At the time of writing, people are queuing up outside petrol stations across the UK — waiting impatiently, for gas.

A purchase which usually takes no more than a few minutes has even begun to disrupt, not just consumers, but entire logistics networks, with couriers struggling to find fuel. Who’s to blame? Brexit? A global oil shortage? (Well, yes, but…) Or bottlenecks? Even when systems are that well optimised, if one part of the chain has a critical failure, it all fails.

Bottlenecks are our focus here and now – so let’s look at how automation can help us to overcome them.

Add Fuel to The Fire

While current backlogs in the UK relate to physical queues for fuel, we can also think of backlogs in a digital sense: people backed up on your website trying to raise support tickets.

What’s the impact? Customer agents in your call centre are stuck on the phone dealing with an influx of problems created by a bottleneck – unable to offer anything more than an apology. All of this is lost revenue; not just because of downtime, but because you’re taking away chances for new customers to make contact with your business.

Discovery Channel

To get around issues like these, you need to start identifying the key parts of your processes which could be susceptible to failure. At PAteam, whenever we engage with a new customer we always start with a discovery phase. Making sure the scope of the project is understood means the end result will meet their requirement and won’t go over budget.

If something is missed during discovery it can have a big impact down the line. Think about the UK right now, the government didn’t pay enough attention to the number of haulage drivers available following Brexit and now they’re short-staffed.

Taxation Complication

Let’s take another real world scenario where identifying the stress points of processes helps to deal with bottlenecks: the dreaded filing of tax returns. Many people leave it till the last minute to complete their tax returns – meaning that tax departments everywhere have to deal with a tidal wave of submissions.

Knowing that this is going to happen gives the tax office a chance to brace themselves. Or at least it should. If it’s clear that a particular task will be impossible with just people, the ability to deploy automation at the busiest times, on-demand, to handle capacity is worth looking at ahead of time.

Any Time, Any Place

RPA can help at a tactical as well as a strategic level. There are problems you know will occur at some point. Just like tax returns, many businesses know their busiest periods – think Christmas for retail. But when it comes to dealing with unforeseen issues – such as rail strikes – it’s great to be able to quickly build and deploy a bot that takes care of messaging customers to keep them updated. No one likes being kept in the dark.

For all businesses technology should never be the focus. It should always be all about the customer. Bottlenecks hurt customers which hurts businesses. Understanding processes and using well built bots can aid customer satisfaction and that’s always the end goal.

If you’re interested in the benefits of RPA and have a challenge that needs tackling, contact PAteam today.

Right we’ve lured you in with a baity title (!).

Stick with it though, we’re actually taking a look at something you should be wary of. You might have heard these words before, you might even have uttered them yourself. “But we’ve always done it this way”.

Those words are so charged – and speak to an unwillingness to change: a resistance which you need to know about before you implement automation.

Successful implementation of automation comes down to how willing the people involved are to change. The automation itself, that technical challenge, is very rarely the biggest hurdle that we have to help our clients leap over.

Really understanding how to make a process more efficient is the only place to start, before we even think about automation we need to think about why we want to automate.

Because Isn’t Why

Unfortunately, people who carry out their day to day tasks don’t often ask ‘why’ – and almost never in a constructive way. If we don’t understand why we want to change something it stands to reason that the solution probably won’t live up to expectation. That’s why the success of any automation that can be implemented relies hugely on the quality of the process which it sits on.

You might be familiar with the classic ‘5 Whys’ methodology originally conceived by Sakichi Toyoda. Essentially it states that if you ask ‘why’ of something 5 times then you will come to its root cause. While some people might criticise its simplicity, it is a remarkably effective tool for quickly making sense of a situation.

Don’t Just Look Within

Without asking why you’re going to become stagnant, you’ll find yourself, your processes, and your business in a rut. We all find ourselves in ever-changing environments, so processes have to adjust to keep pace with those shifts. To be competitive you need to be improving – always. Often, looking for external help with processes and automation is a great way of getting out of that slump.

Someone external is likely to see a process for what it truly is. They won’t have any attachment to it – which will likely stop them being blind to its inefficiencies. As a business, external assistance offers you a unique opportunity to have someone see what you do for the first time. Also, internal change can often be a struggle, but if you’re paying someone for their advice, all of a sudden it’s a lot easier to listen to (!).

We don’t want to sound like a broken record but automation is not a magic cure for bad processes. Automation and using robots is about applying a technology to an efficient process. To make a process better you have to understand it and not just assume it works because you’ve always done it that way – just ask why.

