Beyond ROI: Measuring The True Impact of Intelligent Information Management

Return on investment (ROI) is a crucial component of measuring the success of business solution implementations, ensuring your organization sees financial gains as a result. While important to consider, ROI often only captures part of the picture during investment assessments with a slew of intangible benefits in the backdrop that enhance the value of your business. Intelligent Information Management (IIM) goes far beyond simply reducing costs or improving efficiency; its impact can be felt by employees, partners, and customers alike in the form of greater satisfaction, collaboration, transparency, and trust.

Here, we explore why ROI alone isn’t enough to measure the success and value of an IIM implementation and what broader benefits organizations should consider.

Unlocking the Intangible Benefits of IIM

A few key overarching factors drive IIM’s intangible benefits, which have far-reaching positive effects on countless areas of your business.

Improved Employee Satisfaction

By eliminating monotonous, often headache-inducing manual processes such as data entry and audit preparation, employees will stress less about errors and time crunches and have more time for engaging in value-driving work.

Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams

Centralizing information access across teams, departments, and locations informs your entire organization about the information that affects them. This yields fast and agile responses to countless situations, including customer inquiries, process bottlenecks, and more.

Building Trust with Organizational Transparency

With this enhanced access to information, your organization can bolster its reputation for transparency and provide instant responses to customers, shareholders, employees, and partners.

How IIM Drives Better Customer Experiences

Faster Response Times for Customer Inquiries

Fast and transparent service provides immense value towards customer satisfaction. In fact, a Forbes survey estimates that customers would pay an average of 19% more for “always immediate service” and that 27% of customers are more likely to spend money when the brand responds faster than expected. Delayed access to critical information can lead to longer wait times and lower customer satisfaction. Intelligent Information Management enables instant access to customer records, invoices, and service histories, empowering teams to resolve inquiries faster and more accurately.

Consistent Service Quality Across Channels

Organizations often house information within multiple systems and locations, resulting in varying access levels between service staff operating via text, call, email, and chat. These disjointed data silos can lead to inconsistent service experiences as information is slowly requested and retrieved. IIM integrates and centralizes customer-related information, ensuring every team member can access the same information regardless of the channel.

Enhancing Personalization Through Data Insights

Personalized service can create immense customer trust at a fast rate. Analyzing information stored in customer purchase orders, service logs, and other documents can help predict customer needs and improve proactive communication.

Supporting Sustainability and Compliance Goals

The Environmental Impact of Going Paperless

Environmentally conscious consumerism is on the rise. In fact, according to The RoundUp, 62% of people say they “always or often” seek products to purchase because they are sustainable, and 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for eco-friendly brands. Transitioning to digital workflows through IIM significantly reduces paper usage and associated waste. This shift supports environmental sustainability goals and reduces operational costs for industries handling large volumes of documents. Square 9 customer, McCue Mortgage emphasized the importance of this benefit for their business, reducing its paper usage by 75% with IIM.

Simplifying Compliance with Audit-Ready Documentation

Regulatory compliance is a complex challenge for many organizations, particularly those in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and education. Much of this challenge involves being able to provide documentation during audits. IIM solutions streamline the archival and searchability of these records, ensuring they are secure and available for effortless audit preparation.

The Long-Term Strategic Value of IIM

Adapting to Changing Business Needs

Business needs constantly evolve as new technology, best practices, and regulations shape the landscape. Well-designed IIM solutions scale with your organization, accommodating growth and new needs without significant overhauls.

For instance, as a company expands into new markets or adds remote teams, an IIM system ensures that critical information remains accessible and organized, regardless of geographical or operational changes.

Future-Proofing Your Operations with Intelligent Data

IIM is a foundational step toward leveraging advanced AI and machine learning technologies. By organizing and managing data effectively, businesses can position themselves to adopt predictive analytics, automate repetitive tasks, and gain deeper insights into operations as new tools and solutions become more widely adopted.

Strengthening Organizational Resilience

Disruptions such as economic shifts, natural disasters, and global pandemics can create significant challenges in business continuity. IIM provides the tools to stay the course by ensuring information is accessible and workflows remain intact across locations, even after periods of technical downtime.

Measuring Success Beyond ROI

Key Metrics for Measuring IIM Impact

While the value of IIM’s intangible benefits is challenging to measure, some key metrics can offer insights beyond your financial return on investment, including:

Employee Productivity

Time saved through automation and streamlined workflows. Property Management Firm, Towne Properties, cut process times in half with their IIM solution, drastically increasing productivity. 

Data Accuracy

Reduction in errors due to automated data capture and validation. Senior Living Community, Covenant Village, saw fantastic returns in this area after implementing an IIM solution with AI-assisted document capture.

Customer Satisfaction Scores

 Improvements driven by faster response times and personalized service. Ontario’s St. Claire Region Conservation Authority has significantly enhanced customer satisfaction with improved information access and self-service for administrative fee payments. 

Creating a Balanced Scorecard for IIM

A balanced scorecard integrates financial metrics with non-financial ones to provide a holistic view of success. For example, combining ROI with metrics like compliance readiness, sustainability improvements, and employee satisfaction can offer a clearer picture of IIM’s impact.

Summary: The New Metrics of Success

Measuring the success of an Intelligent Information Management implementation requires looking beyond your financial ROI. By considering its impact on customer satisfaction, sustainability, compliance, and countless value-driving components of your organization, you will be able to appreciate and communicate the scope of your investment fully.

How Square 9 Can Help

Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.