Now get this.

You call a customer support number and you hear an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) which tells you that there is a better way of self-service, would you like to choose that option? You as a customer say yes and you receive a link on your mobile phone in the form of an SMS. You open that link and your digital journey starts and you are directed to an interactive page that has a visual menu that you can easily traverse through and fields in which you can enter the required information. You can do it at your own pace and at your own time without the fear of being timed out. If you don’t get the solution you are looking for, you can connect with an agent at the tap of a button. What’s more, the agent already has the details that you filled in earlier so that you don’t have to spell them out again. You get your query solved and enjoy a nice rest of the day.

This feels great, doesn’t it? That’s visual IVR for you.

The traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems that we all have encountered at some point use touchtone pads / numeric inputs to help take the customer through the system. Each press of a key directs you to the next stage and narrows down the reasons for your call. The more recent voice IVR systems require the caller to say where they need to be directed. That brings in a whole lot of pitfalls of its own. Voice IVR systems have been improved over time by adding conversational AI that can predict intent and guide the user in the right direction. However, all of this is essentially the same, just with different modus operandi.

IVR is far from perfect and you don’t need to look too far to identify its weaknesses.

• IVR does not provide full visibility to the customers. They only know the options when they reach there. Customers often select the wrong option and go down the wrong track. They need to go through the steps again once they realize the sub-menu they are on does not cater to their need.
• Many callers opt-out of this navigation exercise and directly select the option that connects them to an agent. This leads to low containment rates and higher wait times.
• The voice-enabled IVR can lead to struggles with pronunciations and accents particularly if the customers are spread across geographies.
• IVR isn’t the best at gathering data from customers. Users cannot enter complex data. Customers using voice-enabled IVR may be hesitant to speak out their personal information in a public place. Much is left to be desired in this regard.

What is Visual IVR?

A Visual Interactive Voice Response or Visual IVR is a system that adds a visual interface to the traditional IVR setup. The visual interface leverages multiple channels like smartphones and other digital devices that provide web access. It makes navigation intuitive and data collection from customers seamless. The customer generally receives the link to visual IVR menus via SMS or the application that is already installed on the phone. The menus may either reflect the IVR structure or maybe be augmented to accept other forms of inputs like long texts, images etc.

A visual IVR system helps to gather real-time data. Company websites and mobile applications can help customers navigate menus quickly. They can type in their responses and use radio buttons, checkboxes and drop-down menus which are more reliable and reduce the chances of mistakes from the customer’s end. When the agent reaches out, the agent has all the essential information at his/her disposal and can continue from where the customer left off. The customer does not have to bounce around before reaching the right option and this enables a better customer experience.

Benefits of Visual IVR

Visual IVR provides some distinct advantages over traditional IVR systems.

• Personalization of customer interactions: As visual IVR makes it easy to collect customer information from various touchpoints, agents can spend their time with customers having meaningful conversations and providing more value to the customers.
• Elimination of wait times: Implementation of a visual IVR system can help save up to 60 seconds of AHT for an agent. This time that was wasted in collecting user information can be utilized to understand their problems and provide quick resolutions. The customer does not have to wait online. Faster resolutions lead to more satisfied customers.
• Omnichannel presence: While IVR is only usable on phones, visual IVR allows for multichannel contact. Millennials and Gen-Z increasingly use smartphones, mobile apps, and social media. Visual IVR makes it possible for contact centres to reach them via their preferred mode of communication.
• Improved security: Visual IVR providers make sure that all the data security and privacy protocols are in place so that customers can enter their personal information without the risk of it being misused. Landing pages may be encrypted to add to the security.
• High containment rates: 60%-70% of users using visual IVR find a solution to their problem and do not require a call from an agent. This is a big leap when compared to the 15%-20% containment rate of traditional IVR systems. This ease of use and self-fulfillment has demonstrated an increase in customer satisfaction and NPS scores.

