The pandemic has caused countless problems, including businesses’ financial planning and spending. Intelligent CXO spoke to two experts about how enterprises can get back on their feet and tackle 2022 with a smart financial strategy.
Disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic in the past year revealed a deficiency of holistic, real-time views of cash flow for nearly two-thirds (74%) of companies, according to Corcentric’s new study, The Future of Finance: 360-Degree Cash Flow Visibility and Control.
Financial leaders agree that achieving top business goals – including improving the customer experience, increasing revenue and profitability, reducing costs and improving sustainability – hinges on optimising cash flows as well as digitising and automating processes and payments. However, the majority (95%) of companies do not have a solution and/or service partner in place for holistic cash forecasting and nearly 90% are not automating their accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) processes today.
“Although the pandemic continues disrupting operations globally, it has helped finance leaders recognise the need for improved insights into their operations’ cash flow,” said Matt Clark, President and Chief Operating Officer at Corcentric. “For companies to meet business goals, they must prioritise optimising AR and AP systems and processes as much as revenue growth and customer experience.”
Intelligent CXO spoke to two experts, who offered further advice about financial planning and spending for businesses in 2022…
Zakir Ahmed, Senior Vice President & GM – Asia Pacific & Japan at Kofax
COVID-19 has taken the world by storm and created global financial and economic turmoil. Although all industries were affected by the pandemic, the travel and hospitality industry and SMEs, for instance, were especially devastated by staff shortages and significant losses as households, the end-value chain, no longer had the spending power.
The pandemic has hampered long-term development plans and forced companies to reassess their digital infrastructure to adapt to the changing nature of work, resulting in the biggest surges in technology investment in history for a competitive edge in this new business and economic environment.
Many businesses that have taken a hit, after almost a two-year run, have created a roadmap to navigate the way through business recovery. Established companies have invested in modernising their IT infrastructure while more conservative ones are likely to keep existing core systems for as long as possible.
Nevertheless, it leads to a pressing need for businesses and governments to adapt to meet today’s business challenges and ensure a level of resilience to future business or market disruptions. The pandemic has forced many organisations to look at how automation can help them be more agile and scale to digitally serve customers with largely remote workforces. It’s likely the digital consumer population will continue using digital services even after the pandemic, indicating the long-term nature of the digital acceleration and setting the stage for concrete Digital Transformation in all industries.
Digital Transformation is top of mind for corporate leaders to streamline their operations and enhance existing technology to make better decisions. Robotic process automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital process automation (DPA) are key components of Digital Transformation. A tightly integrated process orchestration capability allows organisations to manage digital workforces flexibly and scale as needed.
With the increased adoption of Digital Transformation by businesses, automation has grown vital and fully-fledged end-to-end automation has carved itself as a must-have, especially during the pandemic. Ever-growing customer bases set expectations like seamless online interactions and businesses that fall flat risk survival.
For businesses with social distancing mandates, it can be an onerous task for remote knowledge workers, like engineers and accountants, to output high-quality work efficiently. For that to untangle, they would benefit from insights into the different components of the business, real-time escalation and collaboration in a separate workforce. All this relates to businesses having to arm themselves with technology to sustain future in-house operations.
The advancements of technology today are outpacing the capability of upskilling among employers and onboarding employees. To curb the issue, it has become a trend to automate known routine work and place in digital solutions as well as their own upskilling. Employees can also play a more active role in driving automation and managing business challenges when an intelligent automation platform is in place.
Jason du Preez, Senior Vice President – Asia Pacific, SugarCRM
The pandemic has reshaped organisations in Australia and the wider Asia Pacific’s priorities, financial planning, and spending. The uncertainty and emergence of Omicron has not made planning any easier. Although the impact of the pandemic varies by sector, the one conversation among C-level executives and senior leaders that have stayed constant is – customer retention and growth.
The customer experience (CX) is now a whole-of-business conversation as organisations know that tackling CX with a piecemeal approach no longer works. The pandemic and the viral evolution have accelerated the need for increased focus on delivering faster CX. Here are what we think organisations should consider when planning for the year ahead.
Changing customer behaviour
Customers are constantly looking at new avenues to satisfy their wants and needs whether it is through social commerce, alternate sourcing, or different channels of customer service to get what they need. Choices are plenty for customers, but the real battleground for businesses to gain customers’ attention is through providing good CX especially during a wearisome pandemic. Building trust and brand confidence with customers are imperative to maintain good customer relationships and business sustainability.
Take advantage of AI and its capabilities
The assumption of AI today that it is used primarily for prediction is only half of the story told. Using AI, organisations can understand the new and the now. Organisations could address the need for speed and build trust with customers through making better decisions, reducing blind spots, busy work, and roadblocks. Advanced AI could help handle customer relationships with care and understanding, deliver real-time knowledge and advantage and maintain customer data relevancy.
Using automation to transform CX
To enhance the speed of customer interactions in the on-demand economy, organisations that invest in CRM applications can streamline various activities and have a better chance in managing employee experience, helping them to manage the increased demand on them in their daily work. For example, automating customer-facing processes and tracking customer interactions provides a rich view of the customer’s journey from marketing to sales and service and offers deep insight into the customer’s status.
Create tighter cross-functional collaboration
There is a new dimension of what a fully aligned cross-functional collaboration can do to provide a complete view of customers for organisations that want to improve their strategies in CX and delivery. Making use of a platform that can help form reference points for customer engagement and communications across members in an organisation can create much more powerful omnichannel customer engagement.
Rethink customer service strategy
Customer service is critical, especially in increasing customer retention and loyalty. As more organisations start listening and embracing the feedback and views from customers, value-creation becomes more progressive. Customer alignment will lead organisations towards better ideation, problem-solving, performance improvement as well as product innovation. In addition, customers develop a healthy brand preference and loyalty and become advocates extending brand reach.