Many firms adopt digitization just to boost their efficiency, to explore new market opportunities, to attract investors, to gain competitive advantage, market analysis, fancy apps, and digital assets – they ignore the customer’s part, who helps them generate revenue and makes them billion-dollar company. Organizations must focus to enhance their customer experience with the digital transformation journey. Competition is rising fast, and many organizations also start optimizing digital transformation journey to enhance their customer experience. Deepa is in an exclusive interview with the Senior VP, Sales & Marketing / Products at Newgen Software, Virender Jeet to find-out how Newgen Software driving digital transformation journey and customer experience.
What is digital transformation? How can it improve customer experience?
Virender Jeet: Digital transformation is essentially a shift in an organization’s approach, from relying only on legacy systems to implementing a system that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), cloud, mobile, analytics, robotic process automation (RPA), and other emerging technologies. Digital transformation can help in connecting enterprises and transforming the end-customer experiences. Through digital transformation, organizations can achieve end-to-end automation of critical business processes, delivery of context to content, and creation of omni-channel customer engagements. As a result, businesses can improve operational efficiency and deliver a smooth and delightful customer journey.
How Newgen Software are accelerating its digital transformation journey to enhance customer experience, what is the impact on the overall company’s performance and customer experience?
Virender Jeet: Newgen’s applications help transform the customer experience by bridging (process, content, and communication) silos in an organization. They offer agility for sustainable and continuous improvement, thereby future-proofing an enterprise. Further, the applications are infused with the capabilities of modern technologies, such as mobility, social, analytics, cloud, robotic process automation, blockchain, and artificial intelligence to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation journey.
Newgen makes significant investments in research and development (R&D), which enables them to embark on a continuous digital transformation journey and develop innovative products.
What are your offerings for the banking and financial sectors to accelerate their digital transformation journey?
Virender Jeet: Our solutions, built on a low code platform, enable digital transformation journeys of banking and financial services organizations. Banks can streamline account opening, loan origination, trade finance, payments, and compliance and reporting processes. Similarly, insurance organizations can leverage solutions to optimize new business lifecycle, underwriting, claims processing, policy servicing, and customer communication management processes.
What are Newgen’s tech advancements to enhance its customer service experience?
Virender Jeet: Modern customers expect a positive experience, and keeping customers first is part of our culture. We annually invest 9% of our revenue into R&D and are developing a skilled R&D team of approx 370+ people with deep domain advance knowledge. We are constantly releasing new features and updates for our products.
Our solutions, built on a low code application platform, now provide capabilities for customer sentiment analysis to leverage various cross and up-sell opportunities. Additionally, we are enabling businesses to build anytime-anywhere workplaces through our enterprise mobility framework, which allows the rapid development of apps and easy access to content. In line with our customer requirements, we also offer scalable and flexible deployment models, in terms of public and hybrid cloud.
Can you share some details about your offerings, benefits, impacts, etc.?
Virender Jeet: We are a global provider of low code automation platforms, managing content, processes, and communications. Our platform powers our products—intelligent digital automation, contextual content services, and omnichannel customer engagement—and helps organizations drive digital transformation and gain a competitive advantage.
Intelligent digital automation enables process orchestration, contextual content services contextualizes interactions, and omnichannel customer engagement facilitates personalized and timely delivery of customer communications. All our products provide enterprises with the agility and responsiveness required to remain current and competitive.
In the context of your enterprise BPM solution, who do you think is your biggest competitor? How are you different from your competitors?
Virender Jeet: In the enterprise business process management (BPM) space, we compete with organizations such as Pega and Appian. Newgen’s competitive differentiation lies in its ability to offer a low code platform that integrates all the various capabilities needed to build business applications across the spectrum, utilizing our flagship products in intelligent digital automation, contextual content services, and omnichannel customer engagement.
Do you take customer’s feedback? How do you handle negative feedback?
Virender Jeet: At Newgen, we take customer satisfaction very seriously, and to gather significant amounts of feedback, we have created a customer relations team. Also, a cross-functional, small group of customers is part of our regional customer advisory board. We have an ongoing dialogue around strategy and product roadmaps. Our customers have active participation in our annual customer meetups, and we periodically share news updates, thought leadership content, product updates, and more, so that they are always in the know.
To measure customer satisfaction, we conduct an annual survey aimed at senior management, middle management, and day-to-day users of Newgen technologies. Outcomes of this survey are translated into action items for various teams within Newgen. Negative feedback is always welcome, and the processes as mentioned above, are in place to accurately gather and address the negative feedback.
How are AI, RPA, and chatbots playing a major role in advancing customer experiences?
Virender Jeet: AI enables personalized, actionable customer insights using data and, when backed with automation, can provide instant gratification to the customer. Chatbots can allow front office and customer-facing interactions, with AI providing personalization. RPA can automate back-office and backend tasks, reducing processing time for transactions. AI, RPA, chatbots, and related tools working in synergy can provide end-to-end transformations of the customer journey.
Many reports show that chatbots decline sales conversions. What do you say about chatbots? Are they good or bad?
Virender Jeet: The bounce rate probability increases when a user is encountered by a chatbot at a touchpoint. However, many studies are illustrating increased user satisfaction with smartphone assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. These studies clearly show that chatbots, when backed by AI and personalization, drive a more engaged conversation. Users specifically prefer chatbots as a default medium for customer support as it significantly reduces hold time and provides instant responses and solutions based on user data and history. Chatbots, when implemented in integration with AI, RPA, and related cognitive tools, will pay dividends in the long run.
What are the motivating factors for companies to drive digital transformation journey to enhance productivity and customer experience?
Virender Jeet: Several internal and external factors are prompting organizations to undergo digital transformation. Organizations are looking to improve customer conversions, reduce customer acquisition costs, and improve customer loyalty and retention. On the performance side of things, enterprises are looking at digital transformation for streamlining processes, reducing costs, leveraging data to drive actionable insights, and empowering business users.
What is Newgen Software’s mantra to improve customer experience?
Virender Jeet: Today’s customers want companies to interact with them across multiple channels—online, offline, via social media, and others. Customers want their interactions to be handled properly, regardless of the channel they choose and expect communications to be consistent and personalized.
Organizations need the right technology that helps them craft a personalized experience across the entire customer journey and offers an omnichannel approach to customer communication. The right technology not only enables consistent, continuous, and personalized interactions, but also provides the robustness and scalability required to match future needs.
What is your further plan for 2020?
Virender Jeet: We are expanding our product portfolio and are developing new delivery models. We are also focused on developing agile, low-code, purpose-made solution accelerators for banking, insurance, government/PSU, healthcare, and shared services/BPO industries. Our innovation pipeline includes intelligent content services, a low code application development platform, collaborative work management, digital sensing, blockchain, and RPA.
We will continue to focus on the U.S., European, and Australian markets and expect to build a strong growth momentum in these regions. As a part of our focus on sales and marketing beyond our new territory expansion, we are investing in building the sales channel for a global system integrator network. We hope to achieve a significant part of our revenues in the next five years through this channel.
Conclusion:
Digital transformation journey enhancing customer experience, organizational efficacy, data analytics, competitive analysis etc. Now the traditional way of business may leave you behind. Organizations should advance themselves with the latest technologies, like cloud, analytics, IoT, AI, automation, chatbot etc to enhance their productivity and customer experience.
