Astoundingly simple purchases have become table stakes in 2021. Through repetition and familiarity with the Amazon model of purchases — find an item, make a purchase, check your doorstep in a few days — we want to buy what we need using as few clicks as possible.
While Amazon and other large online retailers can scale indefinitely to accommodate this model, the speed and ease of their purchases have put pressure on all companies to provide the same type of customer experience. While Amazon’s customer experience may seem like magic, leading-edge technology is responsible: process automation systems. To meet consumers’ expectation of a seamless buying experience, businesses should consider how they too can use process automation to improve their employee experience to benefit their customer experience at the same time.
To examine how process automation is changing both the customer and employee experience, I recently spoke with Shiva Ramani, founder and CEO of iOPEX Technologies, a new-generation business solutions provider offering optimized IT management and automation services. iOPEX Technologies works with more than 30 Fortune 500 companies to optimize their digital operations and is fresh off winning the 2020 Workato Partner Award for Automation Center of Excellence.
Before iOPEX Technologies, Ramani was the founder and CEO of CSS Corp for more than 10 years. In addition to Ramani’s wealth of experience in the process automation space, we had a chance to dive into some new data from Prosper Insights & Analytics’ Media Behaviors & Influence Study. The study is based on responses from 17,056 respondents surveyed from January 27, 2021 to February 19, 2021 on smartphone and tablet usage habits.
Gary Drenik: Has iOPEX Technologies seen an uptick in client requests to modernize and digitize operations through automation? Is the focus on accommodating certain departments or the company's entire ecosystem? How are they accomplishing this?
Shiva Ramani: We’ve certainly seen an uptick, and the focus has been on automating processes within certain departments. Early in the pandemic, our clients needed new data pipelines and better workflows to accommodate remote customer service teams. The surge in e-commerce also caused many of our clients to realize online purchasing processes could use an upgrade.
Once customer workflows were sorted out, revenue slowly picked back up and companies were hiring again. Because of this, HR departments became a testing ground for process automation as the hiring lifecycle was digitized. This movement, in turn, spurred another departmental need for automation, as IT teams tackled the challenge of equipping new employees with hardware and software in different remote locations. Many IT departments automated their laptop procurement, for example, to send the machines directly to employees’ homes and perform software installation through remote access technology.
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