Automation is becoming more than just a way of processing data without the need for people. It’s now being applied across a range of businesses to actually support staff and customers alike. But what are the highlights of this developing, people-focused tech?

Many businesses use customer service automation to increase the effectiveness of their support staff, which in turn provides their customers with a more complete level of service. So what exactly is customer service automation, and how can it help your staff, your customers, and your business?

What Is Customer Service Automation?

Consumer service automation is a particular use of automation technology that aims to support customers by providing them with ways of communicating with a business – without the need to speak with a person. The general goal is to make information more accessible, but also to reduce the amount of impact on your teams from customer inquiries.

Some examples of the technology include chatbots, which you’re likely to have seen pop up, usually in the bottom right-hand corner of a web page on some sites or even in apps. These bots have a connection with a knowledge base and provide answers to questions from customers based on their messages.

There is also the slightly older, but rapidly developing, technology of IVR (Interactive Voice Response). When you call a company, you’re often sent through an automated lobby where you have to say words that relate to the nature of your call so that you can be funneled to the most appropriate operator or at least brief whichever person you are passed to about what your call is about.

3 Big Benefits of Customer Service Automation

Give Your Team Time

You hire people to make your business better – not  to get them to push buttons and carry out tasks that a bot can do. Unfortunately, that’s what many customer service people end up doing. Customer service automation is a great way to free up much of their time to focus on delivering true value to your business. With more time, they can focus on delivering the highest quality in every customer interaction, as well as solving more complex customer queries that bots aren’t capable of dealing with.

Prevent Errors

Automating customer service workflows and processes reduces the possibility of human error and speeds up the process of connecting consumers with the appropriate help. This is because customers can be guided via a workflow that includes FAQs, a self-service center, an interactive speech system, and finally onto a human support team member if necessary rather than being passed from one customer service team member to another. This reduces the likelihood of human errors when passing customers from one operator to another.

Boost Time To Value

By giving customers ways to get information on your products and services 24/7, you’re helping to unlock the potential of those offerings. It doesn’t matter whether a query is technical or billing-related, giving customers that information in the quickest way possible, reduces the time it takes them to get the full value of your products and services.

This has a positive impact on customer satisfaction, which cascades into brand loyalty, and in turn CLV (customer lifetime value). That means putting support bots in place to deal with basic queries in a timely manner can generate more revenue for your business in the long run.

Keen to discover how bots can boost customer satisfaction. Contact PAteam today!

We’ve covered RPA in contact centers before, but today we’re looking into all things Attended Automation. That means, in the next few hundred words, you’ll find out what attendant automation is and how it can help your contact center.

Contact centers are often hectic places. With phones constantly ringing, and customers at the end of every line wanting help and answers – there’s a lot of pressure to deliver. People do a great job of connecting with people, but the systems that have historically been built to support them can’t keep pace with customer expectations in 2022. That’s where Attended Automation comes in.

What is Attended Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates human actions, such as dragging and dropping files, clicking the mouse, or hitting keys on a keyboard in a quick, precise, and repeatable way. In contrast, Attended Automation provides employees with a “robot companion” (in the form of a piece of software) to support their work. The key difference between attended, and unattended automation is that the attended bot only works under the supervision of a human.

You can program certain activities that an attended bot will automatically perform when necessary using trigger events. A human employee picking up the phone or pressing a button on their screen could be this trigger, which then leads to an automated action from the bot.

What Can Attended Automation Do For Contact Centers?

An automated attendant’s duties could include gathering customer data from one platform and updating it automatically on another, or providing insight from previous calls with a customer to speed up a conversation. By combining Attended Automation with other technologies, such as Machine Learning and Speech Pattern Recognition, it’s possible for a bot to gauge someone’s mood from short responses before passing the call to a human operator.

These types of Attended Automations give a human employee more time and information to be able to concentrate on providing a personal service to customers in an environment where speed of interaction and resolution is often key. You can’t replace human connection, but you can augment it. By giving human operators more time and information, they can make better decisions at a higher pace.

These sorts of options can drastically cut down on ramp time, average handling time, boost data entry accuracy, and raise CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) ratings. In the contact center, Attended Automation has the potential to result in happier employees, happier clients, and ultimately, a healthier bottom line – really, should be the automatic choice.

Want to make your contact center the best it can be? You need Attended Automation, so speak to PAteam today.

Technology comes with the promise of making things faster, easier, and cheaper – but how about more sustainable? As it happens, automation, as part of wider digitization, can have a fantastic impact on the world we live in, and be part of repairing some of the damage we’ve already done.

