Today their role hasn’t necessarily changed. However, the value organisations place on them certainly has. The focus is shifting from fitting customers around business processes to reshaping contact centres around customers’ needs.

For years, the role of contact centres was limited – often confined by traditional 9-5 working hours. It was predominantly aimed at driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

This was reflected by the way companies measured their success. They had KPIs ranging from targets for call volumes to queue times and abandonment rates. These inward-focussed efficiency metrics have, however, consistently failed to put the customer at the centre of the service.

In today’s increasingly digitalised environment, this is no longer sustainable. Nothing is more valuable than customer experience and customer outcome. Organisations are fast adapting to the idea that great customer experiences convert into customer loyalty and new customers. People increasingly sharing their positive and negative experiences online. As a result, financial institutions can no longer afford to underestimate their services.

Contact centres are transforming. From unempathetic, 9-5 services reliant on a standard agent script, to becoming a customer experience centre. They don’t just focus on a service but the total customer experience across an organisation.

This presents a new opportunity for financial services companies to become fully connected organisations driven by technology. Embrace solutions that connect and unify all their channels – from digital to physical and mobile. As a result, they can create seamless, connected customer experiences that distinguish them from their competitors.

Understanding the needs of financial services customers

To better equip contact centres to service customers, we first need to look at how the needs of these customers have changed over time.

The past few years have seen the customer landscape evolve and diversify significantly. Alongside more traditional customers, organisations are increasingly welcoming a new generation of tech-savvy, socially connected customers. They come with a fresh new range of expectations.

Empathy, passion and hyper-personal connections are key drivers behind their demands. They centre around being understood and supported throughout their customer journey. Failure to do so can have catastrophic effects for organisations. Not only will it risk customers leaving their service but also expressing their frustration online.

This means one thing:

The more you know your customer, the more you can tailor your service to them.

A customer who’s been with your organisation for decades will be likely to seek support through traditional landlines or your website. On the other hand, the younger, digitally savvy customers will want mobile and self-service options, pursuing a more digital experience.

So how can organisations make sure that all these needs and preferences are satisfied? Put simply, the more diversified the audience, the more diversified the services.

Breaking down silos in contact centres

To really drive customer satisfaction across your evolving customer base, you need to invest in omnichannel engagement. Encompassing anything from social media to instant messaging, webchats and physical customer support, customers choose their channel of preference.

But this hasn’t always been the case for organisations in the financial services industry. Organisations may have invested in technologies to support a growing number and type of customer-facing channels. However, these are often used in silos and operated by different vendors.

This leaves customer data confined. Additionally, it prevents agents from surfacing customers across multiple systems. Most importantly, it prevents organisations from leveraging customer insights and using them to better orchestrate the customer journey.

Organisations who adapt and unify these siloes will be more likely to succeed at improving the customer journey. Doing so will empower employees to be more collaborative and productive. It will also reduce time to serve customers and provide an overall higher quality of service.

But it’s not enough to change the internal ways of working. Organisations must improve the way they build relationships with their customers. Looking ahead, they need to improve their ability to capture interactions in the moments that matter. They must continuously adapt and improve using this new-found knowledge.

To do this, they need an infrastructure and technology foundation. One that can empower them to capture these moments, understand their context and orchestrate the best, most optimal route across any function. All to deliver fast, impactful and personalised services that convert prospects into long-lasting advocates.

The rise in automated self-service technology

In a world that increasingly relies on digital innovation and newly found tech capabilities, automation can play a key role in improving customer services and contact centres.

Until recently, these have had virtually no front-door filter standing between customers and operators. Self-service has only just started to become a reality, leaving agents to deal with more complex cases.

This is where automation comes in. As data-based insights and capabilities become the norm, organisations have the opportunity to identify the simpler customer queries. They can then direct them to self-service areas, virtual assistants and AI-powered services.

Conversational virtual assistants are a powerful tool. Especially when it comes to harnessing data to gain insights on the customer. This data can be used to understand customer demands, their purchase history and previous complaints and other crucial information that can help them address their query entirely autonomously.

If the customer wants to transfer to a human, all that data can be carried across. Using AI, potential knowledge articles and recommendations, agents can successfully solve a customer’s request.

AI can also assist with more complex tasks such as pre-authenticating customers before speaking to an agent. This time-saving feature benefits both the customer experience and a contact centre’s inward metrics. With the addition of voice-biometric technology, a virtual agent could also help detect and prevent fraud by comparing a customer’s voice against their customer profile. A more cost-effective solution to training agents on fraud prevention and extra reassurance to customers that their money is secure.

These kinds of innovations aren’t there to make calling a contact centre redundant. There will always be a need to speak to agents to help manage banking relationships or advise on future monetary decisions. But for simpler, everyday tasks, financial organisations can empower customers to self-service rather than waiting to speak to an adviser.