Visual IVR systems are primarily designed to make the contact centre spaces more efficient while making it convenient for the customer to reach out. The time of human agents is better managed as redundant tasks are taken out from the calling routine and they focus more on solving customer problems rather than performing perfunctory tasks. The customers feel cared for and this leads to an overall positive experience for them

IGT has an immense wealth of experience and demonstrated capability in enhancing contact center experience and achieving operational excellence. The solution provided by leveraging its digital conversation framework, “iConverse” and voice automation framework “iVolume” have benefitted numerous clients across the airline, hospitality, and retail domains. IGT has provided more than 25% cost optimization and 15% improvement in net NPS and CSAT scores through its offerings. IGT’s 20+ years of travel domain-led solution development experience enabling it to deliver end-to-end solutions, a worldwide operation presence, and its commitment to provide best-in-class solutions has helped deliver innovative solutions and business excellence continuously.

Author:

Pratik Sharma is a Sr. Business Consultant in the automation practice at IGT Solutions. He has 4 years of experience in RPA in multiple capacities. Outside of work, Pratik is passionate about football and reading.

The post How can visual IVR transform the customer experience in a Contact Centre space appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Hotel contact centres are the backbone of hospitality operations and play a vital role in providing round-the clock support to ensure customer needs are being met promptly and accurately. The good quality of service encourages repeat business, increased referrals, opportunity to cross sell and up-sell, customer satisfaction and a boost in profitability. In the hotel industry, contact centres are crucial because of the demanding nature of the business and the need for consistently increasing operational efficiency.

Given that the primary driver of the hospitality industry is guest experience, contact centre agents should spend most of their time providing accurate and quick resolutions to customer queries. However, the majority of the agent time goes into the mundane task of pulling information from different systems and carrying out manual repetitive back office tasks when responding to customer queries. While handling complex customer queries, contact centre agents have to put customers on hold when searching for answers across different systems and documents, which is tedious and time consuming. This increases the AHT and irritates the customer, and leads to customer dissatisfaction and potential revenue loss for the hotel. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a technology can be of great help to contact centre agents in this scenario where retrieval of details is required from multiple systems. Attended RPA bots can be deployed on systems of contact centre agents to help them gather information required to resolve customer queries from different systems with the simple click of a button.

RPA bots can be used in hotel contact centres in the following areas to assist agents and enhance overall productivity:

• Bookings: RPA can be used to automate the booking process from start to finish. The vendors or partners send details to the contact centre for bookings or cancellations and bots can be used to create or cancel bookings on reservation systems.
• Analysis of customer feedback and reviews: Customer reviews play an important part in improving service and standards. The RPA bot can extract reviews, analyse them and send a prompt response to the customer depending on the review.
• Notification to customers: Providing regular updates to the customers is a key aspect of the hospitality industry. This can be easily managed using RPA, the bots can be used to send timely updates to the customers for a better experience.
• Back office operations: Repetitive and high volume back end processes like invoice processing, claims processing and bill generation can easily be automated using RPA to save agent time and reduce human errors.
• Reporting: The bots can swiftly extract and organize data from multiple sources and systems to generate reports to provide better insights of performance and identification of areas for improvement.

The role of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a technology in hotel contact centres has increased significantly in the last few years. Many contact centres are implementing RPA solutions to improve the customer experience, enhance efficiency and increase productivity.

The following are the key benefits of using RPA in hotel contact centres:

• Time Saving: The RPA bots can gather information from multiple systems in no time leading to reduced wait time on calls.
• Improved Accuracy and Compliance: The manual errors will reduce as BOTs are more consistent and process with 100 percent accuracy.
• Reduce Operational Expenses: RPA bots can work 24/7 and process transactions faster compared to a human agent leading to reduced operational costs.

IGT Solutions Intelligent Automation practice has worked with many hospitality companies by providing automation solutions to improve efficiency and reduce operational cost in contact centres. Over the last couple of years, IGT solutions has worked with two leading hotel groups in Europe and USA respectively and automated processes in the contact centre such as guest booking confirmation, contract loading, updating metasearch commissions and auto-response to customer reviews which has helped these clients to save over $2M in the last 2 years.

Author:

Nischal Guleria is a Senior Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation Practice. He has an extensive experience in process automation using RPA for Travel, Hospitality and Finance domains. Outside of work, he loves travelling and walking. He can be reached at Nischal.Guleria@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Boosting efficiency in the Hotel contact centre through agent-assist bots appeared first on IGT Solutions.

As robots don’t have intelligence of their own, it severely limits the extent to which automation is possible, as there may be a lot of varied inputs and processes that require decision-making at different stages. To bring in some intelligence to automation, we must look at Artificial Intelligence technologies. AI has the ability to use its own logic and understanding to perform tasks. AI can learn to take decisions on its own, based on rules created by humans, and can learn by failing too, which is popularly known as machine learning.

