Lessening the manual labour and looking for reasonable outsourcing destination nations is not enough to go by. The average labour arbitrage, that too in a BPO industry, has curtailed over time.
Then again too much cost-cutting might put a dent in the customer service altogether.
The cumulative customer experience comprising process quality and operational efficiency may largely suffer if pushed too far. So it is technology’s turn to cause a never seen before the revolution to gain more returns. Recently the RPA I.e Robotic Process Automation has opened doors for the industrial revolution, in recent years.
But guess what? Though automation might have fascinating abilities, it still may not be a quick fix and could have some major limitations. Some of them could be that the solution is not corporation orientated and hence does not function according to the corporate strategies. Then again, the tools might cause some inference in other systems and could likely disrupt the customer experience. Also, since they are incorporated narrowly, they mostly tend to miss the bigger picture, for perennial profits altogether.
Now a major shift is taking place in the business process outsourcing world, namely IA i.e Intelligent Automation, that is changing the face of the industry and earning enormous gains and chunks of revenues.
What is Intelligent Automation?
Factually speaking, Intelligent Automation could be termed as a software of ‘virtual army of efficient employees’, as it can seamlessly perform the assigned chores and tasks repeatedly yet productively. It can also surprisingly imitate most of the human mannerisms and actions and execute any given work, based on pre-set rules, whether it is menial or complex tasks.
Since it continuously evolves and alters itself into better, to ensure that each interaction counts, this type of automation is termed as an intelligent one. It further impedes the potential of RPA and machine learning and channels them to improvise the exception and process at all the stages of the cycle.
Being rapid, precise, and cost-effective, the advantages of IA are definitely countless. Plus, its 24X7 availability is a major advantage, as it allows full
traceability, and dims the hazard by restricting any possible entry or reach to the ultra-sensitive data.
Now the bots made with computer software, will not essentially jeopardize social security numbers and credit card information. On the other hand, intelligent automation accomplishes all the reliable, recurring, and efficient processes while simultaneously keep up with the standards of productivity and even helps in lessening the labour costs of the employees, especially the outsiders.
Greater regulatory compliance and extensively improved business outcomes are also guaranteed. Intelligent automation lends corporations an advantage, with considerably better operational agility, faster time for marketing, and enhanced standards. Hence making way for the best in class customer experience that gives better service that too at way too reasonable costs!
DIY IA Solution
Or Do it yourself intelligent Automation that differently applies to the varied areas of your company. Then again, since you’re doing it yourself, there’s definitely a steep learning curve. Maybe not at the nascent stages but eventually in other stages.
Even though the process of installation and configuration might appear linear but it is the corporation integration, that is complicated and cumbersome. The best way out is to maintain a mindset open for a collaborator that lets in constant improvements and contributes to the lasting and ongoing processes such as re-engineering.
Such an approach, helps in blending the overall internal resources, and eventually disrupts the overall business, and produces less ROI.
The scarcity of integration essentially equals the fact that one sub-optimizing processes. Mostly, the DIY solutions are, deployed by minor teams seeking the answers to one or more localized problems, applied narrowly.
The successful launch of Intelligent Automation also opens doors for broader perspectives, that too across the organisation, as it is surprisingly sensitive enough to cause lasting consequences. Hence, the overall upstreaming of the savings may eventually result in major downstream costs.
IA deployed by a self-managed systems integrator
Similar to DIY, but in this case, the installation, customisation, integration, and configuration is all majorly carried out by a specialist. But a definite limit is applied to the efficiency and standard. Unfortunately, when the project terminates, at the contact centre service provider, the integrator leaves the system to deal with the real-life consequences, eventually making you directionless, and might drive down your ROI. After all, there are better ways to implement the IA.
Largely the revolutionary IA of the BPO industry can be classified into RPA and chatbots.
What is RPA?
RPA essentially manages the accounts and finance spreadsheets without a speck of trouble, in the BPO world. It is so because they are designed to be decisive regarding issues like client personalisation or loan approvals, customer feedback classifier (into positive or negative), detect positive and negative bots and even internet trolling.
Though it was parallel to the evaluating data right from the sensors, and the subsequent computation of analytic indicators that bring the efficiencies in the supply chain to the centre stage.
Conversational Agents
Now the conversational agents can be divided into conventional and task-oriented chatbots.
Chatbots render opinions about topics they have idea or knowledge about across social media and blogs and makeup conversations. Eg. Microsoft’s Tay bot is a great example of a conversational agent.
Whereas when it comes to the task-oriented chatbots, as the name goes, their function is to execute a task, belonging to a particular domain. Advanced task-oriented chatbots after sufficient training can easily make hotel reservations or give directions to the vehicle.
Hence, such a kind of technology that thinks on its feet can be supremely useful to the inception of the customer experience industry revolution.
The Data Trove
AI systems can simply incorporate the knowledge based on the field of business and could be represented in such a way that machines could effortlessly process it. A data set with loads of instances are needed for the AI system to grasp it all. This might be a bit of a challenge as AI systems’ way of learning differs from humans, who tend to learn with just a few examples.
This is why the price of conversational dataset development makes this type of AI system prohibitive for small companies to train and they remain only affordable to the largest data powerhouses. This is why some of the most operationally significant breakthroughs in conversational agents’ research consist not so much in model development but in the design of a training mechanism that makes efficient use of the dataset. It is an addition to the omnichannel customer experience that eventually will attract more collaborations and success stories.
Conclusion
The birth of Intelligent Automation has guaranteed dramatic cost savings, the presence of reliable digital labour, accuracy and quality, improving insights and analytics and even reduced process cycle times, and has hence been a game-changer in the world of business process outsourcing. With the changing times, it will soon become a norm.
Did you know? Switching to automation allows the companies to eliminate recurring operational processes, and lets the agents and employees take charge, which will eventually add more value to the businesses. Automation allows the mash-up of the critical operations without being hindered by any techno-shortcomings in the way.
It offers an efficient way to the BPO service provider that integrates critical operations that too without amending the conventional and letting the business leaders essentially force the applications to use modern systems and way too extensive cloud-based services.
