- Front office processes in your organization,
such as those that revolve around customer service,
are great sources of opportunity for automation,
no matter what industry you're in.
I'll provide several examples to give you an idea
of what to look for.
The most common use cases will revolve around
augmenting and supporting your front office staff.
For example, if a customer service team
is facing large call volumes for incoming requests
there might be an opportunity to have the agents
hand off certain processing tasks to our PA robots.
You might have a workflow where agents
can generate tickets with the data from their calls
and at the press of a button
have the robot work multiple databases or systems
to pull up relevant information.
This is a prime example of assisted automation with RPA,
sometimes called Robotic Desktop Automation or RDA,
where agents can trigger automated workflows
at the convenience of their desktop.
Thinking outside the box
can yield interesting solutions as well.
In that same example,
one could also reduce call volume
and expand service channels by creating a web interface
for customers to directly create and track their tickets.
In the background, the tickets might feed into
the work queue of a robot,
which progresses them or escalates them automatically.
This would be an example of unassisted RPA
working to support the front office.
Chat bots are also great fits for front office automation.
The simpler ones are rules based
providing automated responses based on
user selections and keywords.
They can be useful in answering
the basic customer inquiries
and directing the more complex ones in the right direction.
Think of how a good portion of product return inquiries
could be self serviced through chat
based on a set of policies and warranty rules.
Some bots with more advanced capabilities
can be great companions for your existing teams.
You may hear these referred to as co-bots
serving up suggestions in real time
during customer support engagements.
Some chat box services are intelligent,
which means that they use machine learning algorithms
to provide more advanced human-like
conversations with customers.
You might have encountered one when booking a vacation
with a travel agent bot,
which learns about you by asking you
for preferences and requests in a natural manner.
And finally, don't forget the data produced
by this critical set of interactions.
Machine learning and complex analytics will play
a huge role in how future services
are designed and served up.
As you can see, the common theme
with front office automation is to support
customer facing staff
who can then dedicate more time
to providing quality interactions.
And while chat is becoming more prevalent,
there's no doubt that voice as a self service channel
is revolutionizing industries
with the deployment of Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana,
and others that are entering every corner
of our home and office environments.