Accelerating Digital Speed-to-Value with Data, Technology, and People

In the millisecond economy, one of the most important things digital transformation can do is help companies accelerate the achievement of business value. However, most organizations garner less than one-third of their target outcomes from digital initiatives, according to McKinsey research.¹

An organization that is a top economic performer is more likely to report value from digital efforts. Studying these top performers, McKinsey identified three factors that organizations must do to capture value from digital transformation efforts:

• Develop proprietary assets, such as artificial intelligence (AI), data, and software
• Use technology to innovate products and differentiate on customer experience
• Attract and develop tech-savvy leadership and team talent

This combination of data, technology, and people is the key to winning or losing customers, capitalizing on opportunities for growth, or bringing new products to market. Organizations that get better results faster will gain a competitive edge. There are several common areas where speed-to-value can be a key differentiator: customer onboarding, service provision, issue resolution, new product introduction, and training people and artificial intelligence (AI) models, to name a few.

Data and analytics can drive transformational speed-to-value, but on their own, they aren’t enough. It’s the combination of data, technology, and domain-specific expertise that can help organizations overcome obstacles and achieve better results, fast.

In this white paper, we’ll explore the main challenges companies are facing in optimizing speed-to-value with digital transformation, as well as the most effective methods and capabilities for transformation. We also will share case studies from organizations that partnered with EXL to accelerate their digital initiatives to solve complex problems, address internal inefficiencies, and improve customer experiences.

Digital Interactions Have Tripled Since the Millisecond Economy

The term millisecond economy was coined after a University of Massachusetts study² showed a quarter of consumers will stop watching a video that doesn’t start streaming within five seconds, and half will stop watching if it takes 10 seconds. In 2013, Adobe’s head of digital marketing shared in a digital summit that online marketers have just 300 milliseconds to deliver excellent experiences to consumers.

Since that time, the global average share of customer interactions that are digital almost tripled between June 2017 and July 2020, according to Statista research³. This increase in digital interactions and resulting data exchanges between businesses and consumers are spurred by changes resulting from the global pandemic, supply chain interruptions, and customer expectations for speed and accuracy.

These disruptive forces have accelerated the need for organizations to make important business decisions faster and implement digital strategies and technology to leverage opportunities for process improvements, transactional efficiencies, and cost savings.

¹ https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/three-new-mandates-for-capturing-a-digital-transformations-full-value

² https://people.cs.umass.edu/~ramesh/Site/HOME_files/imc208-krishnan.pdf

³ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1248804/share-of-customer-interactions-that-are-digital/

3 Common Challenges Blocking Digital Transformation Results

Almost every customer interaction has some digital component, and companies are looking to accelerate the benefits of the biggest opportunities and use cases for digital. Tasks that have traditionally been done manually—such as the ingestion and processing of text, image, video, audio and sensor data—can now be automated. Organizations that will garner a competitive edge are those that can generate results faster.

More often than not, digital transformation projects under-deliver because they aren’t solving real-world problems fast enough to demonstrate value. Digital efforts should be driving improved customer experiences faster than ever before while optimizing efficiencies for the organizations that implement them.

These are some of the challenges facing organizations undergoing digital transformation initiatives:

• Speed: Achieving speed-to-value is more difficult than some leadership teams realize. Translating unstructured text, images, audio, and sensor data, into actionable business insights is challenging. Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements adds complexity to digital transformation.
• Complexity: Creating and enabling digital transactions can be complicated. Paying for something or collecting payment from someone are typically some of the most friction-filled interactions for an organization and its customers.
• Blockers: Organizations often have technical debt and unused technology, both of which can complicate determining which new interventions to initiate.

EXL’s approach to overcoming these challenges is to combine data, technology and deep domain knowledge to accelerate time-to-value and ensure target outcomes are achieved.

What’s possible when you combine data, technology and deep domain knowledge?
The promise of digital for our clients is to bring speed to how quickly they can onboard its end customers and how quickly they can introduce new products to the market. We help them do that by operationalizing the use of AI, analytics and the cloud strategically, based on its industry, use cases, and desired outcomes.

Our clients look to us to collaborate with them in several ways. Applying our team’s deep domain knowledge from more than a decade of working on digital transformation projects for enterprise organizations, we analyze the challenges surrounding speed-to-value. We tailor our services specifically to meet the needs of your end customers so we can deploy pre-built technology solutions to solve your target problems.

Our AI and analytics experts build models to decide how to use data to create insight, and our engineering teams operationalize the processes and create automated workflows. We also deploy our customer experience teams to ensure that what we’re delivering actually meets your specific business requirements.

If you have an extensive legacy infrastructure in place, we can design solutions that will work and integrate seamlessly with your existing technology. For large organizations with teams spread across many geographies, we can deploy EXL’s on-demand talent and accelerators to facilitate the execution of digital transformation and roadmaps faster than you can do on your own. Finally, we have operations teams to make sure your digital transformation initiative continues to deliver results and doesn’t become just a one-time project.

