Attended automation is something that a little underrated from an RPA perspective. Lots of people have really focused on the unattended RPA and building automation that runs by itself. However, there is a tremendous opportunity for attended automation to help in organizations like a contact center or even in a back office. Because a lot of times those back-office employees could use some help on their desktop as well. Let’s look at one example, from a contact center perspective:
Say, somebody calls in and wants to open a new credit card. We know that there are a few processes a contact center agent is going to do through:
- to pull a credit score;
- to look for other relationships that the customer has;
- to determine what card they are eligible for;
None of those are judgment-based. So, why do we have a human to do it? Why can’t we just pass that off to a robot? And that’s where the attended robot can see you opened up the credit card application screen. We can grab that customer number that you put in and then go doing all those rote processes that you would normally have to put the customer on hold for. A bot can execute all those and deliver those results back to you. That allows the agent to continue to be engaged with the customer on the phone as opposed to being dreaded “let me put you on hold for a minute while I look up your information”. We all hate that sentence and we can help avoid that.
And the second piece where it’s really valuable if you’ve got an attended robot is what happens after the call? So it’s always scheduled in. Agents are praying to people to do something after they hang up with the customer. Typically documenting it in a CRM system what was performed, how they did it, what the results were. Well, if you have a robot, it also knows exactly all those same things. So why do we need the human to go and fill in a form? The call is over, the robot goes and fills in the form and the agent is already onto the next call.
Those are two really strong value points for utilization of Attended Automation, particularly in a contact center.
