Written by Don Schuerman, CTO & Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems
Intelligent automation is an invaluable technology many organisations have harnessed to improve business practices, support employees, and improve customer experience. It allows leaders to simplify internal and external processes and save money while enabling them to innovate.
Unify customer and employee experience
There has always been a disconnect between applications employees use and those used by customers. Notoriously, internal applications are just not as good as external ones, as organisations tend to prioritise resources for customer-facing applications. This can be detrimental to businesses as it creates differing experiences depending on the end user. Employees should not have to spend time fighting with internal applications to understand their functionality, the applications should just work.
Organisations need to recognise the importance of having their internal applications provide the same seamless, efficient experiences as those that are client-facing. Quality internal applications result in increased efficiency and innovation, enabling employees to spend their time on higher-level tasks which can positively impact all customer experiences, regardless of channel. Those forward-thinking organisations will ensure that their user experience is consistent across applications without needing to manage duplicate copies of processes just because the interface is different. This creates a better overall experience for both customers and employees.
Embrace reusability and legacy debt
Many businesses currently build applications from scratch despite the expense. Collectively, organisations should work towards building processes once and then expand them across applications and workflows. Also, they should consider adaptability and flexibility for users in the present and in the future.
This means having a system for building applications with the same features and functions in one place for both internal and external users. They could then benefit from consistent experiences. By leveraging reusable templates when creating a new application or workflow, organisations can get one step closer to eliminating legacy debt. This results in a cost-efficient way to develop new, user-friendly applications. When the compounding legacy debt starts disappearing, there is room for even more innovation.
However, legacy debt will continue to be part of the conversation. While no fault of the businesses’ actions, leaders should continuously work to drive innovation – they do not need to eliminate such debt to innovate. It is possible to do both at the same time.
With the help of low code, businesses can build much faster with lower risks. Overall, businesses need to consider their total cost of ownership, balancing new projects with the phasing out of decades-old technology to overall achieve a better ROI with their investments.
Adopt a low code approach
It is common for businesses to want to build new applications from the ground up, rather than using low code. However, it is unrealistic to create new applications and frameworks every time there is a new industry trend. This will only lead to more legacy debt. By embracing low code, businesses can outsource a good portion of this work to the software. They can create consistent and innovative applications without the need for a dedicated team of specialist coders and be able to easily keep up with new trends and market demands. Here, user experiences are much more flexible without the need to build new workflows from the beginning, which has previously slowed the speed of adoption.
Fortunately, low code is not just used for internal, smaller scale, backlogged tasks and applications. It can be used to build truly innovative, enterprise-grade, and scalable applications. If used right, it can become a true engine of innovation. This can be achieved by creating new applications, processes, and experiences for employees and customers. Embracing low code allows businesses to build new applications much faster, and if they fail, they can move onto the next set of innovations much quicker. As low code software is so easy to use, more employees, not just those with deep programming knowledge, can participate when building new applications, driving rapid innovation.
Use data to improve internal business processes
We are all consumers that are used to trading our data for value. Our social media networks and email services use our data, but we accept it and keep using those services, as the value this brings outweighs the fact that our data is being used.
If businesses reviewed the insights they gather and used it to improve processes their employees have to regularly engage with, workers may be more inclined to allow data sharing to up level their experience in the workplace. Technologies such as task mining, process mining, and process AI come into play. These can help make decisions based on that data to make it quicker and easier for colleagues to carry out tasks and achieve their objectives, improving satisfaction and retention, and saving the company time and money.
Using intelligent automation and low code software, businesses can reap the rewards both internally for their employees and externally for their customers. Altogether, businesses can lower their costs, simplify their internal processes and continually innovate, all while providing the best customer service possible.
