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.

With growing demand, organizations realize it is important for them to enable their business users to build micro automation for their day-to-day work. Any such business user who builds automation with minimal or no coding experience to support their own business work is called a citizen developer.

According to a recent Gartner report, 61% of corporates already have or are planning to have initiatives for citizen development. By 2024, it is expected that low-code application development will be responsible for 65% of all application development activity.

Gartner defined a citizen developer as “employees who create application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.” A citizen developer hence is not a dedicated role in and of itself. They report to a business unit or function other than IT, and the development activity is not their primary work role.

Citizen development initiatives can bring multiple benefits for a company, such as:

• IT-business collaboration: As business users can build basic productivity automation solutions, it will reduce the IT backlog, allowing IT to focus on complex legacy migration activities to modernize infrastructure or build native mobile apps to create an engaging customer experience. This collaboration also allows business users to get involved early on in the application development process, to help IT by providing valuable domain expertise and business requirements.
• Improve customer experience: Business teams automating their own back-office processes will improve their ability to deal with customer requests and improve customer experience in the end.
• Reduce risk: With an IT-approved LCNC tool, any business team can build multiple automation solutions, under the IT team’s supervision, allowing IT to maintain visibility and control into the entire application landscape of the company and the data it produces.
• Productivity Gain: Empowering employees with the right tools can allow them to streamline their internal processes and make their operations smoother since employees are the most motivated to solve their operational problems and understand their business processes better than anyone else.

Scaling Automation with Citizen Developers​

While IT-enabled technical teams are needed for enterprise automation, empowering business users to develop their own automation could help sustainably scale the automation within a company. Citizen developers are a creative force that generally comes under two categories.

• Basic users, who can build automation for their selves on their desktop related to their day-to-day tasks.
• Advance users, who can build automation for themselves or for the team or company, which can later get validated and standardized by a professional developer.

Since employing a full contingent of developers can be a cost-intensive approach, broadening the scope of automation to citizen developers carefully chosen for their interest and skill with low code development, with an added layer of technical validation by fully trained developers can help reduce costs.

Before rolling out the citizen development initiative, decision-makers need to consider two factors: Value and Risk. To make such an initiative a success, the team should enable staff with in-depth knowledge of business processes by providing them training and mentorship. They should establish clear governance and boundaries, set goals, make best practices, and track and manage outcomes. Finally, they should review processes for ongoing support, maintain and avail reusable assets, and leverage and document automation ideas.

Author:

Brij Mohan Sharma is a Senior Technical Architect at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Analytics Practice. With a specialized experience of 15 years in Digital Transformation Consulting across Travel, Hospitality, and Retail domains, Brij has worked extensively on the front edge of process and conversational automation technologies, designing and delivering innovative back and front office automation solutions.

The post Can Citizen Developers help in maximizing automation benefits? appeared first on IGT Solutions.

However, as automation matures, it is clear that its potential is limited by its rule-based nature. Blending RPA however, with Artificial Intelligence technologies, and other advanced techniques, can expand the scope of automation, not just bringing down its limitations but compounding the benefits delivered. This combination of AI and RPA is called Intelligent Automation.

The most important feature of Intelligent Automation is its non-invasive nature where no major changes are required to the existing landscape and can be integrated across multiple applications, helping in faster deployment, and continuous improvement as opposed to legacy system automation that would require invasive integrations and has long turnover rates.

Driving value across Finance with Intelligent Automation

Let’s understand how intelligent automation can be implemented in the back-office processes of Finance, such as: Account Receivables (AR), Account Payables (AP), and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) that are critical elements in the functioning of any corporation.

Challenges

Account Receivables: Accounts receivable (AR) is the payment/balance due to an organization for the use or purchase of its goods, products, or services. Companies that are still using humans for their account receivables process face the challenge of errors in invoicing leading to delayed payments, credited invoices, and other disruptive and troublesome issues. Thus to overcome these problems automation of account receivables is important.

Account Payables: Accounts Payable (AP) is a liability and a short-term debt on a balance sheet where a business owes a payment/money to its vendors/merchants/providers that have furnished the business with goods or services on credit. Perhaps the most high-risk errand in the financial services industry is managing payments. AP serves the ideal conditions for automation and guarantees a more prominent ROI i.e. return on investment. In order to streamline the account payables process, AP automation is a necessity.

Financial Planning and Analysis: Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) involve activities that support an organization’s financial health: these are activities such as planning and budgeting, forecasting and modeling, management and performance reporting, integrated financial planning. When processes such as these are not automated and handled through emails, attachments, and spreadsheets, it leads to inefficiency and there is a high risk of delays, lack of visibility, and improper approvals. Organizations running FP&A on manual mode would not have enough resources to make forecasts at a faster cycle time as they require regular updates on the latest financial statements, capital expenditures, and investments making for weak financial planning.

