Frost & Sullivan describes robotic process automation (RPA) as software that incorporates technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate routine, high-volume tasks that are sensitive to human error.
While RPA can boost business efficiencies and ROI without increasing costs, it should not be seen as a replacement for existing business process management (BPM) systems.
That's the view of Nancy Jamison, Frost & Sullivan's Digital Transformation Principal Analyst. Jamison who was commenting on the company's recently published whitepaper Robotic Process Automation: A New Era of Agent Engagement, which examined the increasingly important role RPA is playing in contact centres.
Across all industries, RPA acts as hidden glue that ties together many business processes, with RPA workforces improving organisational efficiency by offloading live resources, improving accuracy, maintaining compliance, and reducing costs.
The whitepaper notes that the focus of the contact centre has shifted from its early days as a customer service cost centre to a customer engagement hub that utilises advanced analytic applications to provide insights into agent performance and workforce management.
At the same time, many businesses place increased emphasis on having the contact centre cater to a changing consumer and employee base that favours work-life balance and employee engagement.
Frost & Sullivan maintains that providing the tools that enable workers to have more satisfying jobs is now a business imperative and is being achieved through enhanced workforce optimisation applications. Robotic process automation and back-office workforce optimisation are two such applications that can have a substantial impact on the overall quality of customer service and employee satisfaction.
"RPA is being deployed across many areas within businesses with varying levels of complexity. For instance, it can be of a generalised nature, propagating data into desktop applications or documents, or it can be used to create highly customized applications geared to a specific vertical market or a specific business area, such as accounting or finance," Jamison said.
"RPA can be customised to a specific company, or be enterprise-grade software that is scalable and reusable. RPA also can incorporate the use of advanced AI and ML that allow the 'robots' to learn and change as new data becomes available, improving their capabilities over time."
She emphasised that used correctly, RPA would augment and complement existing BPM systems as well as case management systems or contact centre/back-office applications, without the need for complex application programming interfaces (API) or coding, allowing for quick deployment.
"Integrating RPA with additional analytics assets, as is done by Nice, a US-based robotic automation company can drive further efficiencies, as well as insights. For example, utilising desktop analytics can help a business identify further areas for process automation," she added.
"The key is to be strategic, not tactical. Taking a one-off approach to process management is a limited point of view. Without an overarching plan for enterprise-wide process automation, you risk cascading process inefficiencies."
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