Challenger banks have been particularly good at pushing innovations in this way and raising the customer service bar. Many of them are truly revolutionising retail banking by reducing typical applications processes from a week to minutes. By promoting a digitally-native experience, more traditional banks are forced to reconsider their own customer experience.

Keeping customer data secure in the cloud

Data breaches happen far too frequently today. And as financial institutions can hold an entire customer’s wealth – from mortgages to loans to bank balances – there’s an enormous responsibility to ensure that data is kept safe and secure.

This presents an immediate challenge to spend millions innovating on an existing IT infrastructure. This may require a huge amount of capital investment and resources to maintain. We’re seeing many leading insurance companies and banks choosing to migrate their contact centre operations from on-premise servers to the cloud.

If you consider Azure for example, Microsoft has already spent billions creating a secure cloud solution and helped protect leading organisations from cyber-attacks, fraud and Denial-of-Service on an intraday basis. This reassurance makes migrating to the cloud not just a business decision for better data security, but also for greater cost efficiency by eliminating the many overheads that physical servers require.

The cloud also offers advantages when it comes to complying to financial regulations such as how organisations handle data, offer services and prevent financial crime. By working with a trusted cloud provider like Microsoft, a lot of this responsibly can be shared and evidence can be provided to show that data is being kept securely and systems are operating within regulations.

An all-in-one solution for financial services contact centres

Financial organisations are changing. Their reputation and global presence is increasingly tied to customer experience, online reviews and the quality of their services. As a result, they must reimagine their services with a new, more demanding and diversified customer base in mind.

At the same time, switching banks or insurers has never been simpler. Therefore, it crucial for organisations to innovate their contact centre and make the end-to-end experience as efficient and helpful as possible.

The key is to not consider every channel as a separate challenge. A 2021 Forrester report commissioned by Microsoft, Boost Your CX With A Better Integrated Contact Center, CRM, And Collaboration Systems, found that 74 percent of contact centre agents in organisations typically use four or more applications to service customers. This gives a disconnected experience for agents. But by implementing an all-in-one contact centre solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, financial organisations can manage their operation through a single platform. From initial customer contact to automated self-service with AI virtual assistants, to agent-guided case management and back office collaboration with Microsoft Teams.

This allows live agents to interact with customers on any channel. They have a complete overview of all previous interactions to give a frictionless and effective customer journey. It also helps to free up their time. So they can focus on the most complex and sensitive requests that virtual assistants aren’t equipped to handle.

Find out more

Envisioning the Future of Customer Experience

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service.

The post How data and AI will transform contact centres for financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Data can help an organisation identify new opportunities and uncover hidden efficiencies. The business world is no stranger to disruptions and changes, and when you extract as much value from data as possible, your organisation will be able to move with speed and gain competitive advantage.

Data maturity helps empower employees to collaborate, gain new insights and take action to deliver operational efficiencies. It can help teams be more innovative with their product development. Ultimately, this leads to delivering a better customer experience.

95% _{of surveyed organisations have deployed big data initiatives on a department or enterprise level}

To drive tangible outcomes, leaders should build a solid data foundation to start maximising opportunities. By fusing the power of Azure data and AI with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, organisations can start to unlock new insights and more critically – take action.

But what stage are you on in your journey? And how do you leverage the right tools to stay agile and deliver the results you need and drive innovation?

_{Data-driven organisations are growing at an average of} 30% _{or more annually}

What stage is your organisation in your data journey?

1. Good
   • Better understand your customers, employees and use data to drive collaboration.
2. Better
   • Identify needs and trends, and adapt quickly to new business models, drive efficiencies and reduce costs.
3. Best
   • Empower employees with insights and drive meaningful change.

Step 1: Good

Customers have high expectations of brands. They want to be heard, understood and have personal, meaningful experiences.

73% _{of customers will consider switching to a competitive brand after one bad experience.}

How can leaders meet these goals in an ever-changing world?

• Make customer experience an organisation-wide priority.
• Be agile enough to respond to customer needs quickly.
• Respond honestly and authentically.
• Meet customers in the channels they expect.

When you unify and centralise your customer experience technology, you’ll gain insights to build deeper customer relationships.

Royal Enfield offers a frictionless experience to both its potential and existing customers at different touchpoints, ensuring they can access their data on the spot instead of starting anew each time.

75% _{of organisations have proved that customer satisfaction leads to revenue growth through increased retention or lifetime value.}

These insights will help employees deliver a more personalised experiences to customers. They will also be able to make decisions faster and with greater confidence, to deliver insights to the right stakeholders and the right time.

Rolls-Royce provides targeted and actionable insights at the point of need to inform business decisions, such as which factors will have the most impact on fuel performance.

How?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Helps you better listen to, understand and satisfy your customers. When combined with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, it will help collect customer feedback across channels and form more authentic customer relationships.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Get a 360-degree view of customers and identify new unfound segments to support customer retention or create new revenue stream. Optimise and orchestrate real time personalised journeys to create fans improve loyalty.

