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Digital transformation in the age of COVID-19

In the article Aditya Arora, CEO, Teleperformance India, shares how post-pandemic market dynamics are supercharging Digital Transformation across businesses

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DQINDIA Online
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Digital transformation

COVID-19 has been a powerful force of change and has accelerated the digital transformation journey in a matter of weeks and months, leaving no business immune. Amidst the disruption, nearly three quarters of companies have maintained, or increased, digital transformation spend due to growing concerns about how economic conditions will impact performance.

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Now, as we inch towards recovery from the crisis, organisations have the opportunity to reframe their future by bolstering alternative support channels, both internally and for their clients.

Operating outside of offices has exposed reliance on manual processing, with many companies finding their current systems unprepared to simultaneously facilitate remote working and maintain consistent results for customers.

By 2022, 80 percent of a company’s revenue growth will depend on digital operations and offerings, indicating that investment in a digital strategy is non-negotiable. With companies now likely to encourage working-from-home indefinitely, IT decision-makers will need to consider a host of productivity, agility, and security challenges when building an agile business continuity plan.

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Borderless working environments on the cloud

Cloud-based networks have proved essential throughout the crisis to ensure business continuity with 55 per cent of leaders saying they are prioritising spending on remote technology resources.

Companies that historically owned and stored their own IT systems are now giving way to a ‘cloud-first’, or ‘cloud-now’, approach, in which all files and communications are managed on a virtual platform.

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Built for change, cloud-based operating models will provide businesses with the advantage of being able to respond quickly, no matter thelocation, and mitigate any future disruption to client services.

Employees operating via a centralised command centre can access data from anywhere and seamlessly collaborate with teams, minimising the time taken to achieve a set of projects throughout the organisation.

As businesses grow, the cloud is providing a gateway to recruiting a global pool of talent, and for all employees to benefit from equal access to the same tools and information. As companies are forced to adapt to the needs of the modern workforce, offering the right cloud solution - that drives connectivity and security – can improve the performance of an organisation by 400 per cent.

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Building cyber resiliency

The newfound reliance on digital infrastructures has been accompanied by an emerging wave of opportunistic cybercrime, with attacks soaring nearly 90 per cent in the peak of the Indian lockdown.

Traditional security solutions, that have protected applications in physical perimeters in the past, have been rendered ineffective. Nearly three-quarters of business decision-makers believe the shift to remote working has increased the likelihood of cyber breaches, as employees become more susceptible to scams and malicious communications.

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In these unforeseen times, businesses often lack the technologies and experience to protect a dispersed network against criminals hacking new IT infrastructure.

A focal concern moving forward, will be to minimise the risk of data leaks and implement a more robust architecture for a remote workforce. Organisations should take steps to move their work applications to one trusted cloud network, independent from individual endpoints, so all intelligence remains on company servers.

Moving to a cloud-based system allows companies to encrypt data communication and leverage device lockdown, preventing employees from interacting with other device functions until they log out. This allows employees to access the cloud even on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model, with optimum flexibility.

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Automating where it matters

The transition to remote working, as well as the shift in consumer behaviour, has proven that a collaboration between human and machine learning tools is critical within customer service. Unpredictable spikes in demand, combined with low-staffed operations, is leaving support operators in need of a virtual solution to keep them connected with customers.

Machine Learning (ML) is addressing the need to act with speed, agility, and accuracy in the current climate, and transforming the front-office. A form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning technology processes and learns from the data that is being processed, shaving off valuable time for human agents who can be alleviated for higher-value, less repetitive work.

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Before COVID-19 struck, it was estimated that 80 per cent of manual front and back-office business processes, which could benefit from automation, were still undiscovered. Now, leaders who were slow to adopt are leveraging automated solutions to cut costs in the face of economic slowdowns, improve customer experiences, and redesign processes to accommodate a distributed workforce.

Businesses will be looking to amplify their automated support systems to construct a High-Tech, High-Touch approach for customer support. With limited face-to-face interaction with customers, companies are increasingly paying attention to emerging trends, such as Conversation Artificial Intelligence (CAI), as a means of achieving shorter handling times while providing the necessary level of empathy.

AI-powered chatbots, projected to have nearly twice as many users in the next two years, are playing an integral role in diagnosing and solving customer issues.

When seamlessly integrated with front and back-office functions, a bot can action the next appropriate step in the customer’s journey. By using emotion recognition technology, a bot can detect and flag particularly complex cases to human agents, who are then specifically trained to handle difficult conversations.

Businesses will find great value in using chatbots to complement the work of agents, and deliver frictionless omni-channel experiences in this hyper-connected marketplace.

Thriving in the emerging hyper-connected era

For businesses across the board, a revamp of IT infrastructure has been the key to survival throughout the pandemic. Legacy infrastructures and ongoing security concerns, exposed by the upending of office-based working, are fuelling the shift towards cloud network deployment – flagging the need for change potentially years in advance.

In the next vital chapter of recovery, companies are embracing digital disruption and actively redefining success by harnessing technology across the front and back-office to remain agile.

  • By Aditya Arora, CEO, Teleperformance India
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