Digitization: Enterprises need to drive digitization across customer centric processes

Virender Jeet 

Context has successfully replaced content as the king in the highly competitive game of grabbing customer's attention, which is notorious for not lasting more than 8 seconds. While enterprises cannot do much about the dwindling customer attention span, they can surely launch an offensive to grab that elusive attention through highly contextual content.

In the coming days, organizations will be competing basis their competency on how well they leverage the inflowing information , and apply it to cater to their customers, improve product quality, decrease risk, improve processes and the lot.

The curious/elusive case of unstructured transactional content

Data flowing into organizations are more complex than it might seem. Going granular, 80 percent data today flowing into organizations is unstructured. The remaining 20 percent structured data are already categorized in schemas and are easier to comprehend and analyze. However, the 80 percent unstructured data is a different ball game all together. Information contained within emails, documents, social platforms, blogs, conversation threads, news sites, CRMs, contracts,  social network discussions, maps, text, video, images, audio files, multimedia resources -all constitute unstructured data. Structured data are relatively easy to analyze with traditional analytical tools. However, harvesting unstructured transactional data remains a challenge, primarily because organizations do not focus on an overall data strategy.

Unraveling Unstructured  Content

Contextual content remains hidden in the vast untapped unstructured data. Therefore organizations need to have a data strategy in place that goes beyond content storage and management. A holistic data strategy necessitates a robust enterprise wide content management and content analysis to bring out context for driving business actions and optimized decisions.

Pillars of data strategy

Digitization- Enterprises need to drive digitization across its customer centric processes. Organizations embarking on a digital transformation journey first needs to do away with their manual and paper-based processes which are responsible for delays and poor customer experience.  Apart from digitization of paper documents, enterprises also need to embrace a mobile first strategy to empower workers and drive customer satisfaction.

Process Automation- Organizations need to automate back office operations and customer facing workflows.  Automating processes such as customer on-boarding can significantly impact customer experience. Multi-channel on-boarding support,  online forms, self-service portals, support for digital signatures,  intuitive guidance for form filling along with easy data fetching to reduce data re-keying adds to the process experience.

Content Analytics-  Unstructured content needs to be analyzed by enterprises to discover patterns and trends in customer behavior. Content Analytics comes to the forefront to convert unstructured content into structured content and also to further enrich this content. Content analytics further leverages technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Semantic Analysis capabilities to break apart unstructured content into entities. It uses ontologies to further enrich these entities and to establish relationship between entities. This sets the ground to convert the content into structured content and further uses sentiment analysis to figure out the sentiments or the feelings within the content. These capabilities enable hidden information within unstructured content to be leveraged by organizations.

Leveraging Enterprise Content Management Platform for effective data strategy

Enterprise Content Management systems provide a complete end-to-end solution for managing enterprise content, be it transactional or business content. Here's how

• Capability to capture information from digital as well as physical format at the point of generation of content
• Seamlessly consolidate content bits across channels be it social channels, website, email
• Mobile enabled imaging capabilities like scanning and document capture from copiers, we well as mobile devices for real-time feeding of data from remote locations to document management database
• Reduced manual errors with automation of processes and document centric workflow makes it easier to track documents, flag exceptions and real-time notification of action to be taken
• Centralized repository of all documents makes it easy for retrieval of documents anytime
• Content Analytics allows for decoding of unstructured content through intelligent data extraction to drive context in customer communication
• Optimized decisioning capability driven by availability of contextual information
• Ensure compliance needs as per industry requirements