Power BI

Gives every employee within the business the ability to respond in real-time with data-empowered insights on a secure platform.

Step 2: Better

To make sure your organisation continues to meet changing expectations, leaders must collaborate across business functions to align data goals and initiatives. At the same time, continued disruption, and budgeting means cost saving measures are critical.

64% _{of IT leaders say they’re using two or more analytics solutions}

When you consolidate your data, you’re creating a single source of truth for the enterprise. And by combining it onto one tool like Power BI, you’ll reduce costs.

PwC provides their clients with the data they need to on one platform. They use Azure to process the data and push it to Power BI, before shutting down (to save costs). From there, clients can view their data across customisable dashboards from anywhere.

48% _{of business goals driving data initiative investments is to improve decision making}

Power BI

Align your data across organisational silos. Employees can easily self-serve to get the data they need when they need it. Take advantage of cloud tech such as AI and automation to create cross-team reports that gain more insight. Plus, industry-leading data security capabilities help keep your insights protected.

_{The average time-to-insights is} 27% _{faster with Power BI}

Step 3: Best

Now you’ve laid the groundwork for a data-driven culture, you can use these insights to drive meaningful change and adapt at speed.

45% _{of users want real-time data aggregation and analysis}

To fully take advantage of your data, leverage automation and AI tools to process, aggregate and analyse data in one place in real-time. This, combined with user-friendly tools allows any employee to pull insights that are relevant for their role, right when they need it.

82% _{of users agree that self-service analytics is a top priority at their organisations}

This gives rise to the citizen analyst. Employees can get the answers they need while reducing the burden on IT staff. This better places your organisation to make decisions at speed.

66% _{of users say these capabilities are critical when evaluating new tools and solutions}

Data and AI can also enable predictive analytics, helping you respond quicker to upcoming changes, uncover new opportunities and better support customers. Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Commerce or Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you find new segments to market to, or drive customer retention with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

_{Preemptive digital transformations have a} 50% _{higher ROI than reactive ones}

Identify operational inefficiencies with analytics to streamline and optimise back-end tasks, for example, monitor equipment health in manufacturing or healthcare or reduce manual tasks. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain can maximise your supply chains operations.

Analytics can also be used to amplify your organisation’s work. Take, for example, healthcare. AI is being used to analyse medical imagery, leading to quicker diagnosis and helping doctors focus on patient care.

Move forward with confidence

Making data-driven decisions with the right technology will help you make bold business moves with confidence. As a result, you’ll empower your employees, deliver better customer outcomes and stay agile in a fast-paced environment.

Find out more

Discover how to build a data strategy:

Imagine business powered by data

Learn how to put your data to work

Get data-driven insights

Get fresh perspectives on business modernisation:

Watch Microsoft Envision UK on demand

Explore data management solutions:

Power BI

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post KPIs and ROI: Quantifying the impact of data management in your business appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

I think this is true. There are always going to be more patients. But as recent times have shown, there’s hardly ever going to be enough of everything else.

The last two years has certainly exacerbated this situation. Backlogs of patients requiring care have multiplied dramatically. We’ve essentially lost two years’ worth of elective treatment. And waiting lists are worse than ever.

Despite this, I’m actually optimistic. We’ve known that we would have to face up to these challenges eventually. The pandemic has significantly brought them forward, but we’ve also learnt a lot about ourselves over the last few years.

It is a fact of life that demand for healthcare will grow faster than our supply of doctors and nurses. As a result, we must be open to how technology can help.

What’s interesting, however, is that a lot of the challenges that we didn’t know how to answer have already been by necessity. We didn’t know if people would use their phones and various technology to interact with healthcare. But they have and it’s not been anywhere near as problematic as we thought.

In other words, it turns out that technology is much further along than we thought it would be for our sector.

More importantly, we can now much more confidently use it to deal with more current and future issues. We can tackle key problems such as clearing waiting lists, improving time management and more.

The importance of looking at the bigger picture

I may be Chief Clinical Information Officer at Microsoft, but I’m also a paediatrician. Spending my Fridays at the children’s hospital is still my favourite part of the week. This is where I get to really see life on the shop floor. As a result, I can help find the digital solutions to help improve it.

And the inspiration can really come from anywhere. For example, at the hospital we use an orange, lever arch folder where we store all the relevant information about a patient; tests we’ve run, follow-ups and more.

One time the orange folder broke. There was panic, because we didn’t have another ‘orange’ folder to replace it (we only had black ones). We ended up having to order a new one online.

Now, the beauty of my job is not just finding a solution to this particular – and relatively small – issue. But to solve them on a much broader scale. Replacing the orange folder shouldn’t be the end goal. There are so many other parts of that system that we cannot just improve but transform for the better.

Using the cloud to stay agile in healthcare

One of the big issues we’ve always had in healthcare is that there’s always another revolution coming, another update or digital initiative that needs to be actioned.

