Avi Ben Ezra Official website Now businesses can create competitive advantage with robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots combined. This is thanks to next-level engineering and recent developments in AI.
The recent deployment of natural language processing (NLP) as a functionality with chatbots and AI is a major achievement for innovation as it enabled several industries to embrace chatbots much sooner than anticipated. Now we can sit back and watch a bot pick up a conversation on an omni-channel ecosystem, for example through line, skype, slack, messenger etc. and interact with all the other necessary elements such as CRM, payment processing and customer service. It provides a true end to end solution. Given the variety of possibilities following initial customer contact, you may ask: “How is this possible given that there is no API link between these interfaces?”. This is exactly where RPA comes in, as we’ll explain below.
The automation of repetitive tasks with RPA:
Our main purpose is to use technology to bring competitive advantage and cost saving. The correct deployment of RPA in a technology ecosystem is one of our main methods for doing this. It is unimaginable how much money is wasted on paying individuals to come to work – to spend a huge amount of time on repetitive tasks. This is a problem faced by governments and enterprises. Everyday that this is not solved, tax payers and shareholders are losing millions due to inefficiency. Well: Leading your industry means being first to take control of cost and processes, so it is good to understand the methods available.
Why RPA is such a cost saver:
RPA is great at co-ordinating tasks between various applications. It eliminates the need for humans to perform many clicks and navigation that takes up time. For example, if a national energy company interacts with 3 million people per year and for each person, human operators need to open and close 5 windows to switch between applications – that is an opportunity to save through automation.
RPA is also quite advanced:
Make no mistake: Even though we say that RPA can solve repetitive tasks, these tasks can also be rather complex. Taking any conversation that originated via omnichannel all the way through relationship building (CRM) and even closing sales for e-commerce businesses, can be done via RPA. Yes, this includes upselling, cross-selling, refunds, escalation, de-escalation and other aspects that used to be exclusively managed by humans. In some cases, we get to this point with self-learning bots, or at times, bot programming may occur. The SnatchBot philosophy is “no coding” – so we roll out the most advanced bots in a way that humans do not need to spend time on coding. At SnatchBot, we made sure that plugins are available to integrate with a large variety of popular applications and sites, for example woocommerce, ebay, quora, Yahoo finance, Office 365 calendar, Linkedin and Twitter – this means you do not need to re-invent the wheel on API creation.
It means that we can use RPA also to replace human agents in the areas of sales, especially where high-volume activities provided us with sufficient data for optimal configuration. It should naturally come with the reassurance that this is all done in a high-security environment without cybersecurity breaches, driven by cutting-edge AI.
In reality, people love it. In the most advanced offices that we serve, the idea that copying and pasting once existed, is so outdated because bots now ensure that customer data and messages go to the right applications at the right time without human intervention.
The interaction between human agents and bots:
How we position the RPA bot within a communication ecosystem is quite flexible. For example we can set up touchpoints that are “bot to bot”, it can be “bot to human” or vice versa. The best is to carry out an analysis of the most complex requirements as well as where high-volume tasks can be solved. With this information, we can design solutions that are efficient and improve our competitive advantage – but also to provide flexibility on the type of agents we work with.
A desire to lead your industry, or to keep up?
The motivation for adopting RPA depends on the leadership of an organization. In some cases, people want to be early adopters to lead their industry in areas of customer service excellence and cost. Yet nowadays we see more cases where governments realize that they need to keep up with the private sector – and where peer to peer motivation among businesses, becomes a motivation to change. The ultimate position for change agents is to look back at KPI’s and say “Yes, we did it, and it was a huge success”.
The only barrier to RPA implementation is your imagination:
We like to challenge people’s imagination of what can be achieved. We love it when they write down their most complex problems – to find a solution at scale. Today, with cost barriers removed entirely, the deployment of RPA and chatbots is no longer expensive. There is now a level playing field between governments and organizations regardless of their financial ability: everyone can adopt the technology with ease.
Soon, anyone who chooses to continue operating with a high cost and low efficiency may have only one last excuse: a lack of imagination.
