Low Touch Economy: The remote processes era

The Low Touch Economy concept has been used by the technology industry for a long time. It is related to the company’s process, describing the levels of automation and human interactions of the sales and customer success processes. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic, the market has been forced to evolve rapidly and adapt its activities to continue serving its customers using remote processes and automation.

In just a few weeks, companies and customers have turned their routines upside down with the demands of social distancing. And with that, reinvented companies have started to remotely manage their operations. In this blog post we will detail the main tools to help you manage processes and teams remotely. In this post, you will learn about:

What is Low Touch Economy
Low Touch Strategies
Identify Low Touch activities
Remote process automations
Low Touch Indicators
Low Touch Benefits

What is Low Touch Economy

What the Low Touch Economy is: The Low Touch Economy model is normally applied in sales, service and customer success activities. It is defined by the low level of interaction between people in corporate systems. Its applicability varies widely, from sales processes operated through software, to technical support via chat. The replacement of repetitive manual tasks with automated procedures is the main pillar of this model. The Low Touch Economy minimizes or even eliminates the interaction between people, improving the experience of customers and employees.

Low Touch Strategies

To ensure efficiency in planning Low Touch operations and to reduce the risk of errors during their execution, it is important to define a specialist. They will be responsible for creating a specialized team, defining strategies through intelligent software for managing and monitoring actions. In this planning phase of Low Touch automation, it is important to:

Identify and automate common and routine activities
Map and group interdependent activities
Optimize existing automations to improve efficiency
Create a real-time analysis dashboard
Define the main indicators and their failure limits
Extend the digital interface to more users

These factors will be important to modernize your business processes, increase the efficiency of the system and reduce operational risks.

Identify Low Touch processes

It is important to identify common tasks and thus define the scope of the implementation. This sounds simple, but it can be quite complicated to understand all the policies, rules and regulations involved. For this reason, priority should be given identifying the tasks that are performed most frequently and can be performed remotely. This may include:

Content allocation and updating
Information sharing and access control
Data protection policies
Current rules and regulations

Employee working remotely with a notebook

After the tasks are identified, define the appropriate treatment according to the complexity of the automation implementation. For simple tasks, create simple indicators like status and the team responsible. For more complex tasks, define implementations according to the crucial requirements for execution. For example, a content approval task may include verification of data configuration, user hierarchy level, and information sharing flow.

Remote process automation

Automations can be rigid or flexible, depending on how much they interact with business rules. Risk management needs to be stricter and validate adverse situations in the process. However, activities related to workload targeting can be malleable and do not create as many bottlenecks, as they do not depend on strict rules. The complexity of automation in a remote operation must start small. As processes evolve, the capacity of the automations expands over time. Monitor operational efficiency and identify new activities to be automated in the future.

Low Touch Indicators

Use software to filter only remote indicators. This way you can get a sense of how remote processes are behaving. Identify resources that can be reallocated to improve customer experiences. Find out where downtime negatively affects business. Viewing Low Touch indicators is crucial to developing automations that help to streamline the data flow. Although an interface that has analytical views is good, having a robust solution that integrates multiple data sources and helps to plan and execute remote process management is the most ideal.

Benefits of Low Touch Economy

The development of a Low Touch strategy inevitably depends on software that allows intelligent automation. Thus, resources, activities and data can be managed in a practical and comprehensive way. In addition, remote teams can gain more insight into:

Demand forecasting
Customer experiences
Return on investment
Schedule of activities
Innovations and improvements

To obtain the benefits of a Low Touch model, the software used must be customizable and support integration with third party tools. It is also important that the software has automations that are smart enough to make decisions about which features to use for the best possible result. Automations that run only binary options can result in bottlenecks and poor customer experience. It is essential to optimize a remote corporate operation with automation, generating added value for employees and processes. Consequently, customers perceive optimizations indirectly, and give more value to companies that serve them with integrated, automated and intelligent processes.