Reaping the Rewards of the Robotic Process Automation

Did you know that the average employee spends up to 80 percent of their day dealing with mundane, routine work? Many of these tasks are straightforward and require accuracy and speed, but take up a lot of time, and require little or no creative thinking. So, with reports that robots are able to perform tasks four to five times faster than a human it comes as little surprise that there is a major trend in the uptake of robotic process automation (RPA). In fact, half of today’s organisations say they are planning to implement RPA, and more than one-quarter have already done so.

Giving employees a virtual colleague

Think of RPA as giving employees a virtual colleague, that allows them to focus on more engaging, productive and profitable activities, by automating time-consuming and monotonous tasks. It works by replicating human action, with ‘robots’ interacting with desktop applications and processing transactions in the same way a human would.

Organisations can choose their desired level of automation – full or partial automation. For routine processes, robots can perform them without any human intervention. For more complex procedures, employees and robots can share the responsibility, with the employee performing the tasks that require more extensive thought and action, and the robot performing the more structured tasks.

For organisations that have already begun to travel along this path the outcomes are proving to be nothing short of transformative and nowhere is it more evident than in the contact centre. One such organisation is a major financial services group in Italy that has reported some remarkable results.

The experience of implementing RPA

The business had established its own contact centre company, providing business process outsourcing for financial and insurance organisations. It had built a reputation for exceptional personal customer service, however, operations were flagging as the contact centre reached capacity. Its 500 agents were handling roughly 650,000 calls per month and were under immense pressure to meet SLAs, which required agents to act within five minutes of receiving a fraud alert for a suspicious credit card transaction. In practice, agents were spending a lot of time on data entry and follow-up activities after a customer interaction ended. The contact centre needed a new model to reduce the repetitive and low-value tasks interfering with the core activities of its agents – all without sacrificing accuracy or undermining customer relationships.

Before implementing RPA, all its call handling processes were evaluated to determine which tasks could be automated and once this exercise was completed the technology was deployed. Today, agents are guided with pop-ups on their screens during fraud investigations and interactions with credit card holders, reducing handling times and processing errors. Robots then complete the time- consuming wrap-up phase, including documenting the case and its outcome, freeing agents to focus on more value-added tasks and to begin the next interaction immediately after concluding the previous one. The contact centre ‘robots’ execute a series of data entry actions, including completing the ticket and database entry log and filing claims requests. This has allowed the agents to focus more of their time and efforts on fraud case investigation activities, real-time decision-making and customer service.

99 percent accuracy in preventing fraudulent activity

The results that have been reported since the deployment of robotic automation have been impressive across a range of key performance indicators with improvements to quality, predictability and speed. The company now handles more than 8,000 alerts each month with greater than 99 percent accuracy in preventing fraudulent activity.

The RPA solution also reduced average handing time of the wrap-up phase by 82%, allowing the contact centre to meet process SLAs 100 percent of the time. What’s more, employee satisfaction levels skyrocketed, with agents able to spend more time performing meaningful work reporting that they felt that their efforts were valued more. As the organisation continues to embrace RPA, the leadership team in the business envisions a future in which contact centre representatives are able to focus solely on the customer.

Let humans do what they do best and robots take care of the rest

In this context, RPA is a real gamechanger providing agents that most precious and scarce resource -time. The nature of calls that customers are making to organisations are increasingly different from what they were in the past. Since customers today desire more autonomy and want to resolve their own problems (typically online), the issues that agents must deal with are often far more complex. They therefore require a much wider skillset, have the ability to research and analyse problems, be equiped with higher levels of technical skills, be able to project manage problem resolution, and have a wide range of communication and creative skills.

Every great technology enables us to do things that either we cannot do, or help us to do it faster, better and more efficiently, and RPA does exactly that. As such it is one of the most compelling innovations of recent years.

Author: Karen Inbar, NICE

www.nice.com