5 min read
Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of business resilience and continuity. Across different industries, many businesses closed because their foundations were not sustainable enough to overcome a prolonged interruption. Many others were damaged because they could not function as they would typically do.
Having learned the importance of resilience, how can we build more resilient businesses and roadmaps? How can we ensure that the unexpected arrival of another pandemic or a similar catastrophe will not throw us and our businesses off course?
The status quo
Before outlining how resilience can be realised, we need to understand the landscape in which it needs to be built. Here are the top three features of the status quo:
New emerging risks: The world is constantly evolving, and technology is drastically changing the world we live in. Novelty always comes with risk. Climate change is irrefutable, having led to five of the warmest years since 2010. Floods, unseasonal rains, and erratic weather changes drastically impact people and their livelihoods. Cyber risks, which include cybercrime and information war, are business risks at their core rather than technological ones. Other technological breakthroughs (including AI, robotisation and IoT) have created security gaps that either can’t be filled or are easy to get around. Financial instability (e.g. in China) can destabilise the global economy. The growing population worldwide is also creating pressure on natural resources like water and land, which can paralyse regions and people. All these and more are risks that the businesses of the present and future have to safeguard against.
More demanding customer expectations: Today’s customer expects a service on top of a product. Financial services products are complicated, and customers demand guidance throughout all steps of the value chain. This guidance can be direct and verbal or clearly laid out in text or through customer support. For example, when purchasing an insurance policy, the average customer, who often lacks insurance understanding with its highly technical terminology, demands assistance. It is not enough for insurers to display their policy offering without a clear explanation of its terms and principles: removal of confusion is key to driving higher conversion rates. As per Deloitte, companies that include value-added services in their offerings can achieve higher profits and greater customer centricity while standing out in the market.
Changing economic conditions: According to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, individuals and businesses are less likely to buy insurance during adverse economic conditions. Concurrently, the frequency and value of claims increase drastically along with fraudulent claims. As proof of that, during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, the number of fraudulent claims by individuals increased by 17 per cent. The value of these claims was £730 million.
What this means explicitly for financial services is:
Need for improved business continuity: Business continuity is all about having a plan to deal with difficult situations so the company can continue functioning with as little disruption as possible. The emphasis is on identifying all potential risks the insurance business might face (including the most pressing ones above), and brainstorming how to keep operations running in each scenario. As the saying goes, hope for the best and plan for the worst. This will help to ‘catch’ and safeguard the business during distress.
Need for increased business resilience: Every business has its own weaknesses and operational inefficiencies, which might be magnified due to changing economic conditions and novel risks due to changing times. Insurers play a crucial role in providing financial safety. To continue doing so, they must put on their oxygen masks and ensure they can operate. The first step is to execute a diagnostic analysis to gain a clear view of vulnerabilities at each point of the operational value chain.
How Conversational Process Automation (CPA) can help
Conversational Process Automation was explicitly built to ensure business resilience. By embracing a wise use of technology that strives to deliver expert customer service through expert chatbots executing business processes integrated with core systems, CPA can help a business to be resilient at its core. CPA is specifically designed to absorb and adapt to changing paradigms. Here are two concrete ways in which they help while creating maximum positive impact:
Adapt to customer needs: Data insights are becoming crucial to businesses, and technology is unlocking unprecedented sources of information while organising them in a meaningful way. CPA is designed to capture customer needs through chatbot conversations, offer businesses insights on customer demographics and behaviour, and direct customer verbatim feedback. The information acquired becomes the knowledge base for a more personal conversational experience between a customer and a brand. Also, such knowledge empowers insurance businesses to make informed decisions when redesigning products, services and processes around their customers.
Update customer-facing interactions quicker: Whenever it comes to updating content in traditional systems such as web forms or web pages, time is one of the problems. The approval process and implementation of changes require a long time. Depending on the type of content to change, the update often requires passing through different environments (e.g. development, test, production). The Spixii platform changes the rules of the game by moving from a static and rigid system to a dynamic one. After providing meaningful insights, CPA allows businesses to update the content of customer interactions through its expert chatbots 80% quicker.
In principles: what is too rigid can break and rapid iteration gives the flexibility for financial services to adapt and become more resilient.
How will you approach change?
The late Pierre Nanterme, who was the chairman and CEO of Accenture from 2011-2019, had a favorite quote that was a major part of his business philosophy and modus operandi. It was by Winston Churchill and it goes like this:
If you don't take change by the hand, change will take you by the throat.
We must remember the truth of these words during times of uncertainty and turmoil. There are new risks every day. Economic conditions constantly change, and customer expectations can easily follow the latest trends. Your business needs a resilient foundation- and Conversational Process Automation has the power to provide it. Are you ready to take it?
