Kofax Transform 2014: Making the First Mile of Business Smarter

Transform is being held in San Diego as I write this blog and I have to say that Kofax is showing a new side of itself. With recent acquisitions, changes in management goals and strategies, Kofax is showing how it can help their clients deliver a better customer experience necessary to generate more revenue for an extended period of time. This is the CXOs challenge today and Kofax is stepping up to assist.

Reynolds Bish, the CEO of Kofax, took the stage and shared how Kofax was aimed providing packages of software that were aimed at the first mile where the sophisticated and connected customers could be won over with a delightful experience. He said that the challenge was connecting the systems of record with the systems of engagement. With recent acquisitions of Total Agility (formerly Singularity) for process/rule management, Alsosoft for real time business/process intelligence and Kapow for visual scripting of dynamic data integration as agents (synthetic APIs), Kofx has the combination of technologies to bridge this gap in an intelligent fashion. He told a pretty compelling story that was to be backed up by customer experiences during the rest of the conference.

The highlight of the day, for me, was next keynote by Lior Arussy of Stratvity on the economics of the customer experience. He was totally engaging and had us all convinced that there was a burning race to delight the customer. In fact, customers are demanding an exceptional experience and those who deliver it will be handsomely rewarded. He indicated that each customer interaction should be treated like  "a first date" instead of taking your partner (customer) for granted. He also provided hard numbers for the cost of dealing with customers properly.

The numbers were from a large benchmark and  were pretty impressive. The cost of a customer complaint was on average was $458. The cost to resolve that complaint was $1338. The overall economic value of a customer over the long haul was $91,500 and the cost of gaining one new customer was $4995. It doesn't take a lot of calculation to justify spending millions on the right processes to "wow" customers. This was probably the best presentation, I have seen in recent years.

After the two great keynotes, we were dismissed for breakout sessions in several tracks including BI & Analytics, Mobile Solutions, Smart Process Applications, Data Integration, Image/Content Capture and Industry Solutions. My favorite break out was a customer case study on creating dash linked dashboards for the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania.

Net; Net: 

It was a good first day and I look forward to day two when the customer case studies get thicker on the agenda.