy would it be harnessing? Oh, there are so many questions and the exciting part is that we are at least now beginning to be able to “speculate” about it. With only a couple of centuries out of savagery (some argue that we are not come out of that even today), we have indeed covered much ground in terms of being at least able to think about it.

Most the general chatter on the net seems to suggest that we would, in all probability, be unable to recognize it for what it was… and that should not come as much of a surprise to many people. Would a bacterium be able to speculate regarding the thought processes of a human? Personally, I doubt it.

Chris Manning opines – “All sorts of things that we assume without even realizing that we are doing so may no longer be true. Civilization may not consist of discrete entities. They may not exist in a well-defined region of space. They may not even be in space as we understand it. In Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question”, the super-computer gets more and more advanced. It reaches a stage at which it is located in hyperspace and made of something which is neither matter nor energy. Perhaps the billion-year-old civilization will be something like this”

SUSAN SCHNEIDER – thinks – “I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Mysterious universe presents an interesting view based on her work - https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/10/aliens-may-actually-be-billion-year-old-robots/

According to EarthMysteryNews.com – The astrobiologist Paul Davies of Arizona State writes in The Eerie Silence “I think that biological intelligence is a short-lived phenomenon. If we ever face artificial intelligence, I believe it is post-biological in nature”.

With the advances in technology, it seems that most of the thinkers and those who bother to opine on the net seem to be gravitating towards the “beyond biological, immortal, beyond matter” kind of beings so much beyond our comprehension as to be incomprehensible… well almost!

And then there are others who are speculating about a billion-year-old civilization on earth itself although, in my opinion, that is a separate issue altogether. What do you think? Let me know with your comments!