How Can Intelligent Automation Help Employees and Customers?
Intelligent automation delivers real-time insights aimed at improving customer satisfaction and assisting employees in doing their jobs better. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Employee Point of View
From the POV of your employees, using an intelligent automation platform means more time for tasks that matter and less mundane and repetitive work. By optimizing workflows, automating tasks, and extracting insights from data, your employees can focus entirely on the most valuable activities, like building customer relationships, planning more effective creative strategies, and delivering personalized, enhanced customer value.
Customer Point of View
From the customer's POV, intelligent automation means quicker customer service, better products, and more personalized experiences. Conversely, this improves general customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is especially important when customer acquisition costs are higher than ever.
How Does Intelligent Automation Differ from RPA?
Intelligent automation is a much broader term than RPA – after all, robotic process automation is one of the technologies utilized in IA. RPA itself is a tech that leverages software bots to complete repetitive tasks – it doesn’t deal with data integration or data analytics and doesn’t employ machine learning or AI. You can read more about the differences in our article on intelligent automation vs. RPA.
Why Is Intelligent Automation Gaining Momentum or Popularity?
Why are intelligent automation tools becoming more and more popular? Because they are effective. IA provides context around your data, leading to a deeper understanding of the processes in your company. Therefore, utilizing intelligent automation in your business enables you to take your decision-making to a new level while streamlining your processes to make your company even more productive.
Just think about it – do you really know your processes, pain points, and value? Implementing intelligent automation in your business will let you answer this question and might point out the bottlenecks or blind spots you weren’t previously aware of.
Requirements for an Intelligent Automation Platform
Before implementing an intelligent automation platform, you must consider whether your company is ready for it. Here you should focus on:
- Your current tech stack – Classify the core systems that are used as part of business operations from customer engagement, management, operations, finance, HR, supply chain, and manufacturing. Is it possible to integrate them into an intelligent automation platform? Said another way, do they have APIs and are they network accessible? You have to answer these questions before you make the decision.
- Data management – If you feel that the data is siloed and the flow of information between teams and departments isn’t as seamless as it could be. Then you might not require an IA platform if you answered “no” to both questions.
- ROI and Budget Approval Process – Determining ROI on an intelligent automation project can be done by both direct and indirect methods. Direct ROI can be calculated by process efficiency gains and identifiable improvements in gain of capability. Indirect ROI can be calculated by IT and operational cost arbitrage - specifically by either reducing the cost of current spending or by increasing the utilization of current systems. Both can be modeled by using ROI calculators and building out a business case using these approaches. One core ROI is that as the business scales, the return on the automation scales with it while maintaining a fixed cost.
- Scalability – Is your business rapidly growing? Then you should consider an automation intelligence technology, as it will expand along with your business and will help you accelerate your growth even further.
The Benefits of Using Intelligent Automation
What are the key benefits of utilizing intelligent automation in your business? Take a look at the list below.