PEX Network caught up with Stan Passov, StereoLOGIC, to find out how the company assists clients like Pitney Bowes to accelerate customer services via visualization and removal of process errors, redundancies and delays. The Pitney Bowes case, PEX Network 2014 Project Award Winner, details how StereoLOGIC assisted them to double accelerate its customer service and decrease its error rate by 20% after implementing a Rapid Automated Process Improvement with StereoLOGIC.
Q. Firstly, tell us a little bit about StereoLOGICâs background and history, where did it all start?
Our team has been creating accelerator solutions for software development and quality assurance for many years. Our products have received many awards and are widely adopted in the market, but we felt that they mostly helped companiesâ internal IT staff (like analysts and programmers) and not the business and their real-world customers.
We wanted to use our knowledge and experience to help people - many people around the world, ourselves included, to stop wasting time waiting for customer services. Whether itâs insurance, mortgage, car lease or your phone bill â everyone needs a fast and high quality service.
So we have introduced a solution that enables companies to work quicker. Itâs been used in contact centers, outsourcing departments and back offices, and demonstrated x2 acceleration, 30% savings and solid quality improvement.
Q. Stan, many other vendors as you know work on this problem. How would you differentiate your company from others?
The first and major differentiator is the time! The time is takes to see the value.
Today, a typical service improvement project takes at least 9 months if it only involves bringing in a consulting firm. It can take more than a year if it involves BPM, CRM or any other IT replacement solution. With StereoLOGIC you will start receiving results on the third day. Itâs a cloud solution that can be connected from an external hosting or installed on a clientâs internal server. Day one - installation, day two - training and from day three, you are ready to work!
Can you imagine having "the results in 1 week" versus "results in 1 year"?
The second differentiator is SIMPLICITY.
You will understand your customer service groupâs issues and you will make them work twice as fast, without an army of process consultants or an expensive IT revamp project. You will not even need to interrupt the work of your business for interviews and meetings, trying to capture their processes and localize the delays.
Just start the StereoLOGIC recording and all this information will be available to you, in the form of process maps, time/activity reports and clear visualizations of delays, errors and redundant activities executed by employees.
The LOW COST and QUICK ROI complete the list of differentiators.
Actually, as we just discussed, StereoLOGIC solution does not assume any significant consulting costs - neither during the implementation stage (as BPMs and CRMs), nor during the actual use. It allows you to keep the cost of implementation and use very low compared to any market alternative.
On other hand, it offers functionality that streamlines employee process by the factor of x2, on average. Imagine, you can make one business process two times quicker; in the hands of 100 employees it means huge savings.
Thatâs why we guarantee to our customers the ROI in less than 3 months.
Q. Your Automated Customer Service Acceleration Solution includes a number of different tools, can you detail what they are all about?
Our solution provides immediate discovery, measurement and acceleration of employee processes via visualization and removal of the process errors, redundancies and delays.
You can use our entire suite or choose some specific modules that address your current needs:
- If your goal is to understand your current processes and document them - use the Process Map Generator that generates process maps automatically while you or your employees work with the applications on the computer. Resulting process maps can be presented in Visio, BPMN or XPDL formats.
- If you need to measure the time your employees spend for different tasks - choose StereoLOGIC Process Timer. While employees execute their processes, it automatically measures them and generates detailed time reports in Excel. You will receive precise details about each employee activity or the entire E2E process - when it was done, how much time was spent, etc.
- In case you need to create accurate illustrated process manuals or work instructions in a fraction of time - StereoLOGIC Automated Manuals module generates them instantly by auto-documenting actual employee activities and presenting them in a clear easy-to-follow Word document.
- Choose the Process Diagnostics module for your process improvement work. It will help you to quickly compare actual employee operations against expected baselines and visualize process deviations and variances. It also has an Automated Simulator that allows your staff to learn new accelerated processes through step-by-step replays of business tasks performed by experts.
- Last but not the least, our StereoLOGIC Process Analytics module automatically monitors hundreds of employees performing business operations for days / months, comparing discovered operations with the established baselines, notifying operational managers about unexpected deviations, performance issues and deadlocks.
Each of these modules - all together or in parts - may be purchased or rented as a SaaS.
Q. What industries do StereoLOGIC customers represent? Can you list some examples of the companies using StereoLOGIC software?
While it can be used for many industries, currently we are focused on Banking, Insurance, Telecoms, Utilities and Government.
Q. Can you please include a brief success story, which further highlights why customers come to StereoLOGIC and adopt your software?
- Companies choose us if they need to accelerate their customer service, reduce error rates or improve business processes in a very short period of time, as was the case with Pitney Bowes (PB). As you know, PB project won the PEX Network Project Award in 2014: Best Process Improvement Project under 90 days.
- Another reason is Business Process Outsourcing and Business Process Transformation projects. They bring in StereoLOGIC to restore the process documentation before sending it to the outsourcing vendors or a system integrator.
- Often BPM vendors ask us to accelerate the implementation of their software. Actually, as we have already discussed, BPM implementations start with understanding and mapping of AS-IS processes and with StereoLOGIC it is done 5 times quicker.
- Whatâs even more interesting, sometimes companies reach out to us after spending millions on BPM/CRM implementations, but surprisingly find that their customer services are slower, not quicker, as it was expected. Naturally employees have problems adopting new processes and systems. StereoLOGIC, with its focus on process diagnostics, can find these problems, optimize the process and accelerate the ROI from implementation for these platforms.
Q. What do you perceive to be the biggest challenges for businesses today?
I believe that the biggest challenge for a business today is the combination of high complexity and low transparency. As it is known through the Reliability Theory - the probability of errors increases with complexity. At the same time non-transparency prevents companies from detecting the core reasons of these issues and resolving them in a reasonable time.
This is why it is so important to be able to quickly discover precise business processes and their inherent issues.
Without it neither customer service acceleration, nor process improvement, nor business transformation, nor outsourcing projects is effective. This may be one reason 70% of BPM and CRM projects fail.
Q. According to Gartner, only 30% of manually captured processes are accurate. In an ever-growing digitized era, how is StereoLOGIC helping to address the costs and risks of manual analysis of business operations?
We've actually replaced manual analysis through automation. Instead of interviewing people and mapping their business process manually, as many companies do today, StereoLOGIC software enables you to monitor the work of employees with IT systems and generate the process maps automatically.
Staff can be distributed across many geographic locations, utilizing a large number of diverse IT platforms and personal productivity tools. StereoLOGIC will automatically capture all the processes performed by employees and helps visualize the End-to-End process.
Q. Do you have any figures to showcase StereoLOGICâs success?
Sure. Pitney Bowes needed to cut the cost and accelerate its service in a very short period of time. With StereoLOGIC they achieved x2 acceleration, 30% operating cost savings and a reduction of error rates from 20 to almost 0%. That is a huge customer service acceleration in less than 3 months.
In addition to business performance acceleration, our automation also accelerates the work of process engineers, and this is why these results can be obtained so quickly.
We also have case studies from one of the largest US insurance companies, which is now able to do process improvement in 88% less time, and a US government agency, which was able to complete a key phase of a transformation project in 80% less time.