“It’s no longer just about saving money. It’s about resilience and gaining an edge,” states a 2020 Bain & Company report assessing the use of automation in CX.
Indeed, use cases for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) go beyond automating transactional customer conversations through bots, back-office tasks, and desktop processes.
Nowadays, companies are weaving RPA into the wider contact center ecosystem and beyond to improve customer, business, and employee outcomes.
In this edition of the CX Today roundtable, our expert panelists discuss many of these next-generation use cases of RPA, giving tips to companies for taking their CX automation strategy to the next level.
This month, our expert panelists are:
- Wayne Butterfield – Global Head of Intelligent Automation Solutions at ISG Automation
- Charlie Mitchell – Senior Editor at CX Today
- Mark Bunnell - Chief Operations Officer at NuWave Communications
Below, they answer several questions to delve deeper into the current state of contact center automation, sharing lots of helpful advice for crafting an automation strategy along the way.
What Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Trend Most Excites You and Why?
Butterfield: Using RPA in conjunction with AI is the current trend that excites me most. Although RPA is very strong at moving data from one place/system to another, it’s limited in that it needs rules and structure to be helpful.
The addition of AI provides lots of depth to the potential of RPA, as AI can help provide the decision-making capability that it is otherwise missing.
Mitchell: One of the biggest benefits of an automation strategy is that companies can take an incremental approach, seizing low-hanging fruit use cases, measuring the success of each innovation, and building confidence in the technology.
Kickstarting such a project is becoming easier thanks to the emergence of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon within the marketplace, helping to lower the price point at which companies can adopt RPA technologies. With this increased accessibility to RPA, more companies will likely experiment with RPA and exploit its capabilities for streamlining processes across the enterprise.
Bunnell: The trend that most excites us is the switch from a standard legacy phone system to a more resilient and feature-rich phone system like Microsoft Teams with built-in RPA.
For example, a Microsoft Teams environment offers embedded analytics capabilities, routing, and even cognitive services that allow companies to more easily harness the power of automation.
Give an Example of a CX Solution That is Improving Thanks to RPA
Butterfield: The CRM is receiving a higher usage of RPA than most other tools. Sometimes seen as a sticky plaster, Attended RPA in the CRM streamlines long-winded processes, particularly in the contact center.
These processes, such as form filling, often take a while and require agents to put the customer on hold. Yet, RPA completes such tasks in just a few seconds, which is excellent for the agent, customer, and the business.
Mitchell: Automation now sits at the heart of many contact center solutions. For example, the technology helps automate quality scoring within performance management systems. In the WFM system, it also allows resource planners to automate the testing of various forecasting algorithms and much of the scheduling process. It is even part of recruitment software, sifting through CVs and pinpointing relevant applications.
Yet, perhaps the most exciting example is in the IVR, as the technology evolves from cumbersome menu systems to intelligent bots that enhance routing processes and resolve complex queries. RPA enables this self-service triggering actions that will allow self-service flows, which the customer kickstarts using their voice alone. As such, customers can interact with only a smart speaker to solve their queries, not lifting a finger in the process.
Discover more about how voicebots are reimagining traditional IVR processes by reading our article: The Future of Voicebots: Much More Than an IVR Alternative
Bunnell: Tools like iPILOT – NUWAVE’s solution for Microsoft Teams Telephony and Voice Service – help bring robust automation tools to provision users and procure devices while enabling contact centers to manage their entire voice infrastructure in a single user interface (UI).