Content Automation: The Latent Driving Force of Digital Transformation
Most of the content businesses see today is unstructured, carrying valuable information. Companies can benefit by using content automation. Here, Anurag Shah, head of products and solutions, Americas, Newgen Software, discusses how firms can use content automation to derive value from digital transformation efforts.
This value may differ from enterprise to enterprise in immediate terms. However, broadly, it revolves around one or more of the four facets: customer experience, speed (including agility), employee empowerment, and partner ecosystem leverage.
Successful enterprises can achieve all of these together to a significant degree. What differentiates them from others is how well they bridge the various silos that typically deter progress in these areas. Operational and functional silos impact speed and efficiency. Communication silos impact customer and employee satisfaction and also internal and external collaboration. And information silos impact customer experience and operational efficiency by hurting context, timeliness, and accuracy.
Of these, operational and communication silos are relatively more obvious, and enterprises undertake automation programs to bridge those, with varying degrees of success. These automation programs also tackle traditional data adequately. However, enterprises face an entirely different challenge in the form of large volumes of relevant data that they cannot access and process efficiently. And that is unstructured content.
See More: It’s Time to Rethink Enterprise Content Management to Meet the Needs of the ‘New Normal’
Content Is the Key Digital Leverage
We are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of content around us. Enterprises have to deal with an enormous amount of business data. But, there’s more. According to IDC, 80% of global data will be unstructured by 2025. This unstructured data contains business-critical information and comes in various forms — work descriptions, résumés, emails, text documents, research and legal reports, voice recordings, videos, images, and social media posts.
Successful enterprises can harness this content. They go beyond just processing and storing it in digital form. They leverage it to develop the important context in real-time by integrating it into their business applications.
This content leverage manifests itself in many ways:
- Banks and insurance firms can onboard customers 100% digitally through a digital Customer Identification Program (CIP) by processing uploaded ID documents and collaterals and extracting all the relevant information in real-time without human intervention.
- Lenders can offer real-time straight-through loans by applying intelligent data extraction and cognitive intelligence on submitted collaterals, again without having to manually input or review information from documents.
- Insurers can offer on-the-spot approvals of claims based on the media (videos, pictures, voice recordings, with embedded geospatial information) submitted by the insured, right from the time and place of the incident and the automated processing thereof.
- Enterprises can save millions of dollars in scanning, printing, and generating documents by going completely paperless and managing the whole content lifecycle in a 100% digital manner.
- Customer service can not only respond but also resolve customer issues to their satisfaction by accessing the relevant content in real-time right at the customer touchpoint, without compromising security or privacy.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Enterprises can benefit across the board by leveraging content automation, provided they do it right.
Content Automation for Holistic Digital Transformation
When combined with the other prevalent automation technologies, such as process automation, communication management, and artificial intelligence, content automation can be a powerful lever for deriving real value from digital transformation efforts.
Let’s see how enterprises can do it:
Capture context and extract intelligence right at the touchpoint
Customers and partners submit a majority of relevant content that can be processed right at the source. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven content analytics, enterprises can extract actionable information from a variety of content types. Automating such processing also frees up valuable time for the knowledge workers, who would otherwise spend significant effort inputting and/or reviewing the data against source content. Consequently, these knowledge workers can focus on tasks that leverage their capabilities and add direct value.
Carry context throughout the customer journey
A majority of process-critical documents and media often remain inaccessible at various junctures in the process, leading to gaps and delays. By embedding these content items in the end-to-end process and making them available to customers, partners, and employees through secure and authenticated means, enterprises can achieve a seamless customer journey without dropping the ball. Organizations can ensure no more resubmission of documents or issues pending resolution subject to review by backend teams.
Achieve tighter data security and improved regulatory compliance
Enterprises spend significant time and effort digging out critical regulatory compliance information buried in heaps of physical and digital documents spread across geographies. Content automation enables end-to-end content lifecycle management, enabling visibility and transparency for all content from creation to archival. Real-time authenticated access for the authorized processes and people ensures tighter security, while auditability and trackability of all actions on content items ensure better compliance.
Enable faster and smarter decisions through content analytics
All transactions and processes involve some decision-making at various junctures dependent on the underlying data, a lot of which is buried in the documents. By applying robotic process automation (RPA) techniques combined with imaging, AI, ML, and natural language processing (NLP), enterprises can automate such decisions across the board. This helps achieve accuracy and real-time speed and significant savings in employees’ time and effort.
See More: Four Trends for Content Collaboration in 2022
Enable better collaboration across the enterprise and beyond
The ability to provide authenticated access to all relevant content is a really powerful lever for enterprises. Content services can enable this not only within the enterprise but also for the external partner ecosystem. This paves the way for an extended enterprise wherein all the partners, vendors, and even customers can collaborate on documents and processes for mutual value.
The content explosion that we are witnessing is only the beginning. It will only get more voluminous and intense, and enterprises would do well to be prepared to tackle this impending onslaught of content. Content automation goes above and beyond these immediate benefits to make “real digital transformation” a reality for enterprises, not only today but also in the future.
How are you using content automation to derive value from your digital transformation efforts? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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