To prevent the inevitable fatigue that comes from lots of change, we need to ensure everything we are doing is scalable and fit for the future. I believe that the answer to this is the cloud. We’re never going to be able to implement all of this if we do it as a small step. The last two years have shown us that we need to take some big steps. Cloud technology gives us just that. Combine that with Microsoft’s suite of CRM apps, like Dynamics 365, and we will be able to deliver patients with specific information, send them personalised advice and engage with them more.

Just look at the work we’re doing with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. They have moved their entire electronic record to the cloud. This has given them functionalities and scale that will serve them well into the future.

Leeds covers one and a half million patients. They’ve got about 20,000 staff and the sheer number of electronic forms that they must process has grown by 300,000 since 2015. That’s hundreds of thousands more forms that patients and caregivers are filling in. Additionally, they then need to be processed. It would be a nearly impossible task if they hadn’t just moved it all to the Azure cloud.

Beyond making them far more scalable this has also helped them to use their extra computing elsewhere. And therefore, to do things such as keeping track of data, analyse it and review it for any future needs.

Simplifying processes and consultations via Teams

Another technology that’s proving key in solving backlogs is Microsoft Teams.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust caregivers lead the way in this respect. They carry out virtual consultations that allow patients to utilise teams for clinical interactions.

This has double benefits. On one hand, it allows caregivers to visit their patients without having them come to the clinic. On the other, it gives patients greater visibility of their appointments. Additionally, they can reschedule without having to go through back-and-forth calls.

I have learned the pains of contacting patients through regular phones the hard way. For privacy reasons, the NHS forbids us to leave voicemails to patients, unless that person has a message that states who they are. Whilst understandable, this is a rather outdated policy as now no one picks up a private callers’ phone and too few people check their voicemail.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to start saying to our patients directly during the consultation: I’m going to send you a link for you to have the next appointment. However, even better than that they can choose a time that works best and it will automatically go into both our calendars.

And if you need to change it, you can do that online without wasting time with inefficient telephone calls.

Managing resources though Power Apps

Another brilliant way to use technology to clear backlogs and waiting times is using data and data-centric low and no code solutions.

We all obsess about this ability to try and find the right data and then be able to use it meaningfully to achieve better patient outcomes. With the help of cloud technology, organisations are increasingly shifting towards huge data centres. Here, they can analyse data in real time and use it to make decisions and forecast, identify patterns and much more.

Just look at the extraordinary work by the Northern Care Alliance. They use Microsoft Power Apps to get continuous, real-time updates on the state of beds and bays at their facilities.

In operation since before the pandemic, this solution turned out to be a game changer during the tough months of lockdowns, when the status of wards and beds would evolve constantly. Thanks to the solution, staff at the Northern Care Alliance were able to check availability on real-time dashboards and allocate available beds in a much more efficient way.

Driving digital modernisation in healthcare

The most amazing thing about the NHS is that it’s simply the world’s biggest team. Every person working within it is there to look after patients and is committed to doing things better.

If we can use technology to let this huge team be more efficient and work better together, we’ll really be able to help clear the backlog and relieve staff of all the simple repetitive tasks that frustrate them and get in the way of treating patients.

Organisations often ask me how they can start this much-needed digital modernisation in the most effective way.

My advice is to simply start off by looking around you. See what other organisations are doing, and then pick up the phone and find out how they got started and what is going well. Also keep an open mind. In my experience, there is always a group of people that will remain negative. But don’t be discouraged by that – once you get started, you’ll be surprised at how quickly momentum can build and what seemed implausible becomes routine.

Lastly, make sure that you set and over-communicate your goals. Embracing new technologies will help empower all caregivers to achieve more – freeing them to spend more time caring for patients and leading to better outcomes. Plus, you’ll be making sure the foundations are strong for continued innovation, ensuring healthcare is fit for the future.

Microsoft Envision UK

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 Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The transformation imperative in healthcare

The Digital Healthcare Playbook

Healthcare Delivery Cloud Solutions

About the author

Umang is a Chief Clinical Information Officer at Microsoft with a passion for ensuring that technology delivers its full potential and value in healthcare. He is also a practising NHS paediatrician and has a background working across multiple sectors covering both payors and providers. Umang was a foundational member of start-up Babylon Health which had a successful IPO in 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange. With Microsoft, Umang is helping shape the digital transformation in health across the UK which is aiming for better outcomes through seamless integration and innovation. 

The post Using technology to manage the healthcare backlog appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Turning great customer wins into bottom-line results and satisfied customers takes coordination, collaboration, and insight across every aspect of the end-to-end business. Organisations must rely on faultless management of both operational and project management processes.

So how can construction businesses get ahead, and stay ahead, in an industry that has traditionally been slow to optimise? How can they mobilise their IT landscapes to break down operational boundaries and remove information silos?

