By Alf Saggese, Chief Revenue Officer at TrustPortal
In a relentless pursuit of efficiency and cost reduction, one area under intense scrutiny is email processing. It’s a notoriously costly channel, and at up to three times the expense of a call, it demands immediate attention.
As contact centre backlogs swell, ticket resolution times lengthen, and regulatory burdens increase, organisations are grappling with the need to streamline the handling of both external and internal emails.
Users must determine the intent of each email, cut through ambiguity - while identifying products, services, customers and requests. The need to cross-reference emails, typically across multiple systems - also leads to misinterpretation and errors.
Is GenAI the answer?
There's a huge amount of noise around harnessing the potential of Generative AI (GenAI) to interpret email intent and take appropriate actions.
The reality is many are discovering that GenAI's potential of enhancing services and cutting costs is often challenged by integrating it with old systems and existing ways of working.
Also, depending on the criticality of the process, having a "human in the loop" is critical to managing risk and ensuring GenAI's accuracy: either in initiating processes or generating responses.
Ultimately, the complexity of email processing, coupled with the need for real-time, human intervention, means despite industry interest, it's not been a feasible candidate for significant automation.
So, what capabilities are already supporting these goals faster, across both traditional and all digital channels in the real-world?
HyperAutomating GenAI
Advanced HyperAutomation is the catalyst. It significantly accelerates the ability to deliver better email processing, by adding human experience and AI augmented insights, into a fully digital, end-to-end process - in real-time.
This can also be achieved within any complex, old IT environment that lacks simple connectivity or API's.
Here’s how advanced HyperAutomation delivers the sophisticated orchestration of three technologies and people in a “no-code” way.
RPA “Digital Workers” (from any vendor), perform real-time access to any system.
Digital dynamically generates contextual UI’s for every stage of a process, across any channel.
AI, including GenAI, determines need, context and data from channels, systems & images.
People, including staff or customers, provide input, review, approve and ensure a “human in the loop” where needed.
Advanced HyperAutomation is about enabling each task within end-to-end email processing to be perfectly performed by the best combination of staff, multi-vendor digital workers and GenAI tools.
Ultimately, advanced HyperAutomation is about delivering simple processes that support staff, via digital worker-guided, 'contextual', digital interfaces in real-time. It’s about transforming every task within any email processing activity.
Real world use cases
A UK energy company is already pushing the GenAI envelope to address email processing, including training NLP on 10,000's of emails. However, NLP only improved routing and reporting - not delivery of responses. To deal with this complexity, they are using HyperAutomated GenAI to improve the agent experience, to deliver process savings and better adherence to SLA’s.
There is also an opportunity for the energy company to assist business customers who use more complex emails. They’re aiming to make email processing easier to use for agents, by providing a simple view of what's outstanding, SLA reporting and more.
A European telco has also highlighted initial results of using HyperAutomated GenAI. "We are now achieving the same levels of extreme email productivity as we've reached in other channels. Our email inquiry processing times are 65% faster across the board. We've further enhanced customer service quality by removing input errors and are saving more agent hours each month.”
Final thoughts
Ultimately, the combination of GenAI and HyperAutomation, can transform every stage of email processing. Expect significant savings in time and costs, coupled with boosts in productivity and accuracy. All of these capabilities are now proven and available from TrustPortal.
Learn more about actioning this from EDF, one of our pioneering customers speaking at AWS Automations Fest next week.