As the world continues to feel the full force of human-imposed climate change, sustainability efforts around the world are growing. The owner of Patagonia recently gave up his business as a means to reinvest company profits fully into fighting climate change. This signals a way for investors to back things for more than the sake of profit. But what part can automation play in building a brighter future?

Opportunities To Improve

The range of intelligent automation has expanded thanks to the combined capability of enabling technologies including IoT, ML, blockchain, digital twins, and AI. These additional capabilities have served to catalyse automation – making it more powerful than ever before.

One of the biggest causes of climate change is our reliance on fossil fuels. Electricity companies, for example, are now working to optimize their operations, by making everything they do as efficient as possible. Using intelligent automation along with AI and digital twins, businesses can now have live data models running which automatically map out grids and adjust how they distribute their power in real-time.

These types of efforts serve to create more efficient operations, with lower fuel usage, lower costs, and less environmental impact. That buys companies and consumers time to develop and adopt more environmentally friendly energy options.

Eliminate Wastage

When thinking about wastage, it’s very important to consider the knock-on effects of any action. Time saved on any task can reduce energy usage and increase the time a person can spend on more important tasks. Common wastage savings, besides time, that can be found from process automation includes reducing unnecessary printing as well as digitizing invoicing and purchasing.

Process mining is a brilliant place to start when it comes to finding out where time and other resources are wasted. It’s an integral part of building better automation and can lay the foundation for far more efficient business processes in many different environments.

The Business Benefits

First and foremost, there are huge cost savings available to businesses which take automation seriously. That is simply the main headline for any business out there.

Beyond the money saved, are the added benefits of things like employee engagement – when you free them from the dull, repetitive tasks they’ve been chained to for so long. And, customer satisfaction, when you have an automated help centre that can give support around the clock.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is that the environmental benefits of reducing energy usage will help to protect the place all businesses and people exist in – our planet.

Want to do good and boost your business? Automation is the way. Talk to PAteam today.

Some of the best ways to improve customer experience are actually very simple. Offering your clients an authentic experience, as well as transparency and honesty in how you operate, can go a long way in winning them over. But if it’s so simple, why doesn’t everyone do it?

Without getting preachy, we’re very big on transparency and honesty in the ways that we operate, not only in our business but in the technology that we’re really passionate about – including RPA. Let’s show you how you can make your customer experience top-notch.

What Are Authenticity And Transparency In Customer Experience?

Being honest and transparent when discussing your ideas and beliefs with customers is considered a positive strategy for managing the customer experience.

In reality, although this approach can be planned and accounted for, really, it’s just a genuine way of interacting – where your customer understands what you mean, what you want to deliver, and how you want to work: nothing more than that. This style of communication, if backed up by your actions, very quickly builds trust and understanding.

How Can RPA Help With Customer Experience?

Just quickly, here is the difference between the two key types of automation – attended and unattended. Attended bots require activation by people, whereas unattended bots run on a predetermined schedule without human input. It’s a simple distinction, but nonetheless, an important one.

Automation transparency is an important design philosophy that states that the roles, capabilities, objectives, activities, and impacts of automation should be directly viewable through an interface that humans can understand. If you can nail this, every single one of your customers will have a better time working with your bots.

If you develop automation in your business – either for internal processes or customer-facing systems – everyone who encounters those bots needs to understand why they’re there. People are naturally distrustful of robots because they often work in ways that people can’t intuitively understand.

It’s difficult for employees to leave a task they have potentially done for years and let a robot take over without any direct oversight. The same goes for a customer who is talking to a chatbot on a website – they don’t believe that the bot can offer them what a human can.

But that’s just it – bots can’t offer the things that people can; they aren’t built for it. That’s why being transparent about why RPA is in place is so important.

Let your customers know that their first encounter with a bot is just to improve the speed their account handler can access information. Or, if you’re convincing your staff about a new bot, tell them it’s there to help cut down on time spent on boring tasks and that that will save the business money.

Be honest about the fact a robot isn’t going to replace a person, and nor should it.

Where Does PAteam Fit Into All This?

At PAteam, transparency starts with setting expectations. That’s the expectations of us as a product and service provider, but also of the products and services themselves.

We set up systems of communication with all our clients so that they always know how to get in contact with us on anything they want to talk about – just check out some of the companies we’ve helped.

Ultimately we’re all human, so if you make mistakes be open about it – we certainly will be.

How Is Disclosing Product Information Managed?

Again, start with an honest and transparent approach. There may be specific rules governing how you can talk about your product or service, but providing these boxes are ticked, just approach every conversation you have with customers, new and old, in a way that promotes honest discussion and feedback – it really is that simple.

Want to improve your customer experience? PAteam can help. Contact us today.