Project management complexities

It’s hard to imagine a project that is more complex and fragile than a large construction job. The path from initial estimate and quote to final approval and delivery is long. It is littered with potential pitfalls and bottlenecks. The critical components of the project itself – including resources, skill sets, physical materials and costs – need to be orchestrated across the foundational operational processes of the business. It draws in cross-department expertise such as finance, HR, sales, procurement, supply chain, logistics, project management, quality assurance and legal.

Typically, the interface between daily project management and business operations extends across multiple, disparate IT systems. Often, the consolidation of information across these systems is only possible with a lot of repetitive, manual work and some rather hefty Excel spreadsheets.

At best, this manual process is time-intensive and error-prone. At worst, the lack of real-time insight can mean that the process can go off the rails before the project team is even aware that there is an issue. The result can be missed deadlines, reduced profitability and dissatisfied customers. Not to mention stressed and frustrated employees.

Connecting operations and project management

Connecting the entire business in one cloud-based solution enables a free flow of business and project information across departments and functions. It also promotes a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across extended project teams.

Once implemented, the positive effect of truly joined-up solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Operations will be seen and experienced across every area of the business.

Joined-up systems align daily activities and processes with operational practices and corporate goals. This, in turn, gives each employee a shared baseline from which to collaborate, share knowledge and leverage skill sets.

With IT and collaboration barriers removed, construction organisations can enable significant improvements. They can see this in the way they handle the daily task of monitoring, managing and delivering on project expectations. Improvements that can be seen and felt in the business every day in the complex and large-scale orchestration that is at the heart of modern construction.

As Paul Fryer, Construction Industry Account Executive at DXC*, a Microsoft partner states: “Project operations comes in multiple ‘flavours’. DXC helps customers decide how best to take advantage of project ops and get the most business value from it.”

Four real-world benefits of removing organisational silos

1. 1. More flexible and intuitive project management: Base your planning on accurate and actionable project information from across the organisation. Additionally, document and surface planning with familiar Microsoft Project capabilities and visualisations. Project managers can then spend less time building plans and more time on ensuring that projects are running smoothly. And the whole business can easily stay in the loop.
   2. More effective and satisfied employees: Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right time will help you to avoid classic workload issues. You will also get the most from your project teams. Add in simplified processes for time tracking and expense management and reimbursement and you have a great baseline for optimising resource usage. It will also help find and keep the best talent in the industry.
   3. A more predictable and healthier bottom line: Discover more accurate, experience-based estimating, quoting and forecasting, more effective use of materials and resources, and more informed and compliant project accounting.  Your project profitability will reflect every cost you have saved and deadline you have nailed.
   4. Improved collaboration and insight: Make data-driven decisions in real-time and collaborate easier with an organisation-wide collaboration platform – such as Microsoft Teams. Each new decision is based on experience from previous engagements. This can be aligned to support business goals and changing market demands.

Build agility and resilience in project management

In the ultra-competitive and dynamic world of construction, success is dependent on the ability to react quickly to changing industry, economic, legislative and cultural factors. Retaining and building on this success relies on the ability to consistently make business decisions. These decisions must not only be sound. They must also more insightful than your competitors.

Construction is an industry where fortunes can be made and lost based on the success of a few key projects. Therefore, it is essential that the IT systems deployed by construction companies are more like the final brick and mortar solutions they deliver for their customers. Practical, accessible and built to last.

*Note: DXC is one of the Dynamics partners we have at Microsoft to help us deliver on this proposal. DXC has many years’ experience of rolling out multi-country professional services deployments, supported by close alignment with the Microsoft Product Team for PSA and now Project Operations, enabling us to stay ahead with product developments and ensuring deployments with security and best practice baked in.

Find out more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Discover Dynamics 365 Project Operations capabilities

About the author

Toby is a Technical Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, focussing on Professional Services and the Construction industries. Critically, since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Toby has been the UK Field Lead for Project Operations working on global projects across a multitude of different industries. Toby has been working in the technology and ERP space for several years. He is passionate about driving and providing business and digital transformation by realising the business value through transformational systems. He enjoys empowering organisations to get that ‘competitive edge’ over their competitors.

Toby has been working with the Project Operations Core Engineering and Marketing teams to develop the GTM strategy for the new products and drive new revenue from customers adopting the new platform.

The post How digital modernisation can help innovate the construction industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

I recently joined in a panel discussion with business leaders in the telcom and tech industries who spoke about how organisations can start planning thier own customer experience transformations.

“In an industry where you have a lot of competition and very low switching costs; products and services are becoming increasingly commoditised. Telcos need to differentiate in customer experience to grow,” says a telecom industry lead.

The future state of customer experiences

Customer expectations have outpaced their present experiences. This makes ensuring positive experiences vital for a brand’s reputation and profitability.

A 2018 PwC report into customer experiences found that 43 percent of customers surveyed would pay a premium for greater convenience, while 42 percent would pay for a more friendly experience.

