Process intelligence is a valuable tool for operational efficiency. It is particularly powerful in that it provides a visual guide for understanding how processes work—and it highlights where things are not performing to their potential. Through this lens, process intelligence also offers an opportunity for organizations to reshape their customer experiences, focusing on data-driven metrics within the company’s process infrastructure to drive engagement and relationships.
Here are a few ways process intelligence can help you shape your customer experience in 2022.
Process Intelligence Bridges Gaps Across Departments
Different people in different positions have different priorities for an organization. For example, marketing teams are interested in hard data that can help them understand where to spend budgets most effectively. Accounting teams, meanwhile, need visibility into purchasing and forecasting. Then, there are e-commerce departments looking for more control over customer engagement. The list goes on.
At first glance, these different priorities may seem at odds, driving misalignment across departments. And without a plan to unify them, that would probably be the case. However, process intelligence considers these differences from the outset. When you take a macro approach that considers end-to-end processes, you can see the hang-ups across all departments. Process intelligence helps you visually understand which segments are bottlenecked internally, which sales cycles are taking too long, and more—and quickly identify the cause simultaneously. These problems can impact every stage of your customer journey, affecting everything from the e-commerce checkout process to inventory to shipping and delivery.
With the challenges clearly staked, it’s much easier to plan to solve them. What’s more, because you’ve considered goals across multiple teams from the beginning, you are better suited to meet them all.
Process Intelligence Embraces Challenges to Overcome Them
Process intelligence is highly effective at discovering process exceptions and identifying the root cause and affected segments. Traditionally, when you recognize you have problems in your business process, there are two approaches you can take to process management.
The first is to start over, completely rethinking how work gets done, designing high-functioning business processes from the ground up. For small companies and startups, this may be a viable option. However, for larger companies with legacy systems and processes (and people), rip-and-replace strategies are painful and stressful for the entire organization.
The other option these companies consider is working around the problem. This typically involves piecemeal problem solving, patching specific segments and work functions to meet specific needs. This, too, is problematic, though, as it myopically focuses on task-level management instead of process-level improvement.
Instead of building a new process from scratch or creating temporary workarounds, process intelligence takes a different approach altogether. It allows the organization to lean into its process problems, focusing on both the cause and the effects. From here, you can streamline processes using real-time process data as your guide. Test your loyalty program. Understand the nuances of checkout. Learn the driving factors behind dropped engagement. Improve CRM.
The answers to solving the challenges within your business process and customer journey often lie within the problems themselves.
Building Your Strategy with Process Intelligence
Ultimately, process intelligence allows you to operate from a collaborative point of view. With it, you not only consider everyone’s goals, but you also consider the dynamics at play, recognizing that they all contribute in different ways to your customer’s experience.
If you’re looking to improve your customer experience, process intelligence can shine a light on the path ahead. For a free consultation on how process intelligence might impact your customer journey, reach out to our EPSoft experts any time.