Month: March 2021

Today, contact centers are one of the most critical pieces in the puzzle for delivering a delightful customer experience. As the world is becoming faster and smarter with new technology improvements day by day, customer expectations are also changing fast, with customers looking for a simpler way to access support quickly. Customers are not only evaluating the product and services they brought with its consumption experience, but also the entire journey, from exploring and buying to post-sale.

Contact Center Automation – A closer look

Undoubtedly, rapid digitization in recent years has led to various changes in the way contact centers operate. One of them is the introduction of AI & Automation in contact center space, where many self-serving digital technologies are taking away simple, mundane, and repetitive tasks from agents, leaving the agents to focus on more complex interactions. Even though the bulk of traffic coming to a contact center is deflected away from agents due to digital self-service technologies, for any escalation and critical request, customers still feel more comfortable connecting directly to an agent on the other side than interacting with a bot. Hence contact center agents remain a critical element to deliver a delightful and engaging customer experience.

For contact center agents in the current scenario, the technology and the purpose of a contact center have evolved with more focus on generating revenue & improving customer experience. AI & Automation will also play a big role in enriching and digitizing the contact center agent desktop, thus helping them handle more complex queries in a shorter time. As customer touchpoints are increasing with web & social media, it is critical that the agent has the history of all earlier customer interactions and Artificial Intelligence to understand the right intent of customer before responding. Agents today should be made more resourceful and self-sufficient by step-by-step guidance, timely nudges, and pop-ups — providing the right information at the right time, unified desktop, and on-demand knowledge base access.

To meet these challenging and dynamic requirements, each contact center agent needs to be supported by a “Digital Twin,” who works parallelly with an agent throughout the journey of handling a customer request. These digital agents automate manual tasks, provide the right data at the right time, and clarify customer intent.

Below is an illustration of a telecom contact center highlighting how a digital twin can work in tandem with an agent to fulfill a customer request.

As AI & Automation capabilities are maturing and expanding, they provide new opportunities to enrich and empower contact center agents through intelligent agent assist capabilities. The below figure expands more on the key intelligent agent assists capabilities that are helping agent in becoming a digital agent:

Equipping agents with intelligent agent assist capabilities will help them be more productive and add value to their work profile by making them act more as SMEs or customer success managers than just a customer service agent. The digital agent will help agents focus on solving complex customer problems, showing empathy and building long-term relationship with customers through deeper engagement.

AssistEdge Engage — Creating meaningful customer experiences

AssistEdge Engage provides the key capabilities required in agent assist space through its unified dashboard, signal sign-in manager, one-click automations & guided scripting.

A unified dashboard creates a summary view of the most frequently used customer info from multiple systems in a single view. One-click automation helps you automate the most frequently done tasks with a single click using the non-intrusive integration RPA technique, working with multiple disparate technology systems. Moreover, guided scripting reduces the new agent training needs by giving step-by-step guidance for all the requests.

Write to us at contact@edgeverve.com for more information.

John is anxious. His company has just decided to migrate from one enterprise application to another, and as the CIO, he’ll be spending the next few months orchestrating this move. He’s done it before, so he knows how crucial the project is. The migrated application needs to work without any glitches, and there has to be a seamless transfer of data and information. However, he knows that it’s highly likely that the project will overshoot time and budgets, and there’s still the risk of irreparable data loss. There has to be a better way to do this!

John is not alone; over 90% of CIOs have already experienced data migration projects not going as planned¹ . This is mostly because data migration projects, though routine, are structurally complex and require a lot of effort and cost.

Challenges in data migration

Challenges in data migration stem from data source complexity, legacy systems, and a disconnected approach (See Fig 1). Most systems store data in a specific way that may or may not be acceptable to the new application. So, prior to migration, the data needs to be converted to the required format, and there is a possibility of data loss or corruption. In addition, some of the data is hardcoded in the system and not in the database, for example, user preference settings on a Skype account. To migrate these system settings manually would mean going to every user’s account, getting the preferences, and setting them up in the new system — an effort that’s often avoided, leading to poor user experience.

Then there is the challenge of migrating from legacy systems that may not be as open as modern systems today and were not built for data sharing. In fact, this is one of the key reasons why some companies are still stuck with sunset platforms — they just don’t see an easy way out!

Also, in large migrations specifically, many people are involved, working in different teams, shifts, and various parts of the project. There is a high probability of data getting lost in translation during sharing or handover.

Figure 1: Challenges in data migration

That said, data migration is a common activity in large organizations usually associated with mergers & acquisitions, new implementation or upgrades, legacy modernization, and Cloud migration, etc. For instance, a company could decide to move from an on-premise legacy CRM system — licensed or developed in-house — to Salesforce on the Cloud. This is a complex move where the data is not only moving between two different systems, but the infrastructure is also changing. All of the information and settings in the legacy system would now have to be replicated on the new platform — something that’s time-consuming and error-prone when done manually and can test users’ patience.

So why isn’t there a better way to do it?

Actually, there is, and as you must have gleaned from the title, it’s called Robotic Process Automation or RPA. Today automation is everywhere, bringing more efficiency and accuracy to routine tasks. Because of its rule-based, extract, transform, load (ETL) methodology, data migration is a task especially suited for RPA applications.

RPA bots can be programmed for data migration to overcome the challenges we talked about earlier. In a 5-stage process (See Fig 2.), the bot is able to access application records, extract identified data for migration, transform it to the format that the new system accepts, transfer it to the target application, and finally validate it to check for errors.

Figure 2: Data Migration using RPA

RPA for data migration is really a no-brainer

Using RPA for data migration can help avoid most human handling issues and system challenges (See Fig 3.). The bot works 24×7, quietly in the background, and does not corrupt or mishandle information. It follows the process, and as long as it has been trained on all the use cases, it delivers close to 100% accuracy. It’s also more economical than a large team and can reduce people dependency by deploying multiple bots to deliver outcomes faster.

Figure 3: Benefits of using RPA for data migration

RPA also allows a level of visibility and traceability across the process that’s just not humanly possible. In a team, it’s difficult to pinpoint which action and by whom led to an error. On the other hand, the bot can generate an audit report of every step outlining the reasons and conditions for every action, making it easier to trace and fix errors and retrain the bot on new use cases.

Finally, perhaps the most important benefit of using RPA is that it can act as a connector for a legacy application. For instance, a bespoke application developed for in-house use now needs to connect with other business applications to exchange information through APIs. Instead of building APIs for the bespoke application, RPA can become the communicating layer in between. With this, RPA can extend data and information available in the bespoke application to the business applications without investing heavily in developing APIs.

Data migration with AssistEdge RPA

AssistEdge RPA is an enterprise-grade product that excels in enabling businesses to adapt to market challenges that demand scalability, security, intelligence, and innovation. It spans across the automation continuum from deterministic through intelligent to human-empowered automation.

We’ve been helping clients reap the benefits of automation with AssistEdge RPA, our cohesive automation platform. AssistEdge has helped customers fast-track their data migrations with predictability, confidence, and accuracy while significantly reducing costs. Clients have appreciated the transparency and traceability that AssistEdge brought into the migration, along with much-needed flexibility and scalability.

John finally decided the best way to go forward with data migration would be with RPA and got in touch. You can too! Just write to us at contact@edgeverve.com

1. https://www.cio.com/article/3342616/moving-erp-to-the-cloud-expect-delays.html