Pair with this the importance of telecoms updating their infrastructure and moving to 5G – now has never been a better time for organisations to reduce silos and create unified data streams. An organisation needs to ensure all their employees have access to and can understand data to provide these pivotal customer experiences.

However, what we are seeing is a lag between business strategy and the technological upgrade needed to support it.

“You can spot all the exciting opportunities in the horizon, but it’s difficult to execute those given the current tech and infrastructure that telcos are operating on,” says an industry expert. “There is a real job to be done around modernisation within IT and within architecture.”

So how do telecoms modernise and develop better customer experiences?

A truly integrated customer journey

“Designing and delivering innovative new products and services that create demand, reasons to stay beyond switching costs, and then reasons to recommend means not just meeting – but exceeding – every single interaction,” says a telecom industry lead.

They add that omnichannel has gone further, into opti-channel – where each touchpoint has a thoughtful role to play in the customer experience. However, the challenge is the handovers – where critical information gets lost between agents or touchpoints and the customer gets frustrated.

Take advantage of a solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 that integrates data from across all silos – sales, marketing, supply chains, and more into the customer journey. When the customer is at a certain touchpoint, all the information needed to help that customer is there. It can even provide predictive insights, so you can help the customer before they realise they need assistance. This means your employees can focus on providing quick, reliable and personalised service.

Engaging customer experiences that generate trust

Telecom firms handle a lot of unique data around customer identities. And security is highly important to customers and your reputation. “When we look at identity across any industry right now, it’s about the security and privacy of the end consumer and the trust that you have. That is part of the experience,” says an industry expert.

There’s still a stereotype that privacy and security hinder employee productivity. But with solutions that have built-in intelligent security, you can actually enable productivity. AI and automation take over low-level monitoring, so IT teams can focus on more important tasks. Integrated security that authenticates users and endpoints works in the background. This means employees can get on with their work, while data stays protected.

Empower customer experiences with AI and analytics

“The focus has morphed from [analytics] being an afterthought to ‘I need to do this because it’s important for my business,’” says an industry partnership leader.

AI and analytics are helping telecom firms build new data-driven operation models within their organisation. It can help augment customer touchpoints and create stronger brand experiences. A chatbot powered by AI, for example can answer frequently asked questions. An app can help a customer onboard and activate new products and services instantly. Putting this data into your employees’ hands means they can provide better and more personalised experiences. It also can be used to streamline operations. This gives employees more time to spend with customers or more time creating innovative services.

“If you can reduce the call handling time, if you can give more specific and relevant service more rapidly, that is a huge improvement on your customer satisfaction score or NPS score. That translates directly into revenue,” says an industry expert. “Giving sales associates access to those kinds of data points is absolutely critical. There is a significant area here of augmenting the physical experience.”

From there, you can use the data collected to start turning insight into value and discovering where business opportunities lay.

A 360-degree customer view

For employees to provide the best customer experiences, they need to have a full view of customer data. Reducing silos and unifying data is the best way to do this.

“The single customer view and the customer data platform project are absolutely critical,” says an expert. “Effectively building the single customer view and then having a way to have systems and data visualisations to be able to democratise that across the business.”

Our industry partnership leader agrees. “I think the most important point is democratising data,” they say. “Standardising data and making it simple to use in the form of APIs.”

Solutions that present data in easily digestible ways, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power BI ensure your employees are confident interacting with and understanding it. Power Apps empowers your people to be able to build low and no code apps and solutions.

Part of democratising data is to ensure that your employees have the skills to do this. Make a digital literacy programme available, leveraging a mix of self-service, on-demand and online training to ensure everyone gets re- and up-skilled.

Effective customer experiences are the new premium services

“The limiting factor to innovation and the customer experience used to be our own imagination. But we can literally design and build anything we come up with today,” says a telcom business leader.

Reduce silos, unify business data and integrate secure solutions that provide 360-degree customer views. You can then easily create experiences that delight and engage customers throughout their lifecycle. This data can be used to drive real value, turning telecom firms into real drivers of business and create new partnerships, innovative products, and build sustainable growth.

Find out more

Empower your employees to thrive

Discover how to build a data-driven organisation

About the author

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

He is a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry and has played both sides of the fence. Stuart started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here, the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

The post How to make customer experience the key differentiator in telecoms appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The challenge for retailers during these busy times as online transactions grow in volume is to manage fraud. They also need to protect their customers. So how can you manage security and risk while ensuring a great personalised experience for your customers in a solely digital environment?

We knew from our own experiences the challenges retailers face. We also wanted to deliver the best customer experience while reducing fraud. With our fraud protection system, we reduced fraud-related costs by $76 million. We also boosted revenue by hundreds of millions more over a two-year period. This system turned into Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

The fraud landscape

Online fraud normally conjures up the stereotypical ‘masked hoody in front of a computer’ who has stolen card or payment details from victims. After all, quite a few of us have experienced that dreaded phone call from the bank asking if we just purchased train tickets in Italy, when we’re unfortunately at home doing the washing up.

