Automation technology has been around for decades with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) dominating business investment and priorities for the last couple of years. Analyst Gartner predicts that 90% of large organisations globally will have adopted some form of RPA by next year.
RPA enables businesses to automate the handling of repetitive and time-consuming processes, primarily focused on mimicking how humans perform tasks on a computer such as extracting data from one location and inputting it into another as well as enacting core processes such as updating security and retrieving data for analytics.
The application of RPA has resulted in many organisations saving significant time for operational teams and delivering efficiencies, and cost savings. However, up until now, RPA has been primarily focused on delivering digital transformation to back-office processes such as finance and accounting.
With so much success within back-office process automation, RPA has now turned its attention to more user lead experiences creating a major shift to front office automation. The shift to the front office presents a new opportunity for businesses to not only deliver cost savings through technology, but also to directly contribute to revenue generation through the improvement of customer and employee experiences.
Due to the nature of customer and employee interactions, largely unscripted and unstructured, RPA alone is not able to deliver automation and efficiencies. As a result, many RPA providers have turned to specialist partners within Conversational AI and Intelligent Document Processing to deliver an intelligent automation solution (Conversational AI technology being fundamental in providing RPA bots with a voice and enabling them to understand and enact user requests and associated processes).
How It Works
Conversational Assistants enable organisations to streamline the handling of real-time employee, customer, and supplier communications and requests through deploying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to understand the meaning and intent of unstructured human language. Identifying requests and the associated RPA processes to perform actions and trigger activity.
For example, a customer might request to update their delivery date or the details on their account. To do this the customer would need to call a contact centre or send an email, subjecting them to often lengthy waiting or response times and negatively impacting their experience. Through the combination of Conversational AI and RPA, they can submit this request in an easy-to-use chat interface located on a company’s website, portal, and even WhatsApp channel.
The Conversational Assistant can then apply NLP to understand the request, gather information, and securely pass this to an RPA bot for processing – updating within an internal CRM system and even triggering confirmation emails to be sent.
The application of Intelligent Automation in this way increases customers’ ability to self-serve more effectively and significantly improves their experiences through delivering actionability and outcomes in minutes. Eliminating the need to contact support teams or navigate complex website help pages. Delivering on-demand support when customers need it.
Additionally, the combination of Conversational AI and RPA frees up support and contact centre teams through deflecting a high volume of common user requests, meaning that they have more time to focus on higher value and critical issues – further improving user experiences.
With ever-increasing customer and employee choices when it comes to who to buy or work for, Intelligent Automation could offer organisations a solution to offering better user experiences and differentiate themselves in crowded markets. Ensuring scalability of solutions and securing reputation and success in the years to come.
If you would like to find out more about how to transform your user experiences with Conversational AI, get in touch today.