Business automation demystified

Automation seems to be everywhere, but many businesses are still struggling to work out if it’s right for them.

What exactly is business automation? they ask. Are these solutions affordable? Reliable? Costeffective? Can they be integrated with existing systems? And how long will it take to get a good return on investment?

Luke Woods, general manager, automation and intelligence, for business process outsourcing company Acquire BPO, says the key lies in integrating automation and intelligence with people-driven smarts.

‘‘Getting and programming the right bot is just the beginning,’’ he says.

‘‘Our point of difference from technology-only companies is that we have the business process experts to provide ongoing training and updating of the bot.’’

Acquire BPO was established as a provider of outsourced business processes and now has a workforce of more than 7000 in Australia, the US, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic, providing customer care, technical support, sales and other front-office functions, as well as backoffice services such as accounting, payroll, accounts receivable, marketing, design, graphics and development and, of course, automation through robotics, AI and machine learning.

‘‘We’re a one-stop shop, providing consultancy, design, implementation and maintenance of automation solutions in the areas of robotic process automation (RPA), chatbots, voice biometrics and speech analytics,’’ Woods says.

‘‘Our size gives us the scale to keep prices down and the IT infrastructure to build it efficiently and support the uptime that our clients demand. The barrier to entry can be low, with substantial efficiency gains and cost advantages.’’

Woods says there are affordable automation solutions that can be applied with substantial return on investment (ROI) for everyone from small companies to large enterprises.

The automation solution that customers are most likely to encounter in their day-to-day lives are chatbots, which enable a company’s customers to self-serve 24/7.

These chatbots can authenticate users and give customers their information whenever they want it, not only when a contact centre is open.

Woods says automation can also support quality service by contact centre staff.

‘‘Our speech analytics systems ensure that contact centre staff are responding correctly,’’ he says.

‘‘This drives compliance and identifies ways to improve systems and training.

‘‘Our systems also allow clients to analyse up to 100 per cent of calls so they can stay on top of what their customers are asking and how they feel, by automatically providing reports that show caller sentiment.’’ But automation is not confined to customer-facing roles. ‘‘We have low-entry bots that most businesses can use, such as our accounts-payable bot which can automate 80 per cent of accountspayable work for most companies,’’ Woods says.

‘‘If a bespoke solution is identified, Acquire BPO’s consultants can review business processes and determine the best areas for RPA and artificial intelligence (AI).

‘‘Bots can be designed to link legacy systems, update information in one place and deal with the manual, repetitive data-entry tasks in those disconnected legacy systems.’’

Simply installing a bot is not enough, Woods says. Most bots are programmed by humans, who analyse business processes and work out what the bots need to do.

‘‘A lot of people still think putting a bot in is enough, but the last thing you want is a lazy bot,’’ he says. ‘‘If you have a bot running at 5 per cent capacity, it’s not efficient or cost-effective as there is a true cost to that bot.’’ The ideal customer-facing automation system would be a chatbot that not only answers questions, but also knows so much about each customer that it can upsell via customised smart recommendations. Chatbots with AI will continue to learn and get better at these recommendations, but for now, to ensure optimal results, human training of the chatbots must be ensured as well. At the moment, the simplest type of chatbot can handle frequently asked questions, while a more sophisticated chatbot can authenticate a customer, link them securely into the back end of the business systems and answer questions such as What’s my account balance? How much was my last bill? and update customer records.

One of the technologies underpinning this is Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of AI that can handle many ways humans express themselves in speech and writing.

The chatbot needs to understand all the nuances, Woods says.

If you don’t program the NLP properly, the chatbot won’t answer the questions.

‘‘Acquire’s team of analysts scrutinise all chatbot exception reports and tune the chatbots so next time, it knows how to answer any common questions that it presently cannot.

‘‘We then report that data back to our clients so they can ensure their operational processes accommodate any changes.

Woods adds that Acquire can provide a range of useful data back to the client businesses to assist them with their customer experience and product development.

A lot of people still think putting a bot in is enough but the last thing you want is a lazy bot

Luke Woods Acquire BPO