Clearly, the finance industry requires processes that ensure tedious, repetitive, and time-critical patterns are not an issue. In addition, these cycles are data-sensitive and a slight mistake or error could bring about considerable losses, so robotization of errands requires an unflagging precision.

How can Intelligent Automation (IA) help?

Account Receivables: IA helps streamline the AR process and helps distribute all your customer invoices electronically regardless of your customers’ digital capabilities. Rules can be modified basis each customer’s needs and requirements generating a fully digital workflow. Also, it benefits in lower distribution cost, faster payments, and invoice handling, improves cash flow, increased accuracy and security, and most importantly customer relations.

Account Payables: The timeline for sending and receiving payables can be automated. RPA bots can build approval workflows and process payments and receipts; ensuring that all the transactions take place on time and all financial audit policies and regulations are adhered to.

Financial Planning and Analysis: Performing analysis of the latest financial trends is instrumental for visibility over the workforce. Automation of processes helps in the reduction of process inefficiencies, increasing process visibility which leads to better decision making, and maintaining a stronger, more transparent relationship with business units and departments.

Some other benefits:

• Reduction in operational costs
• Improved accuracy-by almost ~99.99% and increase in compliance as the human error rate is reduced
• Productivity, faster processing time, and reduced average handling time by 35-50%.
• Improved decision-making capabilities
• 24*7 Availability: BOT will execute tasks even during odd working hours.

F&A processes where Intelligent Automation can be applied

Listed below is a list of processes that were automated (% wise) and the benefits of IGT’s IA implementation in Finance and Accounting.

What would the automation of the above processes look like?

Account Receivables: Once applied, AI rules allow the BOT to access and process the billing data, prepare daily AR dashboards and reports, provide visibility on invoice statuses and all customer accounts & share the generated invoices with the revenue department. The system’s ability to deliver more granular results makes it highly accurate, precise, allows for fine detail analysis, and quickly resolves issues related to invoices.

Account Payables: Let’s look at an example to understand how the automation process takes place in AP: Essential cycles of Account Payable include Telecom and Travel invoice processing, Daily Exchange rates upload, and Trial Balance. The BOT reads the invoices using an OCR and creates their entries in SAP based on defined business rules. In case of a failure, notifications are sent to the respective users. The BOT is scheduled to pick up the currency exchange rates for multiple countries daily and update them in SAP. It also extracts data from SAP, consolidates and filters to deliver all the reports under the automation scope, and emails them to the Finance team.

Financial Planning and Analysis: Let’s look at an example to understand how automation works in the headcount of FP&A: Essential cycles of Finance Planning & Analysis include undertakings such as headcount, profitability in SAP, SG&A analysis, reports- DNB credit analysis, entity wise, travel, MIS, etc. The BOT extracts the required details from the SAP headcount dump which is then processed to create a headcount report.

Conclusion

RPA is an innovation that can change the realm of the finance industry.  RPA solutions are expected to grow in several main areas. It offers the clearest path towards a true digital transformation for businesses. IGT Solutions Pvt. Ltd supports businesses driving transformative efforts with investments in automation.

Author:

Ramani Giri is the Senior Business Analyst at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation Team. She has an overall 3 years of experience in the Travel and Hospitality domain. With expertise in Data Analytics, Process Automation, and Conversational AI for delivering back-office automation solutions. Outside of work, Ramani likes to swim, travel and read.

The post Scope of Intelligent Automation in Finance appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Automation is one such powerful tool that can help contact centers to shift the control of manual back-office look ups and simple front-line interactions away from customer service agents. This unlock of agents’ bandwidth offers contact centers an opportunity to reduce waiting time for customers, add new services to their portfolio, improve value for money for clients as well as end customers.

Automation in contact center is seen across functions with varying degree of complexity ranging from simple tasks such as customer triage to human-like interaction using virtual agents. Let’s have a look at some of the key use cases being implemented across industries:

1. Intelligent chatbots to support agents

Intelligent chatbots are trained to engage in human-like conversations by programming with conversational abilities and a self-learning network. They can be deployed to answer simple questions & FAQ’s instantly and seamlessly escalate the complex concerns to live agents.

2. Simple handling using advanced IVR

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have been around for long proving its advantages of 24/7 availability, call routing, and large call volume handling. While traditional implementation was focused on customer service through vocal scripts, newer technologies are extending capabilities to Smart voice assistants, Visual IVR, Biometric authentication and Smart IVR.

