This technology has highly augmented the market in recent years and is expected to continue doing so going forward, transforming our lives and how we work. According to McKinsey Global Institute, it is estimated that 50% of today’s work activities can be automated by 2055. Voice AI is exponentially enabling companies and businesses to solve their long-standing communication issues majorly in terms of customer experience and services.

What is Voice bot?

Voice bots are conversational AI bots that examine the natural language and interpret the need of the customer. In other words, these are voice-enabled bots that exchange dialogues with customers with the help of an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. These bots are specifically trained to interact with humans and accept the commands in oral form.

Voice conversation AI will help expedite resolutions for customers’ queries in no time, ultimately ensuring that voice bots play the role of customer advisory, thereby ensuring agents can focus on more critical and bigger expertise tasks.

Customer Care Challenges in eCommerce

COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down and has impacted almost all areas of business. It has immensely changed the working habits of millions of people around the globe. In many organizations, the contact centre was highly impacted – receiving an extensive number of requests in a very short span with fewer resources thanks to widespread lockdown measures. Therefore, 2020 was marked as the most challenging year for contact centres.

In the Post-COVID world, a lot of small businesses may be under pressure and stress since customers will immensely rely on digital customer support channels as a new normal approach. Today, customers are spending a significant portion of their time on online shopping. Many organizations are moving towards internet-based sales to ensure they can experience multi-fold growth by cashing in on the work-from-home trend. As per a study by Kwantics (software development organization) before COVID-19, the US had online sales estimates of $600 billion, and this number is growing exponentially – projected to touch $6.5 trillion in 2023.

Voice bots in the eCommerce Customer Care Space

Some studies estimate that 39% of voice interactions in the eCommerce Contact Centres will be fully automated in the next couple of years. The following factors contribute to the growing demand for voice automation in this space:

• It helps in expanding inbound customer care, sales and marketing & customer care support at a fraction of the human cost of expansion
• Voice bots allow for cross- and up-selling of products or services, and make gathering surveys and feedback easier
• The technology allows companies to provide a seamless customer experience by boosting two-way communication and allows agents to manage tasks efficiently without any physical involvement.

The fast adoption of voice bots in the eCommerce space can also be attributed to the following factors:

• Customers have easy and smooth accessibility to information
• Customers are provided with quick and relevant answers on queries like return/exchange policies, terms and conditions etc. quickly, which leads to a frictionless shopping experience
• Customers find listening more interesting and engaging than reading the same information as text on websites
• Old-age and people who are visually challenged or with some other disability prefer voice automation in comparison to chat
• Industries like e-commerce require customer insights to boost sales. Voicebot provides seamless customer experience and helps the industry in gaining useful real-time customer insights

Customer habits and trends are changing rapidly, and this impacts their buying decisions accordingly. Voice assistants that cater to customers by tracking buying patterns and behaviours are best placed to offer personalized product recommendations that are close to the customers’ needs. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and help reach higher sales targets.

In terms of medium, the speed of response and efficiency of resolution is one metric where it has been found that voice bots are beating human agents, even chatbots. In contact centre services, voice bots are efficient at handling interruptions and generating potential leads for further sales.

IGT’s intelligent automation practice offers voice bot capabilities as part of its conversational AI solution. Currently, IGT is deploying voicebots at the contact centre of a leading global online travel agency and a large global hospitality group. Automating voice operations by introducing voice bots as an alternative to IVR has allowed IGT to help clients improve efficiencies by:

• Achieving up to 35% containment of volumes within the BOT
• Improving CSAT by 15% and NPS by 25%, and
• Providing opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

Author:

Sheetal Arora is a Business Analyst in RPA at IGT Solutions. She has 2 years of experience in the IT industry and has rich work experience in Travel and Hospitality domain. Sheetal has obtained various certifications in UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Outside work, Sheetal is passionate about dancing and travelling. She also loves fashion and styling. She can be reached at Sheetal.Arora@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.

The post Transforming eCommerce Customer Care using Voice Bots 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.