But the challenge is much broader to manage. It goes beyond transactions and can include account fraud, merchandise fraud and cyberattacks. All of these can occur and be detected across the shopper experience. All the way from the first visit to account logins, at point of payment and post-purchase. And we can’t forget cyberattacks. These are becoming more common, especially online. These risks rise during the holiday and new year season. Last year, the National Cyber Security Centre found that victims of online shopping fraud in England and Wales lost an average of £775 each.

Therefore, it’s important to ensure you take protections across your whole customer journey to not only protect your revenue, but to protect your customers.

Protect against friendly fraud

On top of typical criminal activities, there’s ‘friendly fraud’ such as improper discounts or returns. This is from customers who have made a legitimate purchase then raised a chargeback through their bank to gain a refund. Sometimes with genuine reasons, such as a shared family card where the bill payer isn’t aware of the purchase. But sometimes this can occur when the transaction on the bill doesn’t have sufficient information to remember the purchase being made – a particular problem during the holiday season.

On the other hand, it can also be intentional. Sometimes people who have received their products chance getting their money back via return fraud. The impact of managing this will go beyond the end of the year as chargebacks typically have a 30 – 60 day delay.

A platform that uses AI to deliver insights and detect fraud and purchase patterns helps you gain insights to reduce this. It also empowers store managers and investigators to reduce anomalies in merchandise discounts and returns.

A friction-free customer journey

For retailers, it’s a balance to ensure you have the right fraud protection and a friction-free customer journey. Once you recognise fraud can happen at any part of the customer journey, you can build in protections across the different stages. You will turn your risk management from reactive to proactive and improve customers’ experiences.

Wipro uses Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to reduce fraud rates by applying AI algorithms to almost 10,000 transactions in real time, streamline bank authorisation, generate fraud analytics across date, time, and location—and scale as needed during busy times.

“We expect to reduce fraud by at least 80 percent,” says Venkata Guru Prasad Kandarpi, Client Partner. “What’s more, we can use it to store and manage all our customer data in one place, which helps us meet compliance and security standards.”

Because customers find it easier – and safer – to buy, you can benefit from increased revenue and increased engagement. You will also boost efficiency and lower costs with operational efficiencies and actionable insights. These efficiencies will also benefit the customer. Your employees will have more time to focus on innovating or personalising the end-customer experience.

Combine strategy and tools for successful protection

It’s important for retailers to have a criminal and friendly fraud strategy combined with tools that protect your business. This includes regulatory and risk protections.

“Integration with the fraud protection system for all payments allows Xbox to focus our efforts on providing the most compelling entertainment and gaming platform.”

Erik Yeager, Director of Xbox Live Store.

By using AI and machine learning to manage processes, detect patterns, and adapt to new challenges in real-time, you can free time up for employees. They can then use this time to deliver new innovations or provide personalised customer experiences. It’s also important to re- and up-skill your employees to ensure they can use these new tools with confidence.

Find out more

Reimagine risk and security

4 ways to build trust and agility

Create amazing customer experiences with fraud protection

Fight the three biggest threats in e-commerce

About the author

Liz Leigh-Bowler joined Microsoft in 2019 as the Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain management. Before coming to Microsoft, she started her career as an assistant language teacher in Japan before making a complete change and jumping to finance at Barclaycard. Since then, she has specialised in proposition and product marketing where she can ensure customer needs are put at the heart of business decisions and Go-To-Market strategies. Following her time at Barclaycard, Liz implemented the global payments and banking strategy across Sage Accounting solutions and took up the position as Director for Product and Marketing at Sage Pay with extensive experience in payments, ecommerce and fraud.

The post How retailers can manage financial risk and reduce fraud appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

To rise to today’s challenges, successful businesses across architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management are making changes at their own pace to build resilience and become future-proof. They are accelerating their digital investment plans through targeted data-driven modernisation.

By delivering a high volume of marginal gains — even lots of 1% improvements — firms can make a big change to their recovery in these uncertain times.

Are you ready for the rebound?

While the impact of COVID-19 means the future is uncertain, there is optimism that the built environment industry will rebound.

The Construction Leadership Council anticipates recovery will happen slowly but surely, with lost output requiring around two years to bounce back and most of the recovery taking place in 2021. When recovery does come, firms need to make sure they’re best positioned to capitalise on new opportunities.

The McKinsey Global Institute’s Industry Digitisation Index found construction to be among the least digitised sectors in the world, being second from the bottom – just ahead of agriculture. Low levels of digitisation are hurting built environment firms’ potential for economical growth, contributing to an annual productivity increase of just 1% over the last 20 years. Adopting digital technologies across the sector has the potential to transform productivity, with efficiencies estimated to be worth £7-15 billion per annum.