3. AI/ML-enabled Intelligent Call Routing

Unlike traditional rule-based routing, Intelligent Call Routing provides unmatched speed, accuracy and responsiveness by leveraging AI/ML-enabled algorithms. These algorithms combine various customer and agent-level inputs such as caller input, customer historical data, sentiment data, agent profile to map the customer with ideal agent. ICR, further, shares customer nuances with live agents to ensure personalized service.

4. Backend automation using RPA

Handling a customer call requires service agents to fetch information from disparate computer applications, hampering the speed & accuracy. RPA solves this problem for contact centers by integrating data across different systems and automating workflow, shifting agent’s focus to value-adding interactions with customers.

As per a global study on digital transformation by BCG, ~70% organizations fail to implement digital solution due to lack in preparedness & execution. This points toward the need to develop an integrated approach for implementation of automation. A well laid out roadmap of overall strategy, partnering with right solution vendors, and agile implementation & monitoring systems becomes paramount to achieve desired business results. We utilize an iterative approach to help clients in ensuring successful automation implementation:

1. Analyze: Identify and prioritize right processes for automation through detailed assessment and value impact analysis.
2. Automate: A careful evaluation of automation solutions across technical requirement, financial business case, and positioning system should be carried out, followed by a selection of implementation partner.
3. Optimize: Before going live with the entire solution, choose 1-2 use cases as proof of concept. Extensive testing under different scenarios should be conducted & system should be optimized to ensure that the it stays in operation even if processes change.
4. Monitor: Contact centers should closely monitor the success rate of automation implementation against defined operational KPIs.
5. Measure: Considering the massive benefits of automation on financial ROI and day-to-day business activities, it is imperative for contact centers to ensure that automation delivers maximum value impact.
6. Control: A mechanism should be put in place to immediately track any deviation from the set processes.

We envision this cycle as a continuous loop to recognize new automation opportunities and improve existing solutions.  While we strongly believe that automation is a necessity in today’s world to match customer’s expectations in terms of speed and operational efficiency. But it should be noted that automation is a pillar of support to enhance agent efficiency and hence it is of utmost importance that we do not see automation as a replacement of human empathy but rather a bionic tool to complement & enhance agent’s capabilities.

The post Automation – A key pillar of support for enhanced CX appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Characteristics of Back office and Conversational automation

Back-office automation is a technology through which software robots or ‘bots’ can learn from data and apply this knowledge to resolve problems independently. It can create a spectrum of solutions with next-to-zero downtime because of its machine learning capabilities and algorithm-based solutions. While back-office automation involves the use of software bots, conversational automation, on the other hand, in simple terms, offers virtual assistance in the form of chatbots. These chatbots are smart and capable of handling specific tasks with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP). They can understand and learn through environments, user journeys and conversations.

Primarily, automation mixed with human intelligence works in tandem towards decision making support. However, each area of automation has a unique role to play. With increasing competition in the travel industry, the challenges are not far behind. In fact, some pain points that travel industries face can be solved if automation is applied.

Let’s look at those pain points and learn how automation can make them pain-less.

 Online reputation management

Customers take to social media to share their experiences and grievances. Travel brands have understood the need to maintain their online reputation and have hired digital teams to monitor their online presence. Automating daily monitoring of your social media platforms will ensure you are not caught off-guard. Travel brands can use back-office automation’s ability to read and segregate information into relevant buckets based on the type of issue of the user. It also has a high degree of flexibility to search brand mentions all over the web, view multiple reviews and comments and identify best suggestions based on pre-scripted notes. By logging into one window, one can quickly personalize and respond on several platforms in minutes and take control of the online presence.

 Maintaining service standards

In an era where customers can switch brands easily, it is imperative to maintain a superior standard to retain them. Just like famous food brands follow precise measurements of ingredients which are universal to all their centers, travel brands can similarly have a rule-based system designed through automation to maintain an indubitable standard for themselves. RPA bots can emulate solutions that are consistent with every assignment and match the requirement of the job. Back-office automation can help create standard operating procedures that can help you track project progress, keeps you up-to-date with the latest data and can communicate critical milestones.

 Dealing with duplicate entries

Organizations use their online platforms such as website, social media etc. not just for brand presence but also as lead generators. It is not in our control when over-enthusiastic customers share their information several times, hoping to get a quicker response. What is in our control is using back-office automation to sift through the duplicate entries from a database and centrally apply changes to eliminate any discrepancy in interdepartmental exchanges across locations. Back-office automation works fast and leaves no room for friction, which could have been the case if done manually, thus reducing rework and maximizing profits.

