Gleb Polyakov
When the world flipped upside down last year, nearly every company in every industry was forced to implement a remote workforce in just a matter of days — they had to scramble to ensure employees had the right tools in place and customers felt little to no impact. While companies initially adopted solutions for employee safety, rapid response and short-term air cover, they are now shifting their focus to long-term, strategic investments that empower growth and streamline operations.
As a result, categories that make up productivity infrastructure — cloud communications services, API platforms, low-code development tools, business process automation and AI software development kits — grew exponentially in 2020. This growth was boosted by an increasing number of companies prioritizing tools that support communication, collaboration, transparency and a seamless end-to-end workflow.
According to McKinsey & Company, the pandemic accelerated the share of digitally enabled products by seven years, and “the digitization of customer and supply-chain interactions and of internal operations by three to four years.” As demand continues to grow, companies are taking advantage of the benefits productivity infrastructure brings to their organization both internally and externally, especially as many determine the future of their work.
Automate workflows and mitigate risk
Developers rely on platforms throughout the software development process to connect data, process it, increase their go-to-market velocity and stay ahead of the competition with new and existing products. They have enormous amounts of end-user data on hand, and productivity infrastructure can remove barriers to access, integrate and leverage this data to automate the workflow.
Access to rich interaction data combined with pre-trained ML models, automated workflows and configurable front-end components enables developers to drastically shorten development cycles. Through enhanced data protection and compliance, productivity infrastructure safeguards critical data and mitigates risk while reducing time to ROI.
As the post-pandemic workplace begins to take shape, how can productivity infrastructure support enterprises where they are now and where they need to go next?
Use cases
Productivity infrastructure impacts industries that leverage everyday platforms like email and calendar. In other words: It impacts every industry. That said, the strongest use cases come from industries like healthcare, hiring and recruiting, and sales, all of which spend significant amounts of time sending emails, scheduling meetings and maneuvering multiple business applications.
- Sales and marketing: About 54% of customers who communicate with customer service teams do so via email, while sales reps spend up to 50% of their time each week completing mundane tasks like sending emails, entering data and coordinating calendars to schedule meetings. With productivity infrastructure, businesses can automate these tasks and essentially the equivalent of one sales rep’s position — in New York City, that’s potential savings of more than $33,000 in labor costs each year, according to Salary.com.
- Human resources and recruiting: HR and recruiting is another industry that can save tremendous amounts of time by using productivity infrastructure. The average recruiter spends eight hours each week on admin tasks, and some take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours just to schedule a single interview. By introducing automation via a productivity infrastructure solution to manage these tasks, recruiters can spend more time finding and researching strong candidates and reviewing applications rather than coordinating schedules for interviews and follow-ups.
- Healthcare: According to Medbridge Transport, patient no-shows in the healthcare industry cost approximately $150 billion a year in idle resources. The healthcare industry is slammed now more than ever and cannot risk losing valuable time, money or resources while trying to reschedule missed appointments. But legacy tools that require manual processes hinder their ability to do this efficiently and effectively. Productivity infrastructure solutions empower healthcare providers to automate workflows and billing activities, and streamline patient scheduling, allowing them to worry less about missed appointments and focus more on the patients’ well-being.
- Shipping and logistics: Productivity infrastructure can help shipping and logistics companies automate tasks like updates to user profiles and sending shipping notifications to the right people at the right time, saving hours of manual work. In addition, companies provide a reliable delivery experience by offering full transparency into the shipping process and delivery details — preventing things like package theft while increasing customer satisfaction.
- Automotive: The automotive industry can benefit significantly from productivity infrastructure features for scheduling services and car rentals. This keeps internal teams focused on delivering a positive customer experience rather than getting caught up in schedules or rescheduling appointments.
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The impact on remote work
The transition to a remote workforce urged businesses to invest in digital communications, collaboration and customer engagement tools to support global teams. The only way to get there quickly was through productivity infrastructure platforms.
In PwC’s recent remote work survey, more than half of the employees surveyed said they’d prefer to be remote at least three days a week, while business leaders stood questioning how to maintain both a strong culture and productivity in the long term. The survey also says companies hesitant to embrace remote work risk falling behind.
The balance between meeting the desires of employees while adopting technology that supports remote work efforts and collaboration falls on productivity infrastructure solutions. Why? It supports everyday employee tasks, like scheduling meetings, sending bulk emails or coordinating follow-ups. As a result, their productivity increases by up to 20%, according to Gartner — giving leaders peace of mind that productivity isn’t falling by the wayside. And for an industry like customer success management, that 20% is equivalent to $200,000 to $1 million in operational savings each year, per customer, according to Gainsight.
Productivity infrastructure is on the rise and will continue to be front and center as companies evaluate what their future of work entails and how to maintain productivity, rapid software development and innovation with distributed teams. Understanding the benefits, use cases and steps to consider can propel organizations into the next phase of digital transformation.
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