But the good news is, you have a solution!

The answer is hyper-automation. This technology enables enterprises to delight their customers with an interactive, immersive, and personalized experience.

What is hyper-automation?

Hyper-automation is the planned application of a wide range of tools, platforms, and technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), etc., to expedite operations and improve their effectiveness. It enhances business processes and integrates functional and process siloes.

Benefits of hyper-automation in the hospitality industry

Streamlined Reservation Procedure: Every customer wants a simple and quick booking procedure, especially in the travel industry. At the same time, customers also look for discounts on different portals and book the hotel that offers the best deal. Additionally, when there is a mass cancellation ( it happened during the pandemic years) making a refund to each customer was a huge task All these together have made hotel reservations a cumbersome process for hotel owners.

All manual repetitious operations, such as bookings and cancellations, can be automated with rule-based configuration and intelligence-based automation. Additionally, the technology enables instant refunds following cancellation.

Improved management of hotel tasks: When you go to a hotel and place your first order, the staff who takes your order is the first touch point where a brand impression is created. The first interaction can make or break the reputation of the hotel.

But a hotel owner can completely mitigate this risk by leveraging a hotel job management system.

For example, if a wrong staff member is given a task, they only need to immediately enter the information into their task management software on a handheld device. A prompt response will result from the automated rules and alerts notifying the affected party or department.

Contactless and simple check-in and check-out: The COVID-19 pandemic has created a demand for contact-free services. Customers can check into their rooms by simply arriving at the hotel using their smartphones thanks to automatic check-in software. This means the customer doesn’t need to wait at the reception to get their room keys. Additionally, it enables the hotels to clear the headspace for their staff and lowers the operational cost.

Respond in a timely manner to consumer queries: Nine out of ten times, customers who call or send an email with a question must wait for sometime to hear back. Longer wait times can negatively impact a customer experience.

The use of chatbots and voice bots have evolved as a crucial channel of communication for the hospitality sector. If a customer’s question can be answered right away, the system processes their emails and chat requests, analyses them, and responds appropriately. If not, the Chatbots/voice assistants forward the inquiries to a live agent, who is now free because there are fewer demands for answers.

Improvements in Customer Feedback Management: When consumers have a negative experience with a brand, they typically write online reviews about it. There are considerable chances that you might lose a sale if there are many negative reviews or if they are not addressed right away. This can be detrimental to your online reputation.

A hotel task management system comes with a built-in automated feedback management system. The customer support team is automatically notified whenever there is a negative review to take appropriate measures.

Are you ready to embrace hyper-automation technology?

Hyper-automation is the future of the hospitality business. It enables business owners to fully refocus their attention from mundane data-oriented duties to more crucial functions that enable them to provide superior customer service.

Author:
Vitesh Kohli is an Intelligent Automation thought & execution leader with a track record of setting up CoE, best practices, robot delivery, managing change and extensive program and project management experience with a strong entrepreneurial background. Have strong expertise in leading Transformation -Intelligent Automation across industries. Strong knowledge of planning big robotics set-ups, cognitive-based chat products, multi-components automation and multi-product Tech solutions. He is a domain Expert and Hands-on Technologist using Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Automation and Conversational Commerce to solve business problems in large enterprises.

Source: Gartner

The post Hyperautomation: How can it help the dynamic Hospitality Industry? appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Let’s start with some industry examples where companies across the world have been working with legacy systems as they are critical to their business.

• Mainframe systems that airline companies use for reservations and ticketing systems
• Command-line interface systems based underwriting engine used by insurance companies
• Companies with a core platform on legacy systems (such as COBOL, DB2, etc.) and being used by numerous customers

Many companies are generating good revenues from their operations and supporting the business, but they are missing out on the opportunities for connected data across the ecosystem. The architecture is not supported for enabling seamless data porting, scalability, and speed. Moreover, these systems have a higher cost of operation and high maintenance; and are plagued with usability and security issues. Technological obsolescence and resource scarcity are a few more challenges.

Key challenges with the Legacy systems

Integration issues with other systems: Gone are the days of monolithic architecture; nowadays, solutions are designed to have benefited from multiple systems connected via APIs. Modular and SOA-based architecture are common with scalability benefits and integration with other 3rd party systems. Legacy systems are not designed to integrate with other heterogeneous systems and thus cannot achieve fully integrated systems.

Go to market is slower: Legacy systems usually follow the waterfall model of software delivery, and aligning with the market demand of releasing software features on the fly is not feasible.
These systems are heavily focused on a manual way of working with little or no integrations available for 3rd party build, configuration, and CI/CD tools, causing the entire process to become slow and error-prone.

Misalignment with customer requirements: In the current era of a customer being the king, legacy systems are not synchronized with customers’ needs, especially in terms of flexibility, agility, usability, and customer experience. Legacy systems are still tightly coupled with OS, interface, screen, etc. In the case of growth, these systems cannot scale at the same pace as that of business.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning: Legacy systems are not built to integrate 3rd party data sources and are relatively inflexible. When the world moves towards NoSQL, a flat-file kind of database, legacy systems still run on relational DBMS, slowing the entire operation. Creating intelligent dashboards analytics is a cumbersome task, if not impossible, in these systems. These systems cannot harness the power of AI/ML and achieve predictability and digital transformation benefits.