 High influx of queries

For any servicing brand, online customer service channels like website chat, social media chat etc. always remain open. Many travel companies are prepared to handle a set number of queries; however, during unforeseen times, like a hike in volumes, they face a challenge in responding to the questions promptly. Missing out on your customer queries can result in losing out on business. With messaging becoming a preferred medium of customer service in many countries, conversational automation is being integrated by many brands. Because of its 24X7 availability and rapid responses, conversational chatbots can yield better customer experiences with their intelligent ability to detect keywords, changes in tone, and adjusting to a user’s behaviour.

Regardless of the business type, automation can increase the accuracy of your business process. To increase business opportunities and handle multiple issues simultaneously, travel brands are broadening their horizons by recognizing the potential of automation. At IGT, we strive to take your business to the next level by understanding your business needs and developing the right automation strategy for you.

IGT’s Automation Centre of Excellence offers an array of automation solutions through its RPA and conversational automation capabilities.

Our proprietary automation methodology – ‘iTRIP’, is designed to take the customers from an initial exploratory stage in their automation journey to a BAU Automation Factory Setup, thereby setting up a Centre of Excellence for enterprise-wide cross-functional adoption.

Travel companies must begin with the endgame in mind, aligning company goals with the right technological investments should be a priority. As the industry operations become more complex, integrating automation solutions can be a game-changer.

Read more about the methodology, processes and the engagement model that we follow to deliver automation projects to a large customer base.

Author :

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post How automation is alleviating the most significant pain points of the Travel industry appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Why are they important?

According to a research done by Adobe, 50% of travel and hospitality companies today are gathering and using real-time data; 47% are using automated personalization.

A study by AIIOT states, 73% of retailers plan to introduce AI to optimize their pricing by 2021.

Automation makes life easier, tasks faster and efficiency better. Some of the benefits that automation brings in are, quality, consistency, cost reduction, faster turnaround time and improved operational efficiency to name a few. AI on the other hand can bring the human element to information exchange, for e.g. bots can be simulated to engage with a user, send emojis based on the sentiment and even share stickers. However, let’s do a break down and look at how automation and AI can enhance the landscape of businesses

Visible metrics

Real-time tracking and reporting through automation helps businesses pinpoint trends like spending patterns of the consumer pricing strategies of your competitor and monitoring other excessive costs. Automation also gives light to unforeseen business opportunities and helps in the overall governance of your operations. These metrics can be picked up by AI and help predict and recommend destinations and even suggest services in hotels.

Enhanced customer experience

Consumers of today demand an interesting experience. With the help of automation and AI technology, brands today are able to stay in touch with the consumer before and after their journey. It allows them to deliver personalized communication and experiences at the right time. Automation and AI assist in creating an intuitive experience for the consumer who is looking to learn and experience new things.

A study by Gartner reveals 40% of all customer interactions will be automated through AI and machine learning by 2023.

Increased responsiveness

Time spent on administrative tasks such as searching, checking, collation etc. can be time consuming, however, with automation, this can be a very quick process. Automation can carry out high-volume tasks with greater accuracy while avoiding any manual errors. AI on the other hand can draw patterns and provide additional insights about the customer to help employees with more personalized responses to their customers.

Price tracking

Many customers use price comparison websites to make purchase decisions. Using automation to understand your competitor’s behaviour and gain market intelligence should be high on a brands’ priority if they want to stay in the competition. Automated pricing with the help of AI can help feed accurate data and set dynamic pricing for your business through offers and promotions and can also help fix those abandoned shopping carts.

Expense management

What was previously a painstaking task of inputting manual codes, has become a smooth painless process. With automation and AI, employees are able to track real-time spending and access reports from a centralized location, which traditional systems could not handle. Automated self-booking systems have freed up time in other areas of a business. Stacks of statements and invoices can now be swiftly processed even after modifications are made at the customer’s end.

Customer Retention

The automation approach has far-reaching benefits, for e.g.; conversations with your customers don’t have to end once their purchase is complete. Even post travel, businesses can stay in touch with the customer through emailers and digital ads. Brands can use automation and artificial intelligence to send relevant offers to customers based on their purchase history. Even customers who browsed on your platform but did not check out can be targeted with the help of automation and AI.

Brands that take business priorities and objectives seriously should automate their business processes to maximize results.

But for many, the million dollar question is, how and where to get started?

IGT’s automation centre of excellence is an all-inclusive shop for  several brands. Equipped with the right tools and experts, IGT has successfully implemented automated solutions like Chatbots and RPAs for multiple large airlines, hotels and  Internet companies By leveraging automation with AI, we are able to generate models for solving complex business problems with the right mix of robotics and humans.

