How to Make Digital Transformation Work for Professional Services

Digital transformation has led to sweeping changes around the world. It is fueling the Fourth Industrial Revolution by changing how masses live, work and connect. Given below are statistical data on how digitization is impacting professional services sectors, making them transform business models by adopting new technologies.

The professional services industry is also affected by digitalization both internally and externally. The advent of new technologies, like big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning has enabled the automation of repetitive and foreseeable tasks. The roles of the administrators, customer service representatives, data researchers, and executive assistants are played quite easily by bots. Artificial intelligence and machine learning offer cognitive technology solutions that can learn to analyze data, develop models, test strategies, and give advice to decision makers. Although technology advancement is on the rise, it is essential to understand why and how professional services can make the most of these developments, keeping in mind the importance of ‘trust’ in this industry.

Why Go Digital

Traditionally, the focus of the professional services industry was on developing strong personal client relationships, and the selling model would largely be engrained in the offline world. With new IT innovations in the market, the firms tried changing their landscape by focusing on back-office workflows, resource planning, and process efficiencies; but with customers being well informed about technological advancements, the need for customer experience transformation in this field also increased equally, bringing to limelight an opportunity for real growth. A customer’s digital expectations served as the true inspiration for change in the era of digital disruption for the professional services industry.

What do customers expect?

How to meet their expectations?

Primarily, professional services firms have been focusing for a long time on linear growth. Digitalization will break this, changing the underlying economics of service delivery, thereby changing the rules of the game for incumbents and opening the door for new competition and new business models.

Levelling Up by Going Digital

Many professional services firms are looking at how to improve shareholder value and be in a healthier position than competitors. It is true that professional services companies have an unparalleled opportunity to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and augment people skills to not only think, learn and act but also feel. But this opportunity will pay off well only if all the elements of digital transformation are harnessed. This might involve reimagining the way in which you deliver solutions to clients or reinvent a more dynamic business model to gain market share.

Hexaware is of the belief that digital transformation is not only about leveraging new-age technologies but also transforming current business models while priming strategy and execution know-how for maximum efficiency and impact. An organization can successfully reach a higher level of digital transformation if they can bridge the gap between technology adoption, strategy and execution.

Here are a few suggestions for companies to reimagine their business models:

Informed decision making: To have a competitive edge, professional services firms are redefining what to deliver and how to deliver. For instance, engineering firms replacing people with drones to do building surveys. This pace of innovation is noteworthy, but at some point, the organization may have to rethink, especially if they are losing the market share. Hexaware believes firms should have clarity on the key differentiators that will help organizations to sustain in this situation.

Adopting technology for long-term goals: The shift to cloud is an on-going program that requires long-term focus. Hexaware’s Hybrid cloud offering is focused on helping organizations improve their business performance by migrating to cloud, and to fast-track this process, we offer some tempting cloud solutions.

Human-Machine Collaboration for Improving ROIs: Hexaware’s innovative solutions for various professional services such as tax, audit and accounting, advisory and consulting, legal, risk and compliance, people and talent management and information services and platforms, that intend to help these firms achieve their digital transformation goals. By automating routine tasks, we intend to free people and make them focus on solving higher-order problems. This human-machine collaboration is essential to help companies achieve agility for fast-tracking transformation and achieving better ROIs.

Restoring Trust by Harnessing Technology: Changing economics, evolving market needs, and technology-driven drivers are disrupting top established firms and their market positions and disrupting the trust of professional services firms. We help professional services firms to reimagine trust, by leveraging the latest digital technology enablers like automation, IoT, blockchain and cognitive computing, coupled with our deep domain expertise to deliver platform-based solutions.

The shift is underway

Some firms are still reluctant to go completely digital. They prefer demonstrating trust through a face-to-face or telephone conversation. But many understand what customers want and are making the shift happen. The shift is happening slowly, but it is happening. As we think of the changes that are already happening in this industry, here is a glimpse into the future:

The new digital reality will change the economics of service delivery. Firms that can anticipate change and react faster than competitors will stay ahead of the curve. But there is a need to transform the way we perceive what’s to come post digital transformation. This is because technology such as Cloud, IoT or AI as important as they are, must be balanced with organizational need, reimagining and creating a more dynamic business model and empowered people. The digital economy offers infinite opportunities, and success comes when the industry reimagines everything from business models, business processes, workflow, employee engagement and customer experience.

Hexaware has pillared its growth strategy on the three cornerstones of AUTOMATE EVERYTHING^®, CLOUDIFY EVERYTHING^®, TRANSFORM CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES^®. We make professional services firms harness the power of the latest digital technology enablers like automation, IoT, blockchain and cognitive computing and combine it with our deep domain expertise to help you get the most out of your digital journey.

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