Human resource challenges: The availability of skilled resources with expertise in legacy systems is seeing a decreasing trend. Universities and institutions, nowadays, focus more on newer technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, Internet of Things, Intelligent Automation, Blockchain, DevOps, etc. This means the engine to produce the team with legacy application skills is dying; moreover, the new generation of engineers is inclined to work on the latest technologies and not on legacy ones.

Compliance and Regulatory requirements: Nowadays, regulatory authorities and governments are very keen on adhering to compliances or heavy penalty is imposed on them. HIPPA, SOX, PCI, GDPR, etc., require your technology to be current and aligned with the regulations. These rules demand specific data to be shared with government bodies, and their implementations/modifications are very time-consuming in legacy systems.

Solutions to legacy technology challenges

We understand the challenges legacy technologies pose, like speed bumps, to leverage data modernization and use it to achieve higher revenue and innovative offerings at the utmost speed to enhance customer experience.

The question is, how can we resolve these legacy issues?

Digital transformation is the key to reducing the risk and unpredictability and improving the customer experience in the current market.
The implementation of Agile and DevOps coupled with a technological revolution comprises cloud, IoT, and AI/ML with enriched and interconnected data that will resolve the issues mentioned above.
Each organization is unique in the context of a market, customers, products, ecosystem, etc., so there can’t be an umbrella approach. The approach must be customized to different companies to harness the full benefits of digital transformation.

How can IGT Solutions help you?

With its technological expertise and process champions, IGT Solutions is well placed to implement methodologies and achieve a faster delivery cycle, cost optimization, and excellent customer experience.
IGT’s expertise in transitioning from legacy to cutting-edge technologies in a phased manner does not disrupt the ongoing business engagements. It can easily transition into the latest technologies fitting to customers’ needs. IGT’s expertise in Agile, DevOps, Cloud, and experience in implementing AI/ML, IoT, and Blockchain will help you ensure a smooth journey from legacy to latest technologies.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Modernization of Legacy Systems 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.

The key digital commerce adoption drivers have been:

• Business innovation
• Revenue growth
• Cost optimization
• Customer engagement

All the retailers, legacy brick and mortar and digital commerce included, now understand the need for software applications and their importance on various segments of retail; from customer acquisition, making sales transactions and providing post-delivery engagement to retaining the customer for longer periods of time.

Retail is one of the few domains that has seen tremendous growth in the last 5 years, the COVID-19 pandemic brought a demand for digital transformation in the brick and mortar retail sector, businesses were expected to bring about a change at breakneck speed as per the needs of the competitive market.

The retail IT system is highly dynamic and involves critical applications that take care of various functions at the front-end like social media, POS, website, mobile and back-end like inventory, product management, service and delivery cycles. The ever-evolving customer demands require retail organizations to continuously deliver and deploy new services and features.

In order to do that, software testing became imperative to ensure nothing that is broken goes to production. To cover a large area in the shortest possible time, just software testing would not suffice, this is where automation testing comes in. With automation testing, retail companies can harness the merits of digital transformation while managing the risks.

Benefits of Automation Testing in the Retail Industry

Quick feedback on build: Automation testing when utilized to create a regression suite and executed on the test environment will provide quick feedback on the code, thereby helping in making an informed decision on the deployment of the production code.

Enhance the coverage of omnichannel applications: The omnichannel availability of the application though is good from a customer engagement perspective, is difficult to test in a limited time owing to the sheer volume of platforms, screen sizes, and OS combinations. Automation testing with emulator combinations provides the solution to mitigate quality risk in the least possible time to validate application behavior on different platforms.

Heterogeneous environment: Retail platforms consist of an amalgamation of various systems and sub-systems such as UI, Payment Gateways, 3rd party APIs, Data-Warehouse, Reporting Tools, Middleware, etc. Testing of all these systems is difficult but mandatory to ensure there is no break in the entire process. This testing is done in an automated way, and yields requisite coverage within the short timeline, and provides a view of end-to-end use cases.

Smart Automation Testing: AI/ML enabled automation testing has further improved the quality, efficiency, and speed of risk mitigation and achieving business goals. Self-healing frameworks have the capability to optimize the test scripts in case of changes in GUI web elements on the screen, thereby reducing the efforts needed for script maintenance.

Non-Functional Automation Testing: In addition to functional testing, non-functional testing is very much needed for retail platforms and applications to cover performance, security, and accessibility scenarios, as impact in this area directly leads to degrading usability and customer experience causing customer turnover. Automation testing can be implemented for non-functional testing to get shift-left of non-functional testing and finding & fixing issues earlier in the lifecycle.

Why IGT?

IGT with its Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) is well placed to provide value-added services in automating the testing services for retail domains. The pre-built accelerators for the retail domain with 2000+ use cases covering customer management, customer journey mapping, product selection, cart management, payment etc. cover the entire gamut of retail operation testing.

Our advisory services on automation testing on the retail domain, automation test strategy and choice of automation frameworks spread across open source domain as well as licensed tool segments empower you not only to completely harness benefits of automation testing but also achieve better ROI from overall Quality Engineering efforts in retail organizations.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

Sources: Gartner

The post Importance of Automation Testing in Retail Digital Transformation 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.

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