Make profitability your priority

The perfect storm of the pandemic and Brexit have made it imperative for businesses to find fast and effective ways to reduce cost and increase revenues.

Technology has a critical role to play. According to IDG’s 2020 State of the CIO survey, two-thirds of CIOs say the creation of new revenue-generating initiatives is now chief among their job responsibilities.

The problem that most businesses have is that they are hampered by a complex tech soup of systems, old and new, which are expensive to run, don’t work together and often aren’t being used correctly.

The mid-pandemic wave of technology investment last year was largely focused on fast solutions to teething issues associated with the remote work shift: basic communication and security fixes were prioritised above all else.

As we enter a new era of hybrid work and economic recovery, this focus will need to switch more forward-thinking objectives: identifying productivity gaps, transforming efficiencies and generating revenue.

Cut out the waste to get the best out of your people, processes and tech

Generating revenue growth is so often a case of allowing your people to flourish within user-centric and tech-augmented workflows.

Yet with an increasing number of businesses utilising cloud-based models, there are signs that technology is proving a hindrance to employee productivity. 78% of businesses upgraded workplace technology last year, but more than a quarter of employees claimed new tech to be a costly burden, often due to being poorly implemented.

This is causing employee frustration, disengagement and unnecessarily high churn and revenue-growth opportunities are being wasted due to poorly designed workflows, misallocated resources and technological barriers.

Now is the time to investigate the details of your business’s tech ecosystem and iron out the flaws hiding in your systems design to improve profitability. This means asking yourself some vital questions such as:

• Do you know where your employee pain-points are and the knock on effect on productivity and engagement?
• Is your tech stack optimised for end-to-end collaboration between departments?
• Is your sales team making efficient use of your CRM system, or is the system in fact a barrier preventing them from converting leads?
• Are your service teams preoccupied with too many routine and manual-intensive tasks?

In these fine margins, every business has untold room for improvement. Salesforce’s global 2020 survey found that 88% of service teams say the pandemic exposed the productivity gaps in their tech like the ones listed above.

Profit Finder is a tool for pinpointing these gaps with empirical precision and identifying immediate revenue-generating solutions.

Profit Finder: your business game-changer

Businesses need a fast, in-flight, risk-free and cost-effective way to overhaul the processes and technology driving their revenue. Profit Finder answers this need.

The product is a unique combination of AI-powered diagnostic technology and an experienced transformation consultant. Together they take a holistic overview of the business and all of its people, processes and tech to produce a snapshot of areas ripe for improvement, automation and optimisation.

In McKinsey’s global survey from late last year, a small contingent of respondents from a variety of industries attributed 20% or more of their organisations’ earnings to AI-powered optimisation.

Profit Finder offers businesses the opportunity to join this contingent with a fast and effective AI-powered service that promises to deliver immediate returns – minus the long development schedules or bloated consultancy projects.

Over five weeks, we deploy Profit Finder on desktops across an organisation to gather data, identify immediate opportunities for improvement and build fully automated business cases for change.

In one recent example, Profit Finder uncovered three major insights for an Emergence client:

• Customer service agents only spent 4% of their time actually speaking to customers.
• The team was overstaffed, meaning that they could take 20% more customer queries.
• Agents weren’t closing the chat once the customer left the conversation to avoid being placed back in the pool.

With an Emergence transformation consultant on hand to validate and build upon each of these business cases, Profit Finder found that automation would save our client $250k/year using a combination of RPA and natural language classification to automate case, customer and order detail checks.

Clients are often surprised by what Profit Finder reveals. A business can get through thousands of processes and decisions daily, each with differing strategic value and unique resource requirements - but at any one time, many of these processes are likely to be under-resourced or acting as workflow bottlenecks; others are unnecessarily occupying the valuable time of a skilled knowledge worker.

Profit Finder takes a fast and forensic look at your business to pinpoint these blind spots and convert them into areas of new and improved value.

Eager to find out more? Book a demo with one of our transformation consultants.