Over the last couple of years, the workplace has transformed at an incredible rate.
Though we’ve been moving towards a more digitized future for several years now, the pandemic further ignited this journey. Studies say that COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation by anywhere up to 7 years.
Today’s employees are working remotely, in hybrid environments, and with the assistance of artificial intelligence to guide their day-to-day processes. We’re constantly connected in the cloud and communicating over video. The next step, according to innovators like Five9 and Babble, is empowering the future workforce with Workflow Automation.
Five9 and Babble are working together to bring the benefits of Workflow Automation (WFA) to the masses, in a way that could set the stage for a new age of productivity. I spoke to Thomas John, Vice President EMEA Partners Five9, and Mark Jordan, the Managing Director of Babble Contact to learn more about how WFA helps us work smarter, not harder.
What Does Workflow Automation Mean Today?
The rapid transformation of the workplace has led to a significant amount of confusion and misinformation among a lot of teams. Indeed, there’s a common concern among the modern workforce that concepts like “workforce automation” really defines a quest to replace the human agent with a robot or machine.
To clarify the reality of WFA, I asked Mark and Thomas what Workflow Automation means in today’s age of digital CX, and why it’s so important to contact centre environments.
They told me that ultimately, workforce automation is all about taking the menial tasks responsible for consuming essential human productivity and focus time and automating them with machine learning and AI. The idea isn’t to replace the staff member but to eliminate the issues getting in the way of productive work.
“A good way to exemplify this is by looking at the farming industry. Before the plough was invented, the farmer had to do all of the manual work of preparing the earth by hand. Now, farmers have more time to do the important things that only they can do because the plough handles the repetitive, often mundane work that takes up so much time.”
According to Thomas and Mark, the same concept applies in the contact centre. With AI systems to deal with repetitive admin work, contact centre agents can focus on the things they do best – like having empathetic conversations.
How Can WFA Boost Agent Productivity?
Mark and Thomas told me the beauty of WFA is in its ability to remove mundane tasks, so they don’t consume the finite resource of “time” in the contact centre. Companies need to make sure that agents are spending their most productive moments on the things that can’t be automated – like empathy.
“We always need humans for important conversations, but they often don’t have enough time to focus on the things they do best because of repetitive, mundane tasks. WFA eliminates the extra clutter and noise, so agents have more space to thrive.”
For most people in the CX landscape, admin work is far from the most effective use of their time – and it’s rarely something they enjoy doing either. “We find that when people don’t actually enjoy the repetitive stuff, that’s when errors and issues start to emerge. Automating repetitive tasks with AI can reduce the number of errors while making teams happier overall.”
How Does WFA Work? How Important is Analytics?
Thomas and Mark note that WFA can come in many flavours, depending on the needs of the business. As customers continue to say they don’t like the feeling of knowing they’re interacting with a bot, some companies are even embedding more “errors” into their AI interactions, to make the conversation feel a little more natural.