Preparing for the digital workforce revolution
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials became the largest group in the workforce in 2015. We discussed in our first blog post how the digital native or millennial generation is influencing market expectations, and their influence is growing exponentially in the workplace as well. Digital natives will represent nearly 75% of the workforce by 2030, and they are challenging traditional working models, seeking open communication and sharing of ideas, and moving away from systems and processes that stifle innovation and creativity. This shift to a truly digital workplace will require new methods of employee engagement to satisfy the needs and expectations of digital natives.
Organizations must look inwards across all areas of the business when embarking upon digital transformation. According to the World Economic Forum, the digitalization of telecommunications could unlock $2 trillion in value for the industry and society as a whole over the next decade.
Striving for best-of-breed digital operations can lead to an enhanced experience for your customers, lower operating costs, improved agility and scalability, and increased visibility into business operations. That spells competitive advantage.
Several industry trends are spurring digital transformation in the telecommunications industry, including an interest in partnering with over-the-top (OTT) providers to pursue new revenue opportunities. We help these organizations to capitalize on cloud computing to gain the flexibility needed to scale quickly based on demand. We also help telecommunications providers to achieve a holistic view of the customer across applications and to leverage the vast amount of data at their disposal to intelligently target services, special offers, or advertising to their consumers. We enable these companies to better monetize content, connections, and services.
Often times organizations struggle to create a unified experience across enterprise systems and they must solve this to satisfy the needs of digital natives. A cognitive digital assistant can create a unified contextual and emotionally aware experience, giving employees access to critical information using natural language processing and machine learning to make predictive recommendations that can proactively resolve issues before they become fire drills. We built the Captain, an AI-powered digital assistant, to provide a solution that empowers employees to search across enterprise systems using natural language processing by integrating with key systems such as HRIS, performance management, issue ticketing, learning management systems, applicant tracking, and ERP. The Captain leverages an industry-leading cognitive engine to power the AI experience across desktop, mobile,and voice assistant and provides organizations with an integrated experience to enable employees and managers to reduce issue resolution time and predictively alert leaders of project issues. Cognitive digital assistants help back-office functions create a unified connection to disparate enterprise systems, which improves employee experience while reducing operating costs and proactively preventing issues before they can become costly mistakes.
Empowering teams is the field is also critical to providing great customer service and smooth operations. We partnered with Virgin Media, one of the United Kingdom's leading telecommunications services providers of cable and broadband internet services to more than 4.5 million customers, to digitally transform their field service operations. On customer calls, field service technicians were forced to work with multiple devices and had to cope with archaic equipment. Technicians were sent out with scant data about a customer's problem in advance,they had to perform time-consuming diagnostics on site, and the tools at their disposal were not tailored to the work at hand. As a result, service calls took a long time and technicians frequently swapped out equipment unnecessarily, driving up costs for the company. Customers often called back when they found their problems were unresolved, mandating additional service calls.
To solve these challenges, we worked with the Virgin Media team to develop a mobile application that consolidates several disparate field applications into one unified intuitive mobile platform, which automates the service process. The app provides technicians with a real-time queue of scheduled customer calls. GPS navigation guides technicians to their next customer location and all information relevant to the job is provided. The app even automatically initiates diagnostic tests for Wi-Fi speed and signal strength as the technician arrives on location.
Real-time and historical performance data enables technicians to detect faults across the network and in a customer's devices, eliminating guesswork and the unnecessary replacement of functioning equipment. The app offers guided resolution paths for commonly encountered issues and technicians are prompted to input details on how the issue was resolved by selecting from intuitive drop-down menus. Thus, job closure notes are readily captured and provide accurate data that can be analyzed and used to further improve service performance.
The solution saved Virgin millions of pounds per year in field service costs and dramatically improved customer service. Field service productivity increased significantly by cutting down the need for repeat service calls and saving on costly equipment swaps.
Virgin's digital transformation touched many different aspects of the business, and that is not uncommon. Project complexity might be why a recent survey of business and IT leaders conducted by Gartner Research revealed that while most organizations are investigating or planning for digital transformation, a small percentage, just 8 percent, are fully deployed.
Our ability to address and resolve the devilish details in a digital transformation may be one of the reasons why organizations choose to work with Virtusa. We help them take their digital initiative to the next stage or across the finish line. Our strength is in helping the 92 percent of organizations, those in the investigating, planning, or experimentation phase, make their digital transformation dream a working reality.
In my next blog post, I will explore how organizations are pushing the boundaries of innovation and moving past some of the common obstacles that stifle innovation to drive transformative change to their business by exploring new technology and different go-to-market models.