Businesses can have a hard time tracking down bottlenecks and issues within embedded processes. They might sense that something is causing problems, but without any way to track it down, how do they make fixes? Simple – Process Mining.

Using process mining, companies can dive deep into their processes and effectively audit them, discovering the root cause of bottlenecks or output issues. As digital acceleration continues in every industry, the need to evaluate digital processes only grows. Process mining provides businesses with many upsides with increasing pressure to reduce cost.

Why is process mining important?

Process mining is used to examine business process performance, identify improvement areas, and evaluate process enhancements. Process mining provides a data-driven visualization of process performance. This delivery method is particularly popular with non-technical business leaders because they can easily spot challenges and opportunities.

These things also make it an effective companion for tools like robotic process automation (RPA), as it can first find the optimal spots to put “bots” and then assess the RPA’s benefit. Process mining is a great catalyst for other technologies, and this is why it’s so appealing for businesses focused on digitization.

Types Of Process Mining

Although people use different names to describe the different types of process mining, there are essentially three core methods.

Discovery: Process discovery is the most common form of process mining and uses event log information to autonomously build a process model. This is usually the starting point for businesses because it requires no historical process model information.

Conformance: Conformance testing checks to see that the process model is actually followed by user behavior. This kind of process mining analyses event log data to match a process description to an existing process model and find any differences from the intended model.

Enhancement: This type of process mining takes an existing process model and enhances it using new data. For instance, quality checking results might help managers identify bottlenecks in a larger process model, allowing them to improve the process and, in turn, improve quality.

Industries Which Use Process Mining

Well, basically any.

That’s a very broad brush, but providing there is a digital component to the work that you do, then the chances are process mining can be helpful. One great example of it in action is within the manufacturing industry. In manufacturing, there is often a gulf between the digital processes that a business runs on and the physical manufacturing it does. Process mining is great in this sort of environment because it can quickly establish gaps or improvements in a wide range of processes.

Getting Started With Process Mining

Speak to an expert. No, seriously – it’s not worth spending time and money only to find out you don’t know what you’re doing. Very few businesses have the skills in-house to make process mining work. That doesn’t mean your people can’t be upskilled, but you need an expert who can help evaluate your existing processes and where the most significant wins are to be made.

Want to get started with Process Mining? PAteam are experts, just ask for our help, and we’re there.

Technological advances continue to transform the business environment. Businesses want better bottom lines, and employees want rewarding jobs that they enjoy. Automation can help both groups, but how do companies build the trust required with technology to make that happen?

Building a beneficial relationship between humans and digital tools like #automation takes trust. The introduction of automation is going to have an impact on the working life of people in a business. Because of this, creating trust between people and machines is critical for the success of a company that wants to make its business better with digital tools. But how is it done? Let’s show you.

How Has Employee Trust Been Broken?

To be able to mend broken bridges and rebuild trust between people and machines, we first need to understand where and why trust has broken down so far.

The pandemic and the expansion of remote working have accelerated trust issues between people and digital tools. Building connections has been hampered by a lack of face-to-face interactions, and now employees have to communicate through chat channels and often poor video calls to build their relationships.

People are also frequently monitored by automated tools that track their keystrokes and mouse movement to ensure that they are actively working and being productive. This really damages employee and employer trust and does it through the medium of an automated tool which hampers the acceptance of other digital initiatives.

With business leaders worried about productivity with distributed teams, they’ve increasingly looked to automated processes so that tasks aren’t missed. This has often been done with consultation with employees and nothing more than quick team updates to advise them of changes that have already been made.

People really struggled with finding out that some of their jobs have been taken away without any notice because they either worry they aren’t trusted to do it, or worse that their job is being slowly taken away till they’re left with no tasks and are made redundant.

How Can Trust Be Rebuilt?

There are two simple steps to rebuilding trust between your people, your digital platforms, and your business leadership.

Transparency

Being honest about the reasons that you are doing things. That doesn’t mean just the cold, hard numbers you’re trying to improve. Have the human side of why automation is so good as part of any discussions. Be honest about how it can make work more fulfilling for staff.

Open dialogue

Employers and employees need to share an open dialogue as significant technical changes occur that impact their daily working lives. When employees understand why a tool is being adopted and how it will help their job, they are more likely to get on board. Plus, no one likes to find out about something after it’s already happened. Keep your people in the loop.

Above Anything Else

People are the lifeblood of every business. Whether it’s staff, customers, or suppliers – they’re all people. Trust between all these people is critical to the success of a business, and so it makes sense that everything that supports them, digital tools like automation included, need to form part of that trust circle.

Need help building trust in your automation? PAteam can help; speak to us today.