Many players have already made their move to put digital technologies to work. Arup’s CIO says COVID-19 took their thinking around cloud technology “from opportunity to necessity”, accelerating their deployment by as much as a year.

Modernisation often means playing the long game but that doesn’t mean you can’t create impact in the short term.

The way to a smarter built environment

Make transformation happen for your organisation faster and accelerate your time to value.

Where it isn’t suitable to leverage new enterprise applications — due to budget, timescale, or business fit, firms already on a modernisation journey join up their existing technology, drive innovation from within and empower employees across their organisation with the ability to develop new capabilities. They deliver increased flexibility and innovation through incremental gains rather than big projects.

To put this smart approach into context for your firm, here we explore four quick win examples of targeted data-driven transformation. Each quick win is enabled through the Microsoft Power Platform — a drag and drop low-code development platform without limits on growth and scalability.

Quick win 1: Automate outdated manual tasks

Boost business productivity by giving everyone the ability to automate manual administrative and organisational processes, saving employee’s time and costs.

Automation can play a significant role in modernising business processes, but changing the outdated doesn’t have to be daunting. Microsoft Power Automate fast-tracks automation with templates, making streamlining repetitive tasks and turning processes paperless quick and easy.

With Power Automate, time-consuming tasks, such as contract approvals, can be automated using pre-built templates and a trigger system that sets off a chain reaction of tasks, so your employees can focus on bigger, strategic objectives.

Quick win 2: Promote a culture of innovation

Foster innovation across your organisation by empowering business users with the ability to build low cost solutions that can analyse data, build new capabilities, automate processes and create chatbots, through easy-to-build and quick to deploy applications.

Microsoft Power Apps enables your most talented and knowledgeable employees to solve your most pressing day-to-day business challenges, while reducing time to market and increasing the potential value of new digital capabilities. With the use of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop simplicity, continuous improvements can also be easily rolled out. This can help you to quickly adjust solutions to meet your business goals over time or react to changes in the wider industry, such as returning to the workplace safely under the latest regulations.

Through using Microsoft Power Apps, PCL built Job Site Insights – a construction management app to assist with the tracking of project costs, quality metrics, employee schedules and inspections. It gives site managers a valuable single-pane view of all aspects of work at a job site allowing them to spot opportunities to optimise processes and increase profitability.

Quick win 3: Enrich every customer interaction

Chatbots can engage conversationally with your clients and employees to support and empower your customer services. Improving client satisfaction will increase the potential profitability of every client interaction.

By leveraging Microsoft Power Virtual Agent chatbots, which answer questions with insights from your data, you can innovate your customer services and enable a truly personalised experience. Internal and external users can also self-serve by talking directly with the chatbots to get the answers they need fast.

Informed by sophisticated, AI-enabled Power Virtual Agents, the skills and know-how of your team will be boosted when answering a prospect’s query about a remote or little-known site, for example, to maximise the profitability of the potential opportunity.

Quick win 4:  Harness the power of data to understand your customers

Provide real-time insights, so all employees can confidently make informed decisions, faster and based on data not opinion.

Microsoft Power BI empowers people across the business by helping to surface insights hidden in your data across a disparate set of systems. Using up-to-the-minute analytics, Power BI means smarter reporting — with employees united by a common dataset to accelerate business transformation.

Laing O’Rourke used the Microsoft Power BI platform together with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, to develop an interactive, smart hard hat, with sensors and a data collection unit that monitors the user’s temperature and heart rate, plus the external temperature and humidity. The data collected provides a real time view on the environment and the user to enable quick, informed decisions, to not only react but predict outcomes, increasing the safety of workers.

The roadmap to a data-driven built environment

Choosing the way to a smarter built-environment through targeted data-driven transformation means your firm will be able to adapt and thrive in times of change. Without the advantage of having the right information at the right time, you risk not being able to compete in the future marketplace.

With Microsoft Power Platform you can initiate your focus on applications that deliver impact quickly, across the business or for specific departments, to unleash the power of citizen development in a controlled, secure and compliant framework.

Once ready, you can scale up innovation across your entire operations by connecting complementary Microsoft integrations — such as Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations together with Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Thanks to our common data model, platforms across the Microsoft environment integrate with ease. So, alongside over 350 custom-built third-party product connectors, you can build end-to-end business solutions that secure further long-term benefits for your firm, your people and your clients.

Find out more

Read the blog: How to support resilient operations in the built environment industry

Download the whitepaper: Reconciling the Irreconcilable

Explore solutions for the built environment

Discover the Microsoft Power Platform 

Discover Microsoft Dynamics 365

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

A Senior Solution Specialist for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platform, with over 10 years’ experience working with organisations in the Field Service and Facilities Management sectors. Michael’s mission is to drive ever-closer alignment with our Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) customers as well as Facilities Management (FM) customers and support their transition to modern, adaptable and unified business applications.

The post Four quick wins to make your built environment firm smarter appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.