As organizations seek to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive marketplace, advances of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT) provide an unprecedented level of transparency into the customer experience in real-time. Harnessed effectively, this could provide the key for companies to differentiate themselves by streamlining the alarm noise reduction, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis.

As these technologies converge, organizations are shifting the focus of Incident Management from simply monitoring and responding to process disruptions to placing greater emphasis on proactively improving the customer experience.

These new technologies offer the ability to capture, analyze, and understand the alarm correlation and event correlation between incidents across different silos and activities — from network outages to supply chain disruptions — to gain comprehensive insight on the impact these issues have on customers. More importantly, we can develop strategies to immediately respond to and address these disruptions in real-time.

The key is to avoid the breakdowns of communication and management that have often stood in the way of resolving issues and resume operations that customers depend on and expect.

Successful companies see automated incident management as critical to the business.

Achieving this requires a new approach to organizational structures.

That is one of the reasons we are seeing the rapid rise of job titles such as Head of Customer Experience or Head of Digital Transformation in organizational charts.

These are the problem solvers who are taking a broad look at all aspects of an organization’s operations and using emerging technologies to understand how they affect the delivery of value. This new breed of executives is also focused on the strategic direction of their organization and looking for the key requirements and potential points of failure that can jeopardize the future value proposition.

This represents a significant break with traditional organizational thinking. In the recent past, executives responsible for specific operations were siloed. The heads of network operations, for instance, would be a focus on maintaining the flow of data and monitoring for any network outages. Storage Infrastructure managers would oversee the data lifecycle from the network to off-premises environments according to strict technical, regulatory, and other governance priorities. The managers of application development would also similarly focus on their own environment.

The chances for communication breakdowns were outnumbered only by the opportunities to play the famous “blame game.”

When you integrate new organizational thinking with emerging technologies, enterprises have an enhanced ability to focus on customer experience. Moreover, real-time analytics offers a quantifiable measure of net promoter scores (NPS), which continues to be an important measure of success.

Organizations that embrace this approach are seeing improvements in their NPS standing as they take up disciplined service-oriented approaches to automated incident management. Presented in the correct context, these cross-silo correlated metrics make it possible for the CFO’s office to document the direct impact incident handling has on the organization’s digital reputation and profitability.

While it is important to hit short- and mid-term financial objectives, the long-term performance implications that we are seeing as a result of gains in customer loyalty and retention is even more critical to organizations. Enterprises that have made early investments in applying emerging technologies to incident management are benefiting from reductions in churn that improve margins and provide the basis for financial stability over the long run. Network service providers, for example, that apply AI and ML to their incident management are not only hanging on to the subscribers they already have but are actually adding subscribers in an extremely difficult market.

This shift to a more customer-centric focus represents a change in culture that requires commitment and leadership from the highest organizational levels. At Vitria, our approach to the market revolves around understanding the strategic objectives being pursued by senior executives and provide technology that has the agility to change the current course of an organization through a low code platform that is easily customizable and extensible. We provide the framework for next-generation operations that integrates the analytics of different departments and divisions to create a holistic approach to managing the customer experience.

Our goal is to help organizations quickly develop common data sets and integrated processes that streamline and automate the incident management process to accelerate the return that organizations expect from investments in digital transformation.