What is intelligent automation?
In short, intelligent automation is a holistic solution for digital transformation. It is a combination of the following three key aspects:
- Dynamic case management: organizes work with unstructured or ad hoc processes, so it takes less effort of skilled employees to make decisions and work on the details of a case.
- Robotic process automation (RPA): reduce manual work by humans in applications, particularly in repetitive tasks that differ very little in each iteration.
- Orchestration: connect and integrate separate systems and data to bring together valuable information.
Why is intelligent automation needed?
Organizations focus more and more on personalized products to stay on top and ahead of the game. Customers’ expectations are higher than ever, shaped by encounters with competitors and other occurrences. They have experienced the personal approach first hand, as well as immediate response through the channels of their choice. This inevitably raises the question: why isn’t company XX able to do exactly the same?
Of course, the necessary underlying business processes need to be very divers and complex to offer this optimized customer journey. Even more so, due to an increase in both compliance regulations and their rate of change. Adding to the problem are complex IT landscapes consisting of many different siloed systems. Typically, these siloed systems are geared towards collecting data and passively providing information to internal staff. Traditional approaches deliver rigid and unintegrated services to employees and customers and absence of the much desired automated customer centric approach. Consequently and unfortunately, most organizations still rely heavily on manual work by skilled employees to support their processes.
The reason why intelligent automation is needed is quite simple: it enables maximal automation of activities and tasks while facilitating skilled employees to deal with exceptions. It grants them time and freedom to create and be productive in a human way. All this leads to:
- An improved customer and employee experience
- Saved time and costs, because of the reduction in manual work
- Cutback of errors in processes, while leaving room for exceptions
So what does intelligent automation offer in practice?
Intelligent automation focused on customers offers personalized customers journeys with tailored advice, customized products and a relevant completion process across all touchpoints and channels, from websites to chat and call center. Customers experience no restrictions, while switching between the convenience of online self-service, the guidance and advice of intelligent services and the expertise of your employees.
Focus on customer centric services
Examples of services you may offer customers through intelligent automation:
- Virtual advisors to support customers in finding the best possible solution for their situation by providing tailored advice.
- Virtual assistants to collaborate with customers by monitoring their behavior and provide tailored feedback, communication and advice on improvements and opportunities.
- Intelligent forms to only ask customers what is necessary to complete transactions while reusing existing data, integrating external systems and utilizing the context to minimize customer effort and reduce drop-off ratios.
- Customer self-service enabling customers to solve problems, update information, manage details, subscriptions and payments without requiring any interaction with a human agent (the preference of roughly 40% of all customers).
Organizations such as Tesco Bank have successfully implemented a customer centric (banking) approach by using the Be Informed platform for intelligent automation. Also AXA used the Be Informed platform to offer a fully automated personalized service. Download the whitepaper here.
What is up next?
We briefly introduced intelligent automation, why it is needed and what it may offer in practice. In our next blog we highlight what is needed to make intelligent automation possible. Stay tuned by signing up below or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to stay in the loop at all times.
