Ushur, the leading no-code digital customer experience automation platform, and Sutherland, a global innovator in bringing digital transformation to the front- and back-office, are now working in a strategic partnership.
Sutherland's digital transformation blueprint is built on a three-pronged approach it sometimes calls the “3 ‘A’s of digital transformation”: Analyze, Automate and Augment. Sutherland helps clients analyze historic and real-time data, automate the processes best fit for reinvention, and augment the capabilities of both human and digital workers. All of this is done in a human-centric way.
Together, bringing Ushur’s platform and real-time customer experience automation capabilities, Sutherland is taking a leap forward in the digital transformation of its insurance, financial services, and healthcare industry clients.
Highly regulated healthcare payers and providers, financial services providers, and insurers alike handle a myriad of complex processes day-to-day – and they’re often difficult to automate.
Digital transformation allows for the replacement of the unscalable and manual versions of those processes with more-repeatable, technologically-driven counterparts. Leaders in these industries are constantly looking for ways to elevate customer experience, reduce journey friction, accelerate time cycles, and cut operational expenses with digital innovation.
Sutherland clients can now rely on Ushur’s pre-trained machine learning (ML) models and add the flexibility artificial intelligence provides when interacting with customers, agents, brokers, members, patients, claimants, providers, or other stakeholders.
What Role Does Customer Experience Play in Digital Transformation?
When it comes to making digital transformation real, customer experience excellence is a bigger hurdle than many others. CX often suffers from technology underinvestment. Plus, both customers and employees have elevated expectations of what great customer-enabling technology should look like – believing it should be quick and intuitive.
This underinvestment in CX technology during digital transformation efforts implies that brands have historically tried to build their consumer experiences around customer support teams. However, processes that depend solely on people don’t satisfy the increasing customer expectation for the availability of self-service.
Neither do they scale as well as those built around technology. So, if companies plan on expanding their offerings, they’ll always need to hire more people – or in the current economic climate, they may need to do more with fewer employees.
That’s difficult for any number of reasons – not least of all because, even in best-of-times for an organization, employees change jobs, leave companies, and can otherwise pick up more work.
The absence of more helping hands sometimes leaves customers high and dry when they need help most. And that can happen at the most inopportune moments – like when they’re in the middle of an accident or trying to find medical care. Digital transformation projects can mean the difference between ‘being there’ in their time of need or being absent.
Customer Experience Automation: What It Is, Why It Matters
Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA), as both Ushur and Sutherland like to define it, is the interdisciplinary intersection of artificial intelligence, process automation, conversational interfaces, and redesigned process blended to optimize the customer experience and engagement.
Automation removes procedural barriers that prevent expedient resolution.
Artificial intelligence (AI) uses historical data to understand and predict future behaviors. Customer experience is the product of two-way conversations where action matches the intent.
It is about using these key technological capabilities to hold conversations with customers directly. The goal is to usher them to a final resolution in their self-service journey while letting them speak in their own words and automating the back-office processes that historically forced them to wait for final confirmation.
CXA is designed to facilitate completing every task, no matter how minute, with the least cognitive load possible. Each interaction, task, or inquiry to an enterprise is what Ushur calls a micro-engagement™. Together, those micro-engagements form a wave of customer experience. It is the application of an AI-powered technology platform that is purpose-built to automate, scale, and remove the friction from the interactions between a company and its customers – from the beginning of a conversation through its resolution.
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CX and operational efficiency go hand-in-hand. By approaching digital transformation from a customer-first lens, organizations realize a much greater holistic return on investment (ROI) than optimizing for operational efficiency or cost reduction alone.
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Customer Experience Automation is all-inclusive. Any organization can execute a CXA strategy, regardless of their past technologies investments, current resource bandwidth, or industry regulations.
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Artificial Intelligence makes automation human again. Automation on its own improves the bottom line. Automation powered by AI helps systems understand humans – using their sentiment and intent to embed empathy into self-service experiences.
The application of Customer Experience Automation lets organizations transform into highly efficient and empathetic enterprises by engaging authentic digital experiences at scale that are aligned with what customers, partners, and employees want and deserve. With CXA, consumers and businesses build more meaningful, satisfactory, and less transitory relationships – helping each other pursue success in the least fiction-filled way.
Customers often don’t really need all the “bells and whistles” to work effectively with a brand – they just need to be able to transact with you seamlessly.
In fact, working to delight customers with over-the-top experiences can backfire in some cases. Legacy brands can seek to outperform digital-native competitors only to create overly-involved experiences for customers. But it is the ease of the experience that drives both customer satisfaction and retention.
How The Partnership Benefits Healthcare Companies, Insurance Carriers, and Financial Services
Healthcare companies, insurance carriers, and financial services organizations are already using digital-first strategies for interactions with members, customers, patients, agents, brokers, and providers, and they rely on partnerships like the one between Ushur and Sutherland to deliver on those plans.
As Sutherland expands its use of Ushur across its multiple business segments, companies will see expanded digital self-service capabilities and automation strategies that bridge gaps in technology infrastructure.
Insurance Automation
Frome quote submissions and policy changes to filing and resolving claims – plus everything in between – customers, claimants, agents, brokers, and providers expect digital-first and proactive service. Brands can improve customer engagement by integrating intelligent insurance automation into claims management, policy administration, underwriting, and billing processes.
Healthcare Automation
New service and support is now available across the health ecosystem for patients, members, employees, physicians, pharmacists, clinical teams, employer groups, brokers and consultants, payers, and more. Healthcare automation can elevate member and patient experiences, make it easier for patients/partners to work with you, augment live interactions to reduce staff burden and operating costs, and support better health and wellness.
Banking Automation
From loan servicing and collections to hardship inquiries and account resolution, plus everything in between, financial service institutions must put their customers first. For those interactions that don’t fit within a mobile application or portal, brands can offer ease and speed by leveraging AI and machine learning to create self-service and proactive experiences.
Ushur workflows can be built in hours, are simple to standardize and templatize, and can be a secure connection between customers and backend core systems. Easy integrations with the API-driven customer experience automation platform make it the ideal technological bridge between consumers and the business back office.
Sutherland analytics and digital platforms work in tandem with the Ushur automation platform to create a unique customer experience. Abd Sutherland has the industry experience to help clients identify the most impactful use cases and appropriate handoffs.
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