Organisations across the globe are realising the power of smart technology; harnessing AI and automation to drive productivity and build resilience within their organisation.
There are, however, challenges for organisations embarking on a digital transformation and with economic uncertainty looming, IT and business leaders need to know what technology they should invest in and the return it will provide. Fortunately, there are solutions available to simplify the transition to digital enablement and can provide a clear return in terms of productivity and profit.
The Impact of Digital Investment
According to recent research on business resilience during Covid-19, 65% of executives said they anticipate increasing their investment in digital transformation. The same report found that companies who invest in digital enablement see their profit margins increase, on average, by 12% to 20%.
Digital investment in organisations is trending upwards and it is not hard to see why. Organisations that invest in digital transformation can expect to see immediate and long-term benefits across three key performance metrics:
How to Drive Productivity Through Technology
Introduce AI into the Everyday
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now mainstream and transforming the way organisations collect, process and react to data, ultimately driving more effective business decisions and outcomes.
Intelligent apps within Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilise machine learning and AI to share meaningful analytics and provide insight on how greater efficiency can be achieved. Dynamics 365 AI features can be utilised across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Dynamics 365 Sales Insights
Dynamics 365 Sales Insights enables organisations to learn from transactions and interactions with customers, predict consumer behaviour and improve sales pipelines with AI-guided selling. The assistant feature in Dynamics Sales Insights analyses information from Dynamics 365 and provides sellers with suggested next actions to best utilise their time. The assistant uses prebuilt AI models to predict sales that are most likely to close, helping sales teams to maximise revenue.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights
Maintaining customer service levels during the pandemic has been a challenge for many organisations. Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights is helping to alleviate pressure on customer service teams by empowering agents to resolve customer issues quicker. AI-powered insights can provide agents with similar case suggestions and knowledge articles when they are dealing with a customer issue. AI suggestions are based on case study context and historical success rates, enabling agents to access helpful resources easily, resolve issues and deliver customer satisfaction with efficiency.
The beauty of AI is that it is an automated cloud capability, meaning the features will run in the background without manual intervention. By leveraging AI, organisations can implement processes that reduce costs and drive growth faster than human input alone.
Transforming Your Organisation Through Automation
A significant way technology can make workplaces more productive is to reduce the time spent on manual processes. Automating daily, paper-based tasks can improve employee work-life and free up time for creativity and innovation. Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of products made up of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, that allows end-users to build and automate processes with a low code/no code approach. This enables essential tasks to be automated throughout an organisation without technical support, easing pressure on IT teams.
The Power Platform provides a single-view dashboard to show application owners, usage levels and performance, so applications and automation are easily manageable. Applications created in Power Platform can be accessed on-site or remotely and can even be mobile optimised for employees on the move. You can learn more about Power Platform and managing an estate in our article – What is Power Platform Centre of Excellence?
Power Virtual Agents
An example of automated functionality most of us have engaged with are chatbots – automated messaging systems that rapidly respond to customers and employees. Power Virtual Agents enables no code, intelligent chatbots to be built with ease, empowering everyone in your organisation to automate conversations at scale. Workflows can be created with the easy-to-use interface, and when integrated with Customer Service Insights, trending topics will be highlighted, ensuring automated chats are created to address high-volume queries. Integration with Power Automate enables automation to be triggered by the chatbot, for example, emailing a customer information based on chat conversation. Automated bots do the heavy lifting when interactions arise, leaving more time for teams to focus on value-added activities such as solving complicated issues or improving processes.
If the last 12 months have taught us anything, it is that the future is unpredictable. Organisations require agility and responsiveness to recover and grow in the current climate. Those that facilitate change through smart working technology and embrace digital innovation will be in a much better position to recover and drive productivity in a modern workplace.
If you are ready to take the next step, Telefónica Tech specialises in supporting digital transformation journeys. Our Microsoft certified experts can guide you to the best solutions for your organisation – speak to a member of the team today.