AI includes multiple technologies that study the different facets of intelligence, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). NLP and ML are more advanced than RPA. Other technologies used in AI include Virtual Agents, Biometrics, and Image Recognition. Virtual agents make use of chatbots that are programmed in a way that it can respond to human queries. A lot of applications use a virtual agent as the first point of contact for interaction with customers. Biometrics are used for identification and analysis of the human body e.g.; fingerprint can be used for entering the in-time or login time of an employee. Image Recognition is used for identifying and distinguishing an object in a video.

To explain in layman terms, RPA depicts human actions whereas AI depicts the intelligence of a human. RPA does not have the ability to learn from its mistakes whereas AI can keep learning from its own actions. RPA performs tasks that are clearly defined and where no thinking is involved. However, AI is a step further from RPA as it can learn and analyze and can give improved output to the user through training. AI differs from RPA as it can include voice and facial recognition.

Intelligent Automation (IA) combines RPA with AI technologies as per business needs to maximize the value of automation. Organizations can use IA to provide virtual assistants to their customers across chat and voice channels. The organizations that use IA can surely see an increase in their productivity, accuracy and understand the needs of their customers better by directly connecting with them. It also leads to a reduction in costs.

The ideal combo is one where RPA is combined with AI where AI helps yield better results. Which directly results in the expansion of the scope of automation within the enterprise.

As we already learned, to maximize value from automation and expand its scope, a blend of RPA with AI technologies will result in Intelligent Automation to empower rapid end-to-end business processes and considerably more.

IA offers many advantages that can be incorporated by organizations so that efficient solutions can be provided to the clients. The advantages are as follows:

• Increased productivity that enable automated applications and processes to run faster.
• Reduced costs – Automation ensures increased productivity leading to decreased manpower costs.
• Improved accuracy – Work done by an automated bot has less errors than done by humans.

Let’s look at one of the use cases where IGT incorporated RPA technology for a leading airline. This technology helped the airline cabin crew staff update their status of flying with the help of chatbots. The chatbot that interacts with the attendants shares updates about last minute changes in the staff on a particular flight.

IGT has deployed IA solutions in multiple domains like travel, hospitality and healthcare. With IA, IGT has improved its customer experience by optimizing back-office operations and increasing process efficiencies. By incorporating IA in contact center processes, it has further been able to handle surges in call center volumes, provide proactive customer service, and automated personalized messages for many of its clients.

Author:

Ayushi Jain is a Module Lead in RPA at IGT Solutions. She has 8.5 years of experience in the IT industry and has rich work experience in the Travel and HealthCare domains. Ayushi has obtained various certifications in UiPath and Automation Anywhere. She loves to travel and explore the untouched beauty of nature and enjoys reading fiction in her free time.

The post Progressing from Robotic Process Automation to Intelligent Automation appeared first on IGT Solutions.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, RPA in layman terms can be understood as a solution that allows the automation of business processes end-to-end, irrespective of the type and number of applications involved and the environments in which they are used. Automation itself is not a new concept though and has been around for a long time. However, it has been limited to certain applications or areas of use. RPA is different from “conventional” automation as it is non-invasive and can be used to automate larger business processes instead of creating multiple point solutions. RPA “Bots” can be quickly deployed to automate repetitive tasks, and they save a considerable amount of time and money for the organization. They improve accuracy, efficiency, and even compliance.

RPA bots are responsible for carrying out crucial processes across multiple business functions. They operate as a human and replicate steps to execute repetitive tasks that a user would do on a day-to-day basis. They can access databases and use supporting services. This creates a possible risk and a potential challenge. Since the bots handle sensitive data and the solution may involve moving it across systems from one process to another, it can be exposed if it is not secured. Thus, it must be made sure that things work out as planned.

What are the challenges?

RPA bots are not built like enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are built over a long period, and huge inputs and overheads in development and testing are involved. RPA, on the other hand, is a quick implementation. Development and deployment of RPA bots only take 1-2 months on average. As a result, it is more susceptible to threats if proper security frameworks are not applied and best practices are not followed.

