How Business Process Automation Can Empower Companies

Forward-thinking chief information officers and customer experience (CX) leaders know that the best ROI comes from tech investments made after careful analyses and planning—not before. Companies need a reliable way to make informed decisions about the best way to invest in efficient, effective business practices.

One such practice is business process automation (BPA). BPA offers you and your team a powerful way to slice through repetitive work and fuel more streamlined operations while maximizing the irreplaceable value of human creativity.

However, while BPA’s potential for unified CX is immense, achieving an effective BPA and realizing the requisite benefits requires thoughtful action and considered collaboration from your entire team.

The Urgent Need for Business Process Automation

Delivering dynamic, personalized customer experiences is a must—not a nice-to-have. But acting on that necessity can be painstakingly time-consuming.

Challenges in dynamic customer experiences

Pursuing increasingly exceptional customer experiences, businesses tend to run into several frustrating obstacles, including:

• Siloed operations: Disconnected departments and systems get in the way of seamless customer interactions and consistent branding.
• Complex processes: Intricate, multistep, one-off processes slow response times.
• Lack of real-time data: The inability to access up-to-date customer information in real-time results in missed opportunities for personalization and engagement.
• Technology limitations: Outdated or disjointed tech tools can’t connect to all your current systems, and data sources prevent you from keeping pace with the speed and consistency today’s customers deserve—and, frankly, expect.

BPA’s strategic role in tackling challenges

Business process automation can help you automate some routine tasks, which will free up your teams to zero in on the strategic, creative, or customer-facing work that truly makes a difference.

The benefits are clear: increased efficiency, cost savings, pinpoint accuracy, and better customer experiences. By adopting BPA, businesses can overcome the inherent limitations of many of yesterday’s best practices, ensuring they stay competitive in a market that waits for no one.

Can This Really Help? Exploring Successful BPA Use Cases

But is this all talk, or can BPA truly transform operations? Let’s take a quick look at 2 use cases to glean a compelling glimpse into BPA’s practical perks:

Streamlining Advertising Strategies

OTTO, an e-commerce platform, faced the challenge of scaling and innovating while maintaining a complex advertising setup. The company turned to BPA and was able to streamline its approach to data-driven programmatic advertising.

This shift allowed OTTO to manage its 5,000 creatives much more efficiently. Without needing to hire additional staff, OTTO was able to individualize creative content, launch strategic A/B tests, and tackle other tasks that led to a staggering 339 percent increase in creative performance.

Achieving Success with Marketing Automation

Zalando, an online fashion and lifestyle destination, needed a way to manage hundreds of campaigns across multiple markets without overloading its staff. Transitioning to an automated system made it possible to effortlessly execute and manage “always-on” paid social and programmatic campaigns.

By implementing BPA, Zalando was able to reduce the time and effort required for campaign management. This allowed for a deeper focus on innovative ad strategies and creative content.

These stories are illustrative, but they’re far from the only ways companies can benefit from BPA.

If you’re interested in reaping the benefits of automation for your company, you could consider using BPA to:

• Centralize the management of consistent branded content.
• Disseminate performance data in real-time to keep everyone in the know.
• Automate asset organization and creative production workflows.
• Tailor marketing messages based on customer behavior or preferences.
• Automate initial aspects of customer service.
• Enhance customer profiles to capture their creative preferences.
• And much more.

Perhaps most of all, when more of your routine business processes are automated, you and your teams are freed up to make all-important client connections, which is the gift that keeps on giving. If you have stronger customer connections, you’ll know how to better target creative for them in the future and be better poised to curate world-class customer experiences.

This, of course, leads to a fundamental point when discussing automation: BPA, while powerful, is most successful when used to augment irreplaceable human

creativity—not supplant it.

Strategic Use of BPA Enables Effective Human-machine Collaboration

Imagine this scenario: Instead of limited time and resources being a major constraint that holds your business back, your creative team has the time and resources to move your business forward.

When you use BPA to automate the type of tasks that can be automated, you give humans time to do things only humans can do.

BPA emphasizes human creativity and strategy

Training, and involving teams in the BPA process can boost productivity and spark innovation. Why?

Machines excel at handling routine tasks, the strategic and creative insights that drive forward-thinking business practices come from people. Delegating to automated systems when possible gives your creatives time to be, well, creative (and improves the employee experience).

This strategy allows teams to focus on innovation, strategy development, and crafting new campaigns because when they’re on the clock, they don’t have to focus on routine tasks. Instead, when they take the project over, they’ll find that 80 percent of the routine, easy-to-automate steps have already been completed.

Your Road Map for Implementing BPA Effectively

Interested in reaping the benefits of BPA? Start with these five steps:

1. Map out your processes to figure out where automation would have the most significant impact on your unique organization. Start by looking at any persistent bottlenecks or obstacles in your workflows.
2. Engage your team. Involvement and buy-in from your team are crucial. Provide training and education on the benefits and workings of BPA, then ask them to help you determine the best way to implement automated processes.
3. Define your goals for automation, and then make sure that BPA-fueled efforts align well with your overall business objectives.
4. Implement in phases. Roll out BPA initiatives in manageable phases, starting with less complex processes. This should show you the benefits of your business in a low-risk capacity and highlight any adjustments needed to give you a better ROI.
5. Get ready for continuous optimization. BPA is meant to evolve over time. Regularly review and refine your automation processes to adapt to changing business needs, technological advancements, and feedback from team members.

Then, with your routine business processes automated, get those creative ideas flowing! Enjoy spending time and resources on the activities that build your team and business up and make incredible things happen.

____________________________________________________________

This article was written by Spiceworks and originally published here.