Cognizant: How Digitally Modern Processes Make Great Experiences

2021

ThoughtLab has contributed to Cognizant’s How Digitally Modern Processes Make Great Experiences study. ThoughtLab’s insights are presented on page 13 of the report.

“At a time when experiences are everything, automating processes for speed, intelligence and fluidity will constitute a significant competitive advantage.

Businesses are in a time of great — and unanticipated — change. For the past several years, whether it was through analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA) or work-from-home capabilities, companies were already shifting quickly into new ways of getting process work done.

Then, in the wake of the prolonged pandemic, immediate priorities (e.g., “Everything that can go online, must go online!”) necessitated business interactions and transactions to be more connected, more simple — more “human.” Operating a business in these times of contagion has thrown into sharp relief the importance of establishing digital value chains between employees, partners, customers and suppliers that allow process work to happen effortlessly, flowing around any obstacles that get in the way and gaining intelligence over time.

The great challenge now is to hyperscale this type of “being digital” to the scores of processes that rely on the uber-critical systems, applications and operations at the heart of most big businesses — from processing insurance claims, to approving mortgages, to caring for patients, to growing personal wealth, to ordering a utility or new streaming service.

In short, the business climate of the 2020s has made it plain that without significant digital process improvement, there’s no way to deliver exceptional experience improvement. Case in point: Digital natives like Lemonade and Shopify and large disruptors like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft have all built great experiences with increasingly sophisticated digital technologies that erase frustrating interaction points from formerly cumbersome and lengthy processes.

Behind the “great experience” are processes conditioned for simplicity — processes that are intelligent and seamless, and that minimize how work gets done in the background, to the point that the work becomes nearly invisible. With this deceptively simple formula, these experience leaders have been able to accelerate growth even through times of great change.”