Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are two of the most successful technologies for organizations to achieve the seemingly incompatible goals of increasing customer satisfaction and employee morale while reducing operational costs.
Let’s take a closer look at what RPA and AI have to offer and how these complementary technologies can best be deployed to automate business processes.
RPA: empowering people through process automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software “bots” (i.e., specialized computer programs) to standardize and automate repeatable business processes. RPA bots perform the same way every time. They don’t learn from repetition after repetition, or improvise or come up with better ways to complete their programming tasks.
Rather than making people redundant, RPA bots act more like virtual assistants, allowing you to offload repetitive tasks that aren’t complex but take up valuable employee time. Unlike humans, robots never get bored because they follow instructions exactly and complete these tasks with maximum efficiency.
Using RPA to empower people is a proven way to benefit organizations by:
accuracy：Minimize human error and its associated costscompliancy：Create audit trails and follow regulatory rules preciselyspeed：Complete tasks 4-5 times faster and improve efficiencydependability：Bots are always available and work around the clock, minimizing delaysImprove employee morale：Free employees from repetitive tasks so they can focus on productivity, not processing.
Examples of Robotic Process Automation
Consider a financial institution that uses RPA to automate part of its fraud detection process. The process begins with an agent analyzing the fraud alert, who then interacts with the customer. Once the issue is resolved, the agent will complete the standard form and send a standard email to close the incident according to a strict SLA. The company deployed RPA bots to automate the closing phase, which was repetitive, time-consuming and stressful. Today, customer service agents simply hand off the summary process to the robot and are free to help the next customer. The results of it? Reduce processing time, increase accuracy, better adhere to SLAs, increase employee satisfaction and increase customer satisfaction.
RPA is great for automating simple tasks. Artificial intelligence can take automation to the next level when business processes have more complex tasks or need to combine two and two tasks together.
AI: Harnessing artificial intelligence to enhance automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems or “machines.” These processes include learning (acquiring information and contextual rules for using it), reasoning (using context and rules to draw conclusions), and self-correction (learning from successes and failures). The capabilities of artificial intelligence are endless, and popular applications include image recognition, machine vision, speech recognition, chatbots, natural language generation, and sentiment analysis.
RPA is used to work with people by automating repetitive processes (attended automation), while AI is seen as a form of technology that replaces human labor and enables end-to-end automation (unattended automation). RPA uses structured input and logic, while AI uses unstructured input and develops its own logic. The combination of RPA and AI can create fully autonomous intelligent process automation.
Because organizations have both structured data (e.g., form fields) and unstructured data (e.g., free text, natural speech), many processes require RPA and AI to fully automate the process from start to finish, or once the robotic process is complete Improve it. Deployed.
AI+RPA: realizing end-to-end intelligent automation
End-to-end automation is key to providing the self-service options that many customers demand. Consider how opening new bank accounts online can be fully automated with the help of RPA and artificial intelligence, or what we call intelligent process automation, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and making banks more efficient in saving money.
Our client wanted to open a new bank account online. The chatbot verifies the type of account the customer wants (a business account) and provides a link to the relevant form. Submit the filled form to start extracting the data and handing it over to another bot, which initiates the process of opening a new account. The bot performs back-end tasks such as checking customer credit scores and running Know Your Customer verification processes on Google and social networks.
Next, the smart OCR robot analyzes the scanned document uploaded by the customer along with the new account form. It found discrepancies between the customer’s name shown on the form and driver’s license. The exception is sent to human adjudication. Agents confirmed that Helen Green and Helen Ann Green were indeed the same person because their Social Security numbers were the same. Based on human input, the robot’s machine learning model learns how to respond to similar situations in the future.
The bot continues to validate uploaded documents using text analytics and natural language processing to interpret and classify key data points in the free text.
Once all the data is sorted, the bot performs a set of tasks required to set up a new business account and interfaces with the bank’s various back-end systems. If the customer’s data meets the bank’s requirements, the bot automatically sends the customer an email containing a warm welcome message, account information and access credentials.
Finally, the robot reports to the robot control room that the task is completed.
NICE Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Every automation project has to start somewhere. Whether the focus is on one process or multiple processes, NICE Robotics process automation solutions can help you identify the most optimized automated processes and then implement them at your pace. We find that when organizations are able to:
- Improve throughput
- Ensure compliance
- Reduce expense
- Improve employee engagement
Success will bring incentives to automate more processes. As needs change, NICE RPA scales in step, bringing all automated processes (attended and unattended) under one management umbrella and training the organization’s employees on how to build their own bots.
More cognitive capabilities are required as organizations look to automate more complex business processes using data from unstructured sources such as scanned documents, emails, letters and natural speech. That’s why NICE RPA’s open platform integrates many artificial intelligence technologies such as OCR, speech recognition, chatbots and machine learning. Through the incorporation of artificial intelligence, organizations can not only work faster and smarter to achieve greater efficiency, cost savings and customer satisfaction goals.