Digital transformation means different things to different people. For many, it's about the speed and power of back office technology. For some, it's about getting more visibility into process and data. For others, it's about driving efficiency and cost savings to the bottom line.
But the real gem in the digital transformation jewel box is digitalempathy.
Not empathy in the sense of a fuzzy emotional feeling. We're talking about the empathy of focusing digital transformationon improving the customer experience. The empathy of connecting process and data tocreateeffortless,personalized customer interactions that make customersfeel like their time is valued.
If digital empathy sounds more likeart than science, that's okay. It's easyto downplay the importance of it.But it's hard to ignore the math. Seventy-three percent of consumers say that making them feel like their time is valued is the most important thing you can do to provide them with good service, according to the experts at Forrester.
Here's the challenge. In the age of diminishing attention spans, it's becoming increasingly harderto connect with consumers on an emotional level. Yep, in the mosh pit of digital media, consumers lose focus faster than goldfish (nine seconds). In fact, the average attention span of consumershas fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000, according to a survey by Microsoft.
This problem of diminishing attention spans was captured in a TVcommercial I saw the other day. A distracted driver starts daydreaming that she's belting out a song on an "American Idol"-style TV show. But she snaps back to reality as her digital braking system stops her car in the nick of time to avoid a collision. Metaphorically speaking, you could say that the digital braking system was empathetic, that it was ableto feel the driver's plight, so to speak, and automatically stop the car.
Unfortunately, there's no automatic braking system for distracted consumers, like shoppers who abandon online purchases, or defect to your competitors. In fact, Internet Retailer reports that 87 percent of online shoppersabandon shopping carts, resulting in $18 billion per year of lost revenue for online retailers. The question is, how do you turn the tables on consumer distraction, and overcome the attention span challenge? How do you connect with fickle consumers, and turn them into loyal customers?
Here's a quick tip. Nothing inspires loyalty like a great customer experience. Thisis the valueof optimizing digitalempathy. Forresterdescribes it as the importance of focusing onempathyin yourdigital transformation plans:
"...To address customer needs, enterprise architects must empathize with customers and their emotional states when scoping and designing new solutions and servicesÖ"
The take away for business process leaders: Digital empathy should be a core element of your digitaltransformation strategy.
Yes, back office priorities matter. But aligning these priorities withimprovingthe customer experienceis a critical success factor too. The best low-codeapp development platforms get this right, by putting data at the heart of the digital transformation process. And using data to add context to customer interactions. Which improves the customer experience.Like the banking app that uses customer preference and historical data to push the bill pay option to the front of the menu, because that's the option you most frequently request. Likethe online retail app that allows you to start a chat session on your mobile phone, stop and resume the interaction on your desktop, without repeating information you already provided.Or like the pharmacy app that allows you to skip the waiting room, and do 24/7 video chats with board-certified physicians, who cantreat routine illnesses like sinus, ear infections and sore throats. Even write prescriptions, if necessary.
End users alsobenefit from this kind of digital empathy. Like the representatives at a major healthcare company that integrated five legacy systems into one and deployed it within a week, with a low-code digital transformation platform from Appian. For company representatives, the big challenge was a regulatory obligation to manage site Inspections for over 100,000 providers in a large provider network.
Before Appian, the process was paper based, manual and slow, with data fragmented in emails, spreadsheets and othersystems across the organization. Updating provider information meant navigating multiple systems ñ with nobig picture view.
In just 4 weeks, Appian delivered a fully-mobile Site Provider Inspection app that unified all of the data from these fragmented systems, and delivered a single, simple interface to work with the information. As a result, company representatives can now visit a doctor's office or hospital, pull out the app on a phone or tablet, and approve or disapprove the site, in real-time. Thiseliminated the inconvenience of going back to the office to re-key data and wait for results. This kind of digitalempathy streamlined the credentialing process for new providers, saved significant time for company reps, and took the effort out of routine transactions and service requests for company staffers.
It's worth noting thatAppian is represents a new breed of digital transformation platform, which allows you to rapidly build and deploy empathetic, customer-facingapps in minutes -- not days, weeks or months, aswith conventional custom software solutions.
Hmm-mm...digital empathy, with a low-code twist. It might be worth trying.
Roland Alston
