EDI is a powerful technological approach that automates and simplifies the process of data exchange to promote communication, connection, and collaboration across business ecosystem.
Technologies such as EDI have turned out to be a roaring success in 2020. This well-established approach has taken organizations to new heights, offering agility, cloud computing, process optimization, and business optimization. Gartner claims:
“EDI remains — and will remain for years to come — a high impact, valuable asset to business. More innovative approaches should be used for greenfield projects but EDI is a well-established approach that is still a vital component of most companies overall B2B strategy, and easily contributes to B2B, cloud computing, business intelligence, et al“.
EDI is a simple and stable solution that has undergone an evolution over the past 50 years. Businesses consider it a silver bullet for secure data transfer and exchange. In truth, it has transformed the way business transactions happen, making it simpler and efficient.
However, with changing economy and business becoming more digital, companies need to take all the factors into account to make proper use of EDI. Let’s elaborate one of the factors.
Changing Customer Demands
The widespread use of social media, internet, and mobile computing platforms has brought a change in the way how consumer behaves and pushes enterprises to their limits for building long-lasting relationships.
As per Gartner, customers rely on a lot of communication channels like chatbots, messengers, and more to interact with business users. Knowing how customers make use of these channels is the pressing need for businesses to deliver an exemplary customer experience.
In addition, companies require agile B2B processes to map a successful journey for customers. It not only reduces partner onboarding time but also resolves transaction issues.
Simply put, modern EDI solutions can help companies accelerate business processes to make customer interactions more agile, delightful, and results-driven. Let’s find how.
B2B-EDI Streamlines Business Processes to Provide Quality Customer Experiences
Modern EDI integration solutions enable organizations foster accuracy and speed up B2B process through automation. With a multitude of features, they minimize human touchpoints necessary for customer interaction. And even, Harvard Business Review suggests that when human touchpoints are minimized, companies can easily improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.They can improve their brand performance and thus set a powerful Net Promoter Score.
Application leaders can achieve operating margins up to 6% higher by improving customer experiences using EDI integration. Plus, companies can witness reductions of 10-20% in cost to serve and up to 15% growth in revenue.
To conclude, if you don’t have a centralized EDI integration platform in place, chances of reaping dividends from customer interactions are dim. However, taking a big-bang B2B-EDI approach can do more harm than good. Phased approach (meaning implementing technology in steps) is a better alternative. Companies willing to capitalize on customer interactions and experiences can implement EDI using a phased approach. Know how our integration experts can support your EDI implementation process to take your business up a notch.