By Alf Saggese, Chief Revenue Officer at TrustPortal
Enterprise automation leaders are urgently seeking innovative ways to fuel growth faster, by delivering more productive, valuable, digital services and experiences.
So, what are the key strategic opportunities ripe for harvesting across organisations' front-office and multi-channel operations?
How about more easily adding greater digital care by reducing service delivery effort and completion times, while increasing customer satisfaction scores. Or giving customer convenience a boost by enabling more effective self-service via the most convenient channel.
Maybe start tackling contact centre backlogs in anger and delivering on customer service SLA’s by increasing email processing productivity.
Why automation isn’t enough
Traditional approaches to capitalising on digital service transformation are constrained by the challenges of applying transformative tech like GenAi across poorly connected or inoperable legacy and digital systems. The vast complexity, time and investments needed to make this happen, typically means it doesn’t.
Over time, RPA and intelligent automation has been trying to address these connectivity and interoperability challenges. Think automated processes designed to stitch these technologies together: with bots accessing and processing data from disparate systems to deliver positive outcomes.
But many automation leaders we speak with remain frustrated about not digitising and automating enough end-to-end processes – especially across more dynamic front-office and multi-channel environments.
For example, in contact centres, every second is critical to offering the best level of service. This means that RPA and intelligent automation ‘software robots’ need to be working with old and new technologies to support staff much smarter faster - across all channels.
This means delivering processes that not only connect multiple old systems and newer digital applications, but also bring human experience and AI insights into a processes too. And to achieve serious value, all of these elements must be orchestrated and actioned in real-time – and at a serious scale.
What’s next?
So, what technological capabilties can help automation leaders achieve these goals smarter, faster and frugally - without big investments?
Hailed by Gartner in 2019 as the next evolutionary stage of RPA, HyperAutomation is now remerging as the catalyst. It’s being proven and evolved at scale. It’s boosting work efficiency, productivity and value within mission-critical front-office environments of leading brands including Telefonica and EDF. How?
‘Advanced HyperAutomation’ is about uniquely enabling multi-vendor automation tools (software robots) to work faster, smarter, hyper productively - with staff, GenAI, legacy and digital technologies. They’re all intelligently orchestrated as a ‘HyperAutomated workforce’ communicating and co-working via real-time dialogues to perfectly perform every step of any process, of any complexity or function.
The key is how advanced HyperAutomation upskills all multi-vendor robots so they can:
Access any legacy or modern system including via UI, API and HTML access.
Process data end-to-end across systems at warp speed - with typical UI to robot comms as quick as 10ms.
Super scale by working harder, with just 2 robots supporting up to 200 concurrent staff in a contact centre.
Generate real-time contextual dialogues that guide staff for every process step and dynamically change in real-time, based on data received.
Automation and SME teams jointly design and deliver HyperAutomated, 'human & AI enriched’ real-time, digital processes of any complexity and function. These end-to-end processes seamlessly connect and augment existing systems, technologies and digital channels: whatever their age and complexity.
The result is much simpler, more valuable, digital interactions and next best interactions delivered to staff and customers across every channel that provide transformed services and experiences.
Advanced HyperAutomation in action
Here’s an example of a process designed for the contact centre.
1. A customer call via IVR immediately activates and coordinates robots to instantly gather information from multiple legacy, modern systems and APIs - even before the call being routed to an agent.
2. Robots dynamically generate agent-friendly interfaces from this information that’s dynamically adapted for each customer’s needs.
3. So, the right 360 view customer information is instantly provided to agents, in the right UI, at the right time, given the task at hand.
4. This makes each step the “next simplest interaction” for agents, so it reduces workloads and increases productivity, leading to lower call times. GenAI also helps agents to swiftly solve any issue.
Real world impact
Organisations using advanced HyperAutomation are streamlining work, cutting costs, and solving previously intractable problems while boosting productivity across large scale front-office operations and other channels. Crucially, they’re hitting these goals and ROI - faster, frugally, at scale.
Case in point is Telefonica Spain. Over 12,000 contact centre agents at Telefonica use advanced HyperAutomation daily to deliver over 120 enhanced processes. In 2018, they recouped the entire contact centre transformation project cost within a year. Since then, they save over 50 million euros annually.
MetLife? £25 million directly attributed savings. A UK energy company? £1.4 million value generated in just 4 months.
But it's not just savings; it's positive impact. Call handling time is slashed by 65%, boosting customer satisfaction with +5 NPS and CSI scores. Staff attrition rates? Down from 30% to 10% and training shrinks from months to days.
Final thoughts
Advanced HyperAutomation unifies and augments existing people and technology investments: eliminating the need for rip-and-replace strategies. The approach is also tech agnostic, so as new capabilities emerge, they too can be augmented.
No coding is required, so transition is easier, without unnecessary costs and efforts. Whether digitally mature or facing legacy challenges, all organisations can employ advanced HyperAutomation to do more productive work, at 10% of the cost of traditional digitisation and automation. Everyone wins.
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