The pressure is on: customers are now in the driver’s seat, steering businesses into a new era, one that revolves around frictionless, user-friendly customer experiences. As businesses race to keep up with the groundswell of discerning customer expectations, they’re adopting an ensemble of technologies that involve a variety of apps, tools, and cloud platforms. Smart companies are turning to process orchestration and automation to simplify and streamline their increasingly complex ecosystems of technology. While at first glance the techniques seem interchangeable, they’re two distinct practices, both critical to a customer-pleasing digital transformation.
What is process automation?
Process automation is the tactic of enlisting technology to perform a single task without the need for human intervention. Automation releases your team from the productivity-draining shackles of routine, manual tasks, and shifts the responsibility over to a machine. Businesses use automation to execute unattended tasks like:
- Routing a loan application to senior management for approval
- Compiling email addresses from a self-service account opening app into a marketing database
- Transferring customer information from a CRM into a final contract
- Sending a white paper after a customer submits an online form
- Provisioning virtual servers as traffic and usage increases
Automation frees up time for your staff to focus on more valuable tasks like strategic planning, or clears their workspace so they can lend their brain power to the tougher, more unpredictable cases that fall outside of the routine-based skill set of automation. While stacking your workflow with automations can propel productivity to new heights, it is not something you can do with wanton abandon. It requires a new strategy to monitor and govern how these automations fit into your ecosystem at-large.
