By Alf Saggese, Chief Revenue Officer at TrustPortal
To sustain business, then start fuelling growth, forward-thinking organisations operating in every sector, are urgently seeking innovative ways of delivering faster, more productive, digital services.
They want to accelerate this without big investments and gain a ROI in months, not years.
To achieve this, automation is the obvious route. But industry analysts say that not enough organisations are digitising and automating entire end-to-end processes, across the front-office and multi-channels. This is where real transformation value is gained.
HFS research (2022) revealed that the top 25% of automation COEs only use 40% of their automation licences, and 70% of businesses see it as a key priority.
So, it’s no surprise that Automation and Transformation leaders in multiple sectors are increasingly asking us two key questions. How do we achieve ROI and what is the real-world timeframe to achieving it?
The catalyst to generating a faster ROI
We think the answer is about enabling staff and tech to work easier as one, so there's more productivity, delivered faster, with less effort for everyone. How?
By applying advanced HyperAutomation: uniquely evolved and proven by us.
We believe that advanced HyperAutomation is all about connecting, orchestrating and augmenting the staff, legacy and digital technologies that companies already have, while building on these investments. This opens a whole range of possibilities.
We’re talking about enabling software robots to shift up from performing back-office and sub-tasks by significantly increasing their scope and capabilities.
We’re talking about robots performing valuable end-to-end, processes across the front office, back-office, self-service and beyond. And it’s not just about enabling them to work faster and smarter. It’s about enabling them to assist employees via ‘guided’ real-time dialogues and interactions to transform every process step.
We can also provide a ROI for tools such as ServiceNow or Salesforce, BPM, ERP systems, portals and others. Augmenting these tools’ capabilities is important as they are limited by the expensive integration effort required with backend systems via APIs.
For example, we plug into tools like Salesforce and orchestrate them to significantly increase their scope.
Fast ROI is further supported because we require no coding or integration effort to augment existing ways of working across legacy and digital systems, so expect results in weeks, not years.
Ultimately, we believe digital service enhancement is now achievable at 10% of the cost of traditional digitisation and automation approaches.
ROI quantified
We enable ROI to be measured very clearly and at an unprecedented rate.
A great example of this is our work at Telefonica. When we first started in 2018, the entire cost of the contact centre transformation project was recovered within 1 year. This is unheard of in the industry. Since then, Spain’s largest company has been experiencing over 50 million euros per year savings.
MetLife also attributed $25 million savings directly to the use of our capabilities. We’ve recently helped a UK energy company’s customer service and automation teams deliver a complex move in and move out processes: from design to go live in only 3 weeks. It's generated £1.4 million of value in just 4 months. This is just the start.
While there’s hard numbers, the softer ones, like employee and customer engagement, are also important in supporting ROI.
We help Telefonica and others reduce average call handling time by 65%. This provides a tangibly positive impact on the customer, where +5 NPS and CSI scores show the rewards of delivering satisfactory resolutions much quicker.
Our robot-guided, real-time dialogues and interactions also raises agent satisfaction and because we enable a better user understanding of processes, training time is cut from months to days. We make it easier for agents to deliver big service improvements, while cutting high industry attrition rates of 30% per year – down to 10%.
Other ROI use cases
Advanced HyperAutomation is also solving specialised business challenges across sectors. There are so many use cases that can generate a huge ROI, here’s three examples that can be actioned now:
1. Imagine finally moving the contact centre towards fully multi-channel and self-service. Customers can also self-serve through any digital channel, or even switch across multi-channels: guided by the same digital workers servicing agents, so they’re immediately able to support customers on web, mobile, chatbots, and more.
We’re now helping clients enable self-service across multiple channels, with the aim of producing 50%+ cost savings, while generating all the goodwill that comes from greater convenience, care and satisfaction.
2. Email is often the highest cost channel for an organisation: at 2-3 times the cost of a call. So, how about harnessing the power of gen AI to interpret intent and taking appropriate actions in real-time - across any number, age or complexity of systems – at any scale. For example, with inbound email inquiries, pre-processing allows the context awareness for every message before customer service agents even open their inbox.
Another UK energy company has already made significant progress, including training NLP on 10,000’s of emails. They have a big ROI opportunity with business customers who have more complex needs and use email more heavily.
3. Or how about enabling technologies such as IoT, edge devices and mobility to deliver pre-emptive and preventative services that reduce risks, cut costs and increase productivity. We’re enabling the vision for IoT-enabled real-time services to instantly notice and address issues in the field and more.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, unparalleled ROI and TCO is potentially achievable in months, not years: and much less than the cost of traditional digitisation and automation approaches.
A proof of value can be actioned in weeks by organisations, then rapidly scaled, so they benefit from new types of smarter work that solves problems previously deemed impossible due to the limitations of time, cost, resources, and legacy technology.