Case Study 1

AI-powered Debt Collections and Receivables

A top 10 multinational bank was seeking to improve the effectiveness of its consumer collections operations. The bank was facing a high number of consumer delinquencies, with approximately 100,000 customers overdue on their bills each month. its debt collection processes, supported by immature digital channels, relied heavily on manual phone calls for collections.

EXL identified the operational scope to improve the effectiveness of the bank’s collections. The client chose EXL Paymentor™, an AI-powered debt collections and receivables management solution that supports all aspects of debt collections.

Using EXL Paymentor™, the client was able to reach 100% of its delinquent customers without negatively impacting the customer experience. EXL Paymentor™ empowered the bank to engage customers with AI-powered personalized messaging, automated follow-ups, and payment relief within defined scope

The bank achieved these results two months after implementing EXL Paymentor™:

• Higher collection rate: The bank reached a payment rate that was 600 basis points (BPS) higher than the starting point, leading to annual savings of $3 million.
• Faster collection: Debts were collected 10% to 20% faster.
• Cheaper collections: EXL reduced phoning each customer from an average of five times per customer per month to 2.5 times, for an annual savings of $3 million.
• Better customer experience: Customers could use digital channels to engage with the bank and communicate their ability to pay. Average email open rates increased from 25% to 55%, and customers’ responses to SMS messages increased from 4% to 15%.

How can you satisfy customers across multiple touchpoints, faster and better? To stay ahead of the competition, organizations must now satisfy customers across multiple touchpoints—anytime, anywhere. To achieve this, we work with you to ensure that when we implement AI, it is automating decisions and cognitive tasks and getting the results that you want to achieve.

We don’t just build AI models and hand them over. People play important roles in teaching AI how to solve problems. We prioritize putting humans in the loop to ensure that AI models are continuously learning, so they can be refreshed and improved as real-world conditions change.

Case Study 2

Accelerating the Application of Conversational AI

Top home appliance and security company in the United States wanted to apply conversational AI to address customer service inquiries faster and more efficiently than its call center.

With staffing issues and seasonal fluctuations affecting operations, the company was struggling to maintain support excellence year-round. For example, summer staff had to understand the technical complexities of lawnmowers, and winter staff had to understand snowblowers.

EXL implemented a multi-faceted conversational AI solution to overcome staffing issues and speed up customer service and support responses. To achieve these results, the EXL team:

• Built an AI model that could automate the customer service query process end to end and integrated it into the client’s existing technology ecosystem.
• Developed a machine learning (ML) model and trained it to make accurate predictions and take actions across different support journeys for the company’s various products.
• Maintained humans in the loop to analyze conversations, retrain the model, and improve the model’s predictions and actions.
• Applied EXL’s customer experience expertise to make changes to the company’s process to drive better net promoter scores (NPS).

What would accelerated speed-to-value mean to you?

How we accelerate speed-to-value for a customer varies. For a life insurance company, it may be about processing complex medical documents that typically take seven days by an experienced underwriter. When we build an AI model, we can reduce this processing to one hour and extract the variables, data features, and other requirements for a model to analyze data and decide an applicant’s premium.

Case Study 3

Speeding Accurate Document Processing at Scale

One of the leading life insurance companies in the United States wanted to digitize large volumes of historical attending physician statement (APS) documents.

APS documents are lengthy and contain unstructured data and complex medical language. These documents contain years of a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, medical procedures, and lab reports. Extracting information from APS documents is a resource-intensive manual activity because it is performed by people with specialized medical skills.

EXL assessed the client’s needs and worked with them to implement EXL XTRAKTO.AI™, an AI-powered document processing solution. Its intuitive user interface enables high-speed human validation of extracted information with a low error rate. EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ can process very large volumes of data with speed and accommodate new use cases quickly, using pre-built components and established deployment environments.

Using EXL XTRAKTO.AI™, the company achieved these outcomes:

• Identified key impairments with 90% to 97% accuracy
• Processed ~30 million pages of APS documents in four weeks to extract more than 185 medical features per document.

EXL Combines Data, Tech, and People to Accelerate Transformation and Results

Transformation is never a one-and-done process. As a transformation partner, EXL facilitates change management to keep operations running smoothly. We’re a partner for your data-driven enterprise, helping your team to make sense of data and accelerate applying the intelligence from data. In the speed-to-value challenge, we are helping some of the world’s largest companies to achieve competitive differentiation, with demonstrable business benefits and commercial advantage.

Want to learn more? See how EXL can accelerate your speed-to-value by combining the latest technologies and techniques with teams that have deep domain knowledge about your industry and use cases. Contact us today to speak with a digital expert on our team.

Download the report to know how EXL can accelerate your digital speed with technology, data, and people.