Decoding Content-centric Digital Transformation

Even if 'digital transformation' as as a term sounds overused or sometimes too broad to feel meaningful, the fact remains, digital is a top priority for businesses today. Organizations have increasingly invested in digital technologies over the years. What is changing quickly is the increasing realization that transformation is more about aligning the business models with a focus on customers.

The past couple of decades has effectively been led by digital transformation initiatives around mobility, cloud, and automation to deliver more efficient processes and reduce the cost of operations. Going forward calls for a new protagonist that is transformative and fitting to this new age.

Enter content-centric digital transformation.

Content as the lead protagonist in your digital transformation story

All customer engagements are driven by content, almost all in digital form. Regardless of the product or service being sold, customers judge their experience with organizations not only on the basis of the quality of the product or service but also on their overall journey across all touchpoints.

And that is where content plays a key role in making or breaking that experience. It forms the context around an engagement or a transaction and is often the vehicle for an organization to connect personally with customers. Organizations can truly transform experiences with a concrete content-centric digital transformation strategy.

Transforming experiences with content-centric digital transformation

The ever-exploding formats and categories of content (messages, emails, fax, portal, audio-visual, social media, mixed-media, physical, individual, or broadcast) offer opportunities to engage in innovative ways.

Let's take the case of a business loan.

It is priceless when prospects can apply directly through any device without filling out any forms by submitting the identity and collateral documents (in any format), followed by real-time processing without human intervention. AI and ML-assisted processing of customer submissions like tax returns and financial statements help organizations achieve low and no-touch processing. Continuing the customer journey for a loan, various forms of content are generated by a financial institution at different touchpoints, e.g., disclosures, offer/quote, closing documents, and more. In addition to digital delivery with an electronic signature to the customer, it is imperative to bring all these engagements on a unified content platform.

This ensures that employees are saved from the hassle of referring to multiple transaction systems. Such content platforms can also help in processing a variety of documents and media in case of complex business scenarios. Access to information on the go can have an even more significant impact as it is becoming critical in the increasingly hybrid work environments enforced by the pandemic. Remember that a great customer experience starts with a great employee experience. And a content-centric digital transformation strategy can help you achieve all that.

The multifold advantages of content-centric digital transformation

A digital transformation strategy with content as the key driver allows organizations to embrace divergent business models and deliver transformed experiences.

Establish a future-ready digital workplace to enable business continuity

The pandemic has been a wake-up call for organizations globally, as they were thrust into the remote-work paradigm, underprepared. Manual processes, supported by paper-based documents and hitherto disorganized content, broke overnight as the access to any physical form of content was cut off. A work environment where content is managed through a robust platform while ensuring business continuity in a variety of contingency scenarios is not an optional consideration anymore but an essential one. And, given all the capabilities it offers, it is key to a future-ready digital workplace.

Deliver an intuitive and personalized customer experience

A robust content management capability enables organizations to achieve contextual automation, wherein transactions and engagements can be carried out fully in context. Organizations can leverage content services platforms to enable web-services powered access to all relevant content (documents, media, social media communications, logs, and so on) so that employees, partners, and customers can collaborate anytime, anywhere in real-time.

Enable intelligent and content-centric process automation

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) driven content analytics, organizations can drastically improve operational speed and accuracy by extracting intelligence and actionable information from various content types. Additionally, automating such processing frees up employee time, enabling them to focus on more subjective decision-making and knowledge work.

Adhere to data security and regulatory requirements

Organizations spend enormous time and effort digging out critical regulatory compliance information buried in heaps of physical and digital documents spread across locations and servers. A well-defined content management strategy, supported by a robust platform, can make the office paperless and 100% digital, with anytime-anywhere information access across repositories possible.

A robust content strategy that provides you the capability to control the lifecycle of all diverse forms of content and enables you to leverage content in an innovative, intelligent, and automated manner is pivotal to the success of your content-centric digital transformation journey.

Anurag Shah is Head of Products & Solutions, Americas at Newgen Software

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