“Most employees see the benefit of being in the office for planning, team building, and other vital meetings but just don’t want to be required to be there five days out of the week. It’s clear that hybrid work model are here to stay.” – Says Randy Littleson, CMO at Conga in an exclusive interview with Enterprise Talk.

ET Bureau: How can businesses accelerate their digital transformation journeys while ensuring business productivity and uninterrupted employee workflows?

Randy Littleson: Companies can start by assigning a senior executive with buy-in from the rest of the leadership to champion this mindset company-wide. This executive can develop and facilitate the appropriate cross-functional teams necessary to understand the business needs.

The plan for a thoughtful digitization rollout that doesn’t impact current revenue operations (RevOps) or activities related to sales, marketing, and employee or customer success. The other key factor to keep in mind is that every organization’s digitization strategy is unique.

In other words, applying a one-size-fits-all digital transformation approach will not be as effective as a tailored strategy. Taking the time to rethink, simplify, and streamline processes carefully will result in a modernized and effective company infrastructure equipped with the necessary digital tools to operate moving forward successfully.

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ET Bureau: While organizations are globally working towards finding a middle ground for returning to work, how can business leaders ease the transition to hybrid work?

Randy Littleson: Leaders must listen to their employees. Companies leaned hard on their employees to quickly adapt to remote work to keep business operations going at the height of the pandemic. It is a bit disingenuous to now tell those same employees that the company needs them back in the office to succeed.

Most employees see the benefit of being in the office for planning, team building, and other vital meetings but just don’t want to be required to be there five days out of the week. It’s clear that hybrid work models are here to stay — but each company’s definition of “hybrid work” will likely be different.

It will be even more critical for leaders to effectively communicate with their employees to clearly define these parameters and work with them to ensure their ideas and suggestions are accounted for and heard. By doing this, leaders can ensure effective growth for their employees and organizations.

ET Bureau: Industry leaders take active measures, making the most out of advanced technology and tools to sustain this unprecedented era. How can support digitization accelerate revenue?

Randy Littleson: By connecting and streamlining siloed or disconnected processes, support in digitization has the power to accelerate revenue. Today, for too many companies, the process of quoting and proposing, negotiating, and agreeing to a contract with customers is just too fragmented and slow.

The result is a slower than ideal process to bring in revenue. This not only negatively impacts customer perceptions, but also negatively impacts employee experiences and productivity – as time lost chasing agreements and such internally is time not spent trying to land the next deal.

Leaders should work with their teams to implement faster processes and ensure a more efficient way to accelerate customer success and revenue. By improving the overall buying experience for internal teams and customers, the end result will yield happier customers and increased company revenue.

ET Bureau: As remote working persists, how can automation help in creating a better employee and customer experience?

Randy Littleson: A great example of how automation can help foster better employee experiences can be seen in the onboarding process for new employees. When employees go through the typical onboarding process in the office, and something doesn’t work, they’re able to simply walk over to their IT department and ask for help.

However, this is more difficult today as more employees are starting jobs remotely. Businesses can focus on automation to ensure a smooth process that gets people ramped up and effectively quickly. This could include automating typical onboarding tasks such as employee document organization, automatically scheduling the appropriate onboarding meetings, or even ensuring IT support requests are routed to the appropriate personnel.

Also Read: 3 Team-Building Strategies for the Next Normal in IT Leadership

On the customer experience front, automation can help businesses create better, more frictionless experiences for their customers by helping to streamline the manual processes associated with the commercial operations-related activity.

Automation can help create more streamlined customer experiences through configure, price, to quote (CPQ) applications, automated billing cycles, and the ongoing facilitation of sales contracts. Overall, automation is an effective way to deliver a great employee and customer experience.

ET Bureau: Expediting revenue operations is a critical task for businesses. How can AI and ML streamline the process?

Randy Littleson: Today, companies have hundreds if not thousands of revenue contracts with customers. Most of those are on the company’s paper, but some are on third-party paper. AI and ML can help by quickly identifying key terms and clauses in the agreement necessary for renewals. But, without a systemic way to manage these agreements, renewals are complicated or impossible, which means businesses risk leaving revenue on the table.