RPA bots help organizations process a huge quantity of data 24/7. As the RPA tools have matured, the scope of data that can be handled by bots has also increased. The emergence of process intelligence features has helped significantly in increasing the variety and volume of data. This varied and massive volume of data helps in uncovering more insights than before. At the same time, however, the risks of data being compromised have increased as well.

One of the main risks associated with RPA, and the concern of many, is data security. It may either be from the point of view of the bot transactions or data leakage. Transaction safety is always a concern for enterprises when they opt for RPA. It is difficult for them to trust the bot to function with minimal supervision. Data has become and will remain for some time, the most important asset of an organization. Any untoward incident can lead to huge problems. Two of the primary reasons that can lead to this problem are improper governance and lack of adherence to best practices.

Data leakage can be broadly understood as exposure of bot/user credentials or the customer data that the RPA bot handles. The bots use the organization’s credentials to log in, and they need access to passwords. Therefore, it is really important to keep track of who has access to the bot for execution and maintenance. Unauthorized access to an RPA system could result in intellectual property damage. As world bodies are taking note of the importance of data and bringing in regulations to protect it from unauthorized access and use, it is of prime importance that problems like access abuse and data disclosure are weeded out of RPA solutions completely.

What can be done?

The good news is, the problems described above can be remedied and avoided altogether. To address security failures in RPA projects and manage associated risks, the following things need to be kept in mind.

• There should be a distinct difference between an RPA user; the person who will operate and run the bot and the RPA bot itself. A unique identity should be assigned to each RPA bot along with dedicated credentials. This will help in demarcating bot and human actions and will attach accountability to bot actions. It will provide the complete audit trail of what the bot does. The trick is to not create a bot but a virtual employee.
• Manage access on two fronts. First, who has access to the bot? Limit the number of people who can access the bot for both execution and maintenance. This will eliminate the chances of rogue changes being made in the bot and the bot will act on tested lines. Second, access to systems. Creating a separate bot entity as discussed earlier will help in this. Using user credentials can provide more privileges to the bot than actually required. Dedicated credentials will limit the scope of system and application access the bot has. Reduction in the possibilities of unwanted actions and transactions will help in avoiding breaks in security
• The development and deployment of RPA bots is a continuous process. It is not a one-time activity that ends when the bot goes live. Thus, it is imperative that the threats and vulnerabilities are also tackled continuously. The people handling the bot may leave the organization, the applications involved in the automation solution may change/update, the process itself may change based on business requirements. This makes it necessary that the security team is as much of a stakeholder in the RPA initiative as the RPA CoE (Centre of excellence) or the line-of-business team. Creating a risk framework that evaluates RPA implementation as a whole, as well as the individual scripts, periodically reviewing and testing RPA scripts with a special focus on business logic vulnerabilities, will go a long way.
• Focus on the security features of third-party plug-ins. The RPA tools available in the market come with the possibility of adding plug-ins to enhance their scope, use, and performance. The passing of data from one application to another requires special supervision. It is important to ascertain the security and trustworthiness of the plug-in that is used. Perform a product architecture risk assessment before buying into it.
• The last is to follow all the best development practices. Create separate environments for development, quality assurance, and production. Avoid hard coding of credentials and use credential vault protect passwords. Use configuration files to provide flexibility to the bot. Test the bot rigorously over all the possible business cases and variety of data that it may encounter. Maintain detailed log reports so that they can be reviewed when the RPA security fails. Complete, system-generated logs without any gaps help in investigating the root cause and taking mitigating steps.

The benefits an RPA implementation provides to the organization are immense. Proper selection of the RPA tool that suits the type of process and applications in consideration, vetting of any plug-ins that may be used, creating a security framework, and following best practices for development will help eliminate any security or data leak threat that may be posed. Undoubtedly, the rewards can be reaped for a long time.

Author :

Pratik Sharma is a Sr. Business Consultant in the automation practice at IGT Solutions. He has 4 years of experience in RPA in multiple capacities. Outside of work, Pratik is passionate about football and reading. He can be reached at Pratik.sharma@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.

The post Securing Data in RPA Deployment appeared first on IGT Solutions.

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Travel organizations are increasingly turning towards automation to optimize the business processes and re-envision opportunities to employ human capital strategically. IGT Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Services offers a futuristic mechanism to streamline business operations without the need for radical changes while minimizing risks.

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