Businesses looking to scale have to answer a simple question, do they want to reap the above benefits? If yes, then getting started is easy with IGT’s Automation Consultative Services and Artificial Intelligence offerings, where a team of experienced travel SMEs and business consultants can help you with the following sub-services:

• Automation maturity assessment
• Speech and text analytics
• Financial and technical feasibility
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Robotics
• ROI and Business Case Development
• Automation Centre of Excellence Roadmap

Automation and AI are shaping the future of  business management; not only do they lead to efficient operations for a brand, but also increase employee satisfaction. Employees are able to make best choices with the help of the decision support provided by these technologies, due to which, they are able to maintain compliance, engage with the customer and feel a sense of loyalty for the brand they represent.

Learn how IGT’s Automation CoE (Center of Excellence)has helped the travel and hospitality industry achieve great heights!

Author:

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post How automation and artificial intelligence can enhance customer’s journey appeared first on IGT Solutions.

RPA can be integrated in many industries; not leaving travel far behind, RPA plays a significant role in increasing efficiency while saving time and money. Travel brands deal with large volume transactions, which puts pressure on the staff to managing too many bookings, systems and processes. One of the reasons of added pressure is the rising demands of today’s tech-savvy traveler.

Travelers today want customized features during their trip planning process; like amenities, intra-city transport, local bookings etc. To meet this requirement, online platforms are turning to automation in order to serve its customer’s diverse needs. When brands integrate their systems with RPA, they are not only able to provide solutions to specific needs but also make their business scalable.  To meet small and large volumes as per seasons, scalability is essential for businesses and that is possible through RPA.

Robotic Process Automation gives travel brands the potential to cater to growing demands while reducing the cost of operation and without disturbing the existing systems in place.

RPA has disrupted the Travel industry in four vital ways:

1. Enhanced scalability

RPA has abilities to scale up to massive demands without having to hire more resources. The potential to increase productivity, reduce operational costs, and cater to the tech-savvy customer can all be accomplished with RPA’s advanced features.

2. Competition analysis

RPA is a smart system that can obtain competitor pricing, booking, profitability data and much more. Instead of manually delegating teams to study competitors and the way they function, large businesses can track competition data without aligning too many resources into it. RPA can also identify current trends in the market and examine the competitor’s performance, and keep a watchful eye.

3. Streamline processing

RPA is designed to improve the security, quality, and the timeliness of the processing systems used in the travel and hospitality sectors. By processing complex information, it can also predict and suggest new destinations, services and holidays to the customers based on their travel patterns, all while decreasing the cost of transaction processing. In case of loyal customers, RPA can align data to their preferences and booking history, reducing manual work and cost.

4. Prioritizing customer’s needs

In the age of smartphones flooded with apps that are automated to service its users, the expectations have only increased and spread to brands in other fields. Digital transformation has been a huge factor in reaching out to a wider audience geographically and assisting them online. When a staff member has to manage data online and attend to a customer standing in front of them, it only adds to their work pressure and decreases efficiency. Brands now substitute human interaction with automated bots on their online platforms, so that they can focus on the most important thing; the customer.

RPA has the ability to surpass limited services that basic softwares provide by digitizing paperwork and structuring data management. Travel brands with the help of RPA can securely save user information and comply with industry regulations. Because of its centralized and secure nature, it can be monitored and updated in one place which saves time, which would otherwise go in feeding data into several tools if the traditional method is still followed. This gives brands more control over their customer and eliminates room for error.

IGT’s Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) has the expertise to enable a hybrid digital workforce where tailored bots emulate human agent functionalities. These bots, enabled with capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation, and Computer Vision can execute manual tasks more efficiently than human agents.

Our Automation CoE cover 4 focus areas:

1. Automation Consulting Services (RPA and Conversational Automation)
2. Custom BOT Development & Deployment
3. Automation Testing & Monitoring
4. Industry Solutions- Travel Bots Library

Many argue that automating services that involve human interaction, can affect the customer experience. While travelers are content with instant responses on these platforms, they still seek human touch for reassurance and recommendations. IGT’s Automation CoE has the expertise in getting this balance right. It has helped transform global travel companies in their business approach by applying intelligence capabilities, resulting in formulating responses very close to a humans’.  While RPA does its magic, staff in the travel industry can utilize their time to focus the shift back to attending to the customers in front of them instead of being restrained by handling too many things at once.

IGT‘s has an extensive experience in back-office automation leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as the means to automate business processes, you can read more about the cognitive capabilities here.

Author:

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Can RPA be a disruptive force in the Travel industry? 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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The post Automating Travel Processes with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) appeared first on IGT Solutions.