By Dirk Martin, CEO and Founder of Serviceware SE
If there were any doubts around the necessity of digital transformation to achieve business growth and stability, the coronavirus pandemic certainly silenced them. The past couple of years have provided a unique opportunity for organizations to not only reassess current business models but also accelerate digital transformation efforts. During such difficult times, businesses were forced to make rapid decisions that would address the immediate crisis. For example, many service models had to be revised or reinvented, since value chains came to a standstill or had to be radically redesigned when offices, factories or stores were abandoned for remote working. In addition, businesses also had to examine the costs of every digital service and their profitability to guarantee a stable cash flow and free up money for investment in future growth.
The pandemic, however, was not the trigger for the rapid digitization of services. Instead, it ruthlessly revealed the failures of the past years, taking the cloak off outdated processes and unearthing the lack of flexibility in current service planning and corresponding cost models.
Adapting to evolving consumer demands
Like many things in business, the service economy isn’t standing still. In fact, constantly evolving consumer demands and the rapid migration to digital continue to impact its success. To be able to continuously adapt a business model to meet these needs, different levels of consideration are needed that involve the entire enterprise. Questions need to be asked such as: which service chains or processes does my company need, in order to meet customer and partner requirements at all times? What conditions does my IT infrastructure have to fulfil to be able to deliver services quickly, securely and in compliance with guidelines?
And that’s all before considering the costs associated with meeting growing customer demands. Amid mounting inflation fears, recent figures suggest the rise in operating expenses among service sector firms is at its steepest due to an increase in staff wages, higher raw material prices and greater transportation charges. With finances stretched, businesses need to understand how they can create transparency in the primary and secondary processes driven by their IT teams, and how they can then reallocate the costs in order to understand their added value.
All of this will be underpinned by how short and medium-term turnover, cost and cashflow planning can be achieved in a way that meets the market situation and current demand, whilst also ensuring constant profitability.
The importance of creating an agile, flexible enterprise service management
Ultimately, to be able to perform in today’s digital service economy, organizations need a high degree of strategic and operational excellence at all levels of service thinking, IT alignment and associated financial and P&L planning, typically referred to as Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
Among other ESM disciplines, organizations need effective knowledge management across all business units within the enterprise. Whether it’s equipping contact centre agents with the right insights so they can respond effectively to customers, providing up to date resourcing information for field services and facilities management, or ensuring IT and finance are aligned to invest in the latest digital offerings. With the right knowledge, employees operating across all areas of the organization have the power to drive greater efficiency, effectiveness, and excellence when it comes to service management. But first, they must have access to the right information.
Unfortunately, whilst businesses are full of the knowledge needed to unlock this level of excellence, many companies lack the processes and structures to optimally conserve and make it usable and accessible to all. Data, for example, is often stored in various locations, on different servers and hidden behind different accounts and local hard drives. This can lead to several outcomes – all of which can be detrimental to success – a) time is wasted sourcing information that is hard to find, b) time is wasted duplicating information that already exists but is not accessible, or c) employees continue without the correct and necessary information leading to further inefficiencies and potentially unsatisfied customers.
Powering customer service with structured knowledge
Once knowledge is structured and organized, businesses need a unifying system that can help to consolidate enterprise service data, structure it and run those services on one integrated platform.
Customer care teams, for example, can leverage the knowledge to better serve their clients via standardized and automated IT-Service Management processes, which are based on current and correct information. This is essential as customers demand a response in real-time.
Whilst this is perhaps one of the most obvious cases in which this access to a consolidated view of data can be effective, in reality, it is needed across all areas of the enterprise which contribute to service delivery – IT, HR, finance, resourcing and more.
Paving the way to operational excellence with AI
It’s important to remember that whilst adopting effective enterprise service management software is a step in the right direction – implementing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) will also be essential to unlocking future success. The current and real value of AI is often unrealized or misunderstood. However, when supported and enhanced by AI algorithms, the impact of these tools can be accelerated dramatically, whilst relieving employees of mundane tasks associated with data entry and analysis. For example, AI integration can offer semantic analyses of content similarity, meaning that businesses can avoid creating duplicated content – not only reducing redundancies but also allowing for faster access to the right information.
Most importantly, by automating shared service management through effective and agile enterprise management software, businesses can obtain immediate solutions and equip themselves with the right knowledge to achieve both short-term and long-term ambitions. Only through company-wide transparency, can organizations conduct better planning, monitoring and analysis of service performance and gain greater control over quality and costs. In the world of operational excellence, data is an invaluable tool that helps businesses move beyond resilience and recovery and instead focus on future growth. Those that effectively implement the use of enterprise data will be those that swim, rather than sink, in today’s service economy.