The thing we’ve always done is automation.The PAteam has extensive knowledge and tools that can help you understand and modify your process. Contact them today.

Convincing people to buy into change is no mean feat. As you have probably experienced with your colleagues, friends, and likely yourself – change is the enemy. Or at least that’s how it’s perceived.

However, change gives us opportunities, especially in business. Change is all about harnessing potential and if you can’t see that potential, well, the change probably isn’t going to be very tempting.

To overcome this, we have to find ways to motivate people to adopt new things like robots and automation.

Trickle Down

Early adoption starts from the top. If you want people throughout a business to get onboard with change, you need to buy in from the top dogs. C-suite buy-in is one thing, but encouraging that top level to publicly back a technology is vital in rolling it out further into a business.

But once you’ve got that, then things can really start rolling. Testing comes next – and is a great way of giving people around the business a taste of things to come – steadily building further awareness of the product.

Training Day

Of course, being able to show people the benefits of change is ideal too. However, that can only be done by understanding which initiatives should be pushed through formal and informal training.

But education doesn’t have to be a ‘big deal’. It’s not just about giving people tuition on how to use technology. Casual discussion can work wonders too. These types of forums within your business give people the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback. It helps them engage with whatever technology you’re bringing in.

What’s In A Name?

Having your teams name a project can kickstart buy-in and introduce a bit of personality to what might otherwise be seen as a dry, corporate initiative. This is especially true if, for example, you’re building a bot to handle a process.

Adding a layer of humanity to the usually faceless automaton is a proven way of helping people engage with an idea. It helps them make connections. Once a connection is formed, build on it. Alexa, Siri, and erm, OK Google(?), are living proof. And we’re confident your teams will do better than Boaty McBoatface (!).

Onto a Winner

A little friendly competition never hurt anyone, and this applies to introducing new ideas. If you can gamify the process of adopting a new technology, you’ll take the sting out of it for a lot of your people. Leaderboards, completion achievements, and awards, these are all great ways to encourage people to engage with a technology – often without realising they are doing it.

Automation, robots, AI, machine learning, all the tech we’re involved in that spikes the interest of the public is not there to replace people. We repeat – it is not there to replace people. They’re there to help everyone do better work.

We can all learn, grow, and do so much more if we embrace change. But often, finding some common ground with change is key to transformation.

If you want help showing people how great change can be – look no further. Contact PAteam now.

People can’t help but do the things they like. But at work, this often comes at the expense of things that need doing!

We’re simple creatures – and if we’re presented with a choice between an easy, fulfilling task alongside something dull and difficult, well 9 times out of 10 we’ll put off the mundane.

But more often than not, the thing that makes a job boring is how we have to go about completing it. That’s why it’s important to get the balance right: between an effective process and an individual’s needs. Let’s dive a little deeper.

Path Of Least Resistance

Our poor choices compound at work where we tend to push all the work we don’t like to the back of the queue – and then rush it, making it more challenging with a higher chance of mistakes. What’s interesting though, is that many of us don’t learn from our mistakes and continue to repeat these patterns throughout our lives.

It’s often not even a conscious choice – we’re hardwired to cut corners. Let’s say you have to update a CMS after a call with a customer. Ensuring the information is complete, correct, and input quickly is all part of establishing an effective process. Humans however, will find the path of least resistance (and be honest – have you ever filled out a ‘Required Field’ with a full stop rather than the proper information)

What Is the Nature of Your Call?

In our quest to make our lives easier, we’re also too quick to throw technology at a problem without giving it too much thought. And in such instances – particularly where customer service is concerned – we often end up making things worse.

Consider a company using IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) tech. While it’s designed to streamline call queues and reduce pressure on call handlers, those on the receiving end of each serenely calm, robotic, pre-recorded apology end up frustrated. Yes it might have saved an operator a few moments passing you through, but at what cost in terms of your customer experience?

Of course, if you took it far further and invested heavily in automation and machine learning to create a bot which could deal with 80% of a customer call, you would save massively on human operators. However, you’d give your teams far less opportunity to provide the customer service only a human can offer.

Automation and process optimisation is a real balance between what works for everyone and what works for the individual. It’s about improving actions which are vital and yet don’t generate revenue. Sometimes there is a magic bullet that hits the target every time, but more often than not you have to make something as good as it can be, rather than perfect.

Want to know more about balancing automation and personalisation? Contact PAteam today.