Agile processes improve organizations.

This poses a significant problem for businesses that have clung with white knuckles to legacy platforms or shied away from digitally transforming their internal processes. The decentralization of technology, rise of intelligent automation, and high importance placed on the customer has enabled businesses on the bleeding edge to quickly adapt to the status quo and deliver value at the speed of thought.

This is achieved through agile processes, meaning processes that are both quick and easily responsive to change or external factors. By pursuing agility, organizations can eliminate unnecessary red tape within their operations, not only delivering a more satisfactory customer experience but also allowing employees to adjust their tools and workflows to their strengths and the reality of their work.

While “agility” might seem like a catch-all buzzword, it is an achievable outcome yielded by implementing the right tools and platforms with efficiency in mind. From increasing revenue to customer loyalty, read on for 4 ways agile processes can improve organizations.

LOW-CODE/NO-CODE EMPOWERS AGILITY OF CITIZEN DEVELOPERS/ BUSINESS USERS

Employees’ productivity can be bottlenecked by limitations in the tools that they use. Not all processes look the same end-toend, and unexpected variables or unique scenarios can necessitate the customization of tools and platforms used by employees. If these tools can’t be adapted without a degree in computer science or extensive IT knowledge, additional support is required, and a once-simple task now requires helpdesk tickets, email correspondence, and more overall obstacles than if the initial user was able to make the necessary changes themselves.

This is where low-code/nocode platforms enable agile organizations to expedite internal processes and elevate employees to citizen developers. Intuitive, accessible, and customizable tools prevent the overcomplication of tasks and the accrual of technical debt. Organizations can adjust to client needs on an ad-hoc basis without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Tax season, for example, brings an influx of highly detailed forms with wide varieties of personal information and special circumstances. A rigid platform for document processing would have severely limited utility when getting into the weeds of a business or individual’s finances. Tax services with these legacy platforms that require advanced coding to modify would yield significantly slower processing times than a counterpart using low-code/nocode tools. By improving straightthrough processing rates of documents and reducing the need for human intervention, low-code/ no-code document processing allows for agile adaptation that will keep organizations competitive in the race to provide speedy and satisfying service to customers.

AGILE FRONT-END PROCESSES IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND RETENTION

Slow-going customer onboarding and other tedious front-facing processes will discourage use of your product or service.

Arduous identity proofing and repetitive manual entry are the antithesis of agility and will not garner customer loyalty when, for example, banking institutions have set a standard for an almost instantaneous speed of service.

A recent survey identified organizations’ top reasons for abandonment during customer onboarding, among which were excessive steps (29%), difficult identity proofing (26%) and excessive manual entry (26%), among others.

Proof of identity is a key pain point that can drastically improve the agility of the onboarding process, thus reducing drop-out rates and improving customer loyalty and advocacy. Requiring users to toggle between various screens, email documents to themselves, or dig up personal information poses too many obstacles between consumers and the service they need and provides many opportunities to get distracted and abandon the process.

Limiting proof of identity to only a handful of steps that can all be completed from the same application or interface keeps users engaged and satisfied, reflecting positively upon the organization and strengthening perceptions of professionalism and valuation of the customer.

Intelligent Processes Increase Revenue

Agile processes that directly relate to revenue, such as accounts payable, can increase profitability. Invoice processing is inherently document-heavy, which can involve laborious and repetitive manual entry if organizations haven’t automated their document processing. Opting for manual entry over automation solutions wastes time and money and increases the likelihood of errors.

Agile accounts payable processes enable a higher, faster volume of processing with fewer errors, allowing businesses to take advantage of early payment discounts, avoid duplicate payments, and decrease cost per invoice.

Using Ai Tools To Understand Business Logic And Processes

The rise of tools driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning has enabled businesses to understand their own processes and operations more thoroughly. Attempting to improve the agility of a process without a comprehensive understanding of every step is a fool’s errand that will lead only to the misallocation of time and resources. Automating the wrong aspects of a workflow can even have direct adverse effects on outcomes, such as delaying a back-end bottleneck until it is more visible to the customer rather than eliminating it altogether. One such tool to understand your own operations is process intelligence, which combines task and process mining to depict an accurate and detailed model of a workflow to better identify opportunities for agility and automation. From understanding individual clicks and keystrokes with task mining to gaining a higher-level perspective through process mining, IT leaders can use these insights to guide their implementation of intelligent solutions and take a clearer path toward organizational agility.

Agility Remains A Priority

Agility is not a fad ephemerally adopted by enterprises with recent trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s an approach to operations that brings objective improvements in sustainability and improves employee and customer experiences. Although many organizations have not reached full maturity with agile processes, innovation in automation and the use of other intelligent solutions imply that returns on investment in agility are only going to grow.