By Alf Saggese CRO TrustPortal
This year, to fuel growth, every forward-thinking organisation, operating in every sector everywhere, will be urgently seeking innovative ways of delivering more productive work faster and with less resources.
This means significantly boosting sluggish enterprise productivity - while removing inefficient ways of working taking place across most organisations’ front to the back-office operations. Further fuelling this imperative is the need to satisfy ever-increasing customer demands for enhanced services and experiences - and somehow achieve this within a climate of cost cutting.
Drill down and barriers to high productivity are manifest. Principal causes come from old legacy IT environments, manual, paper-heavy and inefficient processes and broken digital journeys. One area where productivity issues are very transparent is in front office and contact-centre environments.
Often, employees must navigate across multiple, poorly connected, old and modern systems - often 10 or more, so they struggle to bring everything together to properly deliver services. Ironically, the very tools originally designed to make employees more productive are adding even more complexity. This results in costly inefficiencies, poor quality services: high on staff and customer effort but low on productivity.
Productivity enablement constraints
Productivity boosts can be gained by applying many levers including smart investment, greater efficiency, better management practices and more technological innovation. But more than ever, the economic fundamentals supporting and driving productivity are broken.
Traditional approaches to productivity innovations typically include replacing core systems or creating new, bespoke digital services, but are hampered by the complexity, cost, time and staff investment needed. Often there's simply not enough skilled staff to drive this transformation, not enough money to rip and replace old systems and practices and not enough time to transform before both local and international competitors with deeper pockets or less technical debt, gain advantage.
Over time, intelligent automation tools have been attempting to help organisations do more for less. But organisations still use intelligent automation in a disconnected way. They’re only automating parts or sub-tasks within a work process and mainly within back-office environments. They're not digitising and automating entire end-to-end processes - across the front-office - to the back-office and across all channels, or in real-time: which is where real productivity value can be gained.
To really transform work productivity, it's not just about making employees more productive. It's also about making software robots, AI and digital technologies operate much faster, more efficiently to be much more productive. It’s about all of these elements working in real-time in tandem, across all processes to deliver results faster, at a much greater scale. And it’s not about costly ripping and replacing, but connecting and augmenting people and technologies that organisations already have.
A new hyper-productivity engine
This is where TrustPortal comes in. For years, we’ve been helping global organisations create real-time digital processes and services that seamlessly work not just on top of old complex IT systems – but with newer digital technologies too. So, we’ve created a smarter way to fix the productivity challenge by applying our advanced HyperAutomation capabilities.
We achieve this by enabling the real-time intelligent orchestration of people, multiple-automation technologies, digital and AI. We’ve added to this our high throughput "MiniBots" that work with more modern systems via HTML or REST API's: easier and faster than traditional robots. The result is an augmented digital workforce delivering all types of high-speed, data-rich, highly productive end-to-end processes across front-office, multi-channel operations, on the road and in the field.
We're talking about enabling a smarter way of working where each step within any end-to-end process, of any complexity and business function, is best performed by a combination of robotic and human 'workers', augmented with AI tools – all inter-operating at real-time speeds. These capabilities are delivered to employees in real-time, via robot generated UIs, that are intelligent, intuitive and contextual, so they gain much simpler, best possible, digital interactions and next best interactions: proven to result in vastly enhanced services and experiences.
For example, we make robots work in real-time: accessing multiple old systems in parallel, based on what they find, they dynamically create the next step, or 'next best interaction' in a guided journey. This reduces workloads and increases productivity. AI tools can also be embedded in user interfaces: further equipping agents with predictive analysis capabilities, so they perform next best interactions that swiftly solve customer issues.
New potential
The potential for a HyperAutomated way of working to generate hyper-productivity throughout all private and public sector organisations is enormous across all public and private sectors. As well as making customer service environments more productive, new ways to instantly identify and solve issues are also possible by enabling IoT devices to instantly inter-communicate and operate with physical and digital systems of all ages, sizes and complexities.
The results of HyperAutomation fuelled hyper-productivity are now proven, compelling and wide-ranging. Telefónica has already achieved a significant 50 million euros savings per year, 50% faster service completion times. Even complex Telefónica processes can be completed in minutes, rather than hours - or even days. Simple robot guided interactions for agents also not only mean significantly more productivity but less training and far easier multi-skilling.
Other novel metrics include: 30% reduction in agent attrition and 30% cost reductions - while achieving +5 Customer Services Index scores. It's a triple win for employees, customers, and the organisation.
MetLife has also attributed $25 million savings directly to the use of HyperAutomation. EDF has seen improved completion times for complex processes, 98% completion rates, improved efficiency, quality and customer experience as well as reduced advisor training effort.
Final thoughts
The good news is the intelligent orchestration of people, robots, AI and digital means that that new ways of HyperAutomated, hyper-productive, working can be achieved faster, with less capital, resources and efforts, than most corporations believe is possible.
And here's the kicker. HyperAutomation requires no coding or integration effort to augment ways of working across legacy and digital systems: regardless of their complexity. It also augments existing automation and other tech investments, so greater productivity is delivered in weeks, not years: and at 10% of the cost of traditional digitisation and automation approaches. The future of working just got easier, smarter and more productive.
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