Digital experience consulting has been a critical focus area for IT services clients over the last several years. NelsonHall estimates that digital experience consulting services revenues grew by 15.8% globally in 2019, and projects a CAGR of around 12% from 2021 through 2024, after the COVID-19 pandemic eases.

However, with COVID-19 still spreading, digital transformation projects with lengthy delivery timescales and indeterminate business value are currently vulnerable to deferment or cancellation. In a NelsonHall survey of over 1,000 CFOs globally, conducted in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, they projected an average decline of ~2% in their companies’ spending on digital transformation initiatives in 2021.

Nevertheless, in an environment where their customers, employees and partners are forced to remain socially distant, connected to the outside world via digital channels, it is imperative for companies to continue to make investments in digital.

We recently spoke with everis, an NTT DATA consultancy focused on Europe and Latin America, to discuss its structured offerings for addressing customer relationships and internal service operations both during the lock-down and in the new world as we come out of it.

Customer Interactions Become Digital-First

everis highlights four offerings leveraging digital technologies where it can help clients quickly adapt their customer-facing operations in the current changed environment:

• Customer support: B2C organizations in many sectors are challenged with increasing inbound calls in their customer service operations; to help clients expand their use of virtual assistants in these operations, everis is offering a conversational platform called eVA that can boost the adoption of this channel and simplify its management
• Collections process:  with the economic disruption being caused by COVID-19, there are going to be customers unable to pay monies owed. For a company, the cost and effort of chasing after collections that will never be paid is sunk cost. The everis offering here is based on applying analytics and AI to collections data to help clients prioritize their collections effort
• New business sales platform: offerings that use COTS products include Sales Commercial Cycle Optimizer solutions based on Salesforce and Microsoft, leveraging pre-built tools, including CPQ configurations and templates
• E-commerce: everis has a number of offerings, including ones leveraging products from the likes of Adobe and Salesforce to support the expansion and modernization of clients’ e-commerce offerings, including ones to optimize the conversion rate.

Adapting Service Delivery for a Fluid Workplace

COVID-19 is also having a major impact on organizations’ internal operations; in the great shift to work-from-home, employee experience is evolving even faster than customer experience. everis has two tools to support employees operating in a work-from-home environment:

• everis Knowler, which can be implemented with Office 365 and Azure, helps employees access the institutional knowledge required for them to do their job
• TOGO, digital workplace offering to boost Microsoft Office365 and Teams adoption and improve collaboration and communication.

everis is also looking to help clients transform their service delivery in response to COVID-19 disruptions by:

• Reducing the workload of remote workers through the expanded use of automation in business processes, leveraging its Clonika RPA PaaS offering and commercial RPA solutions such as Automation Anywhere that can be implemented based on the highest value use cases defined as part of a consulting and assessment phase
• Working with clients to re-assess their digital properties and identify opportunities to transform these properties through standardization and integration on to a common digital platform. Developing a broader, cohesive approach across digital properties improves the ability to rapidly roll out new products in response to changing customer requirements. everis has developed a proprietary analysis tool, everis winder, that evaluates a digital platform to identify opportunities for transformation.

Digital Transformation as Response to a Crisis, Not a Victim of It

COVID-19 has caused global disruption. One of the ancillary impacts on enterprises has been a widespread re-assessment of investments to determine what is mission-critical in a time of economic uncertainty and what can be delayed until later. Digital transformation initiatives are often viewed as a discretionary budget item, to be undertaken only as time and money allow. However, with lock-downs temporarily pausing nearly all in-person and physical transactions, digital transformation initiatives should be viewed as a response to these challenges rather than budgetary line items that are victims of those challenges.  

everis appreciates that to help its clients weather this disruption, it needs to focus on offerings that address their most pressing needs, and that by tailoring digital transformation initiatives, it can enable clients to improve how they meet customer needs and how they perform their internal operations.