Following our last, this blog details the four key ways that process mining improves your customer experience(s) by improving your business and its operations.
Your business operations are what dictate the kind of experience your customers have. Operations can be executed differently from how you plan due to different internal and external challenges and set-backs. So, it is important to have a strong tracking system in place to ensure that compliance is at a high level consistently. Process mining lets you:
Information as such will help you determine the effectiveness of implementing a digital customer service strategy. Gains like a shorter lead and reaction time, resolving bottlenecks, and optimising inter-dependent processes co-operate to enhance the customer experience.
1. Shorter Lead Time
Every process owner and business leader in the world would be thrilled to know that their processes, or at least some part of them, can run faster. Reduced operational costs, better customer satisfaction and more sales are just some benefits from reducing the process lead times.
Optimising any single process helps you decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a task. This means you can deliver the product/service much faster to your customer because you are able to identify the exact problem areas.
Such areas could include customer-specific requirements, available resources, required competencies for process workers, different business models, and delivery options and products. It can be very costly to your business if these issues are left un-dealt with and could drag lead time.
To find the problem areas in your business processes, using process mining tools does a lot of the grunt work for you through its data extraction abilities. You can then utilise that data to resolve problem areas dragging out your lead time. For example, Veco shortened its lead time by up to 11 weeks by implementing data-driven decisions in its Quality Management Department.
This improved their customer satisfaction in all customer-facing processes and saw an increase in ROI. Another example includes WoonFriesland who ran a process optimisation program and were able to reduce their average vacancy per property by 7 days for 583 properties.
2. Shorter Reaction Time
If lead time isn’t something that affects your business, reaction time certainly does. Whenever a problem arises, the best thing for your business is for you to be able to catch those problems so that they can be resolved ASAP.
Process mining can help you catch problems sooner because it includes constant process monitoring tools. The Piraeus Bank stated that they were able to take necessary actions without time expenditure and risk increase because they could identify problematic stages within minutes.
Quickly identifying problems within your business will allow you to reduce costs, allocate resources strategically, and streamline the entire customer experience to increase success. This means that you can get to the problem sooner than if you weren’t using process mining tools to get things in the order you desire.
By cutting down your reaction time and solving problems more quickly, you can increase customer satisfaction. You can also help improve your business overall because you will not have things standing in the way of it performing at its top level.
3. Identifying and Resolving Process Bottlenecks
There are certain points throughout a process where things can get jammed up and drag your entire process down. Process mining tools allow you to see how much time is spent on every task and at every step.
This will allow you to see where bottlenecks are located in your processes and how to resolve them. This will also help you identify whether you need more resources to be dedicated to a certain process or whether it’s too crowded. You will be able to assess how many people are working on what and how that is affecting the way the workflow moves.
Invisible bottlenecks cause delays for every day that they are not resolved, directly impacting the customer experience. Receiving this information on your business operations allows you to more efficiently strategise to simplify them, to allocate more resources to specific areas, or to automate them.
Process mining tools give you all of the timing, employee, and task-related information so you can see and solve these issues and help streamline your operations. This leads to better business performance, more intelligent allocation of resources, and can produce stronger outcomes at a faster rate.
A case study on BridgeLoan showed that by using process mining to resolve bottlenecks in their loan application processes they were able to process 30,000 applications per month (40% faster than before).
4. Optimising/Harmonising Inter-dependent Processes
Process mining tools highlight inter-process conflicts. You can harmonise these processes to be more efficient and provide better customer service. Process mining gives you context to the data you view.
When you have context, you can see how processes may intersect or overlap. Some overlap may be a source of conflict. For example, there is not enough time for one department to complete both parts of a process simultaneously or a certain resource needs to be accessed by two groups at once but which cannot be.
By gaining context, you can more precisely comprehend the problem areas in your operations. This can create the blueprint for harmonising processes. When processes are harmonised, such conflicts are minimised and processes are completed faster. Optimising or re-arranging the way that certain processes are performed can fix this type of problem and will make your business more efficient.
In the most simple terms, process mining tools allow you to use your resources as effectively as possible and allocate them where they are necessary and when. Having this ability will allow your business to move through processes faster and without any conflicts or errors.
To learn more about process mining, check out our other blogs:
If you still have questions about process mining software, we would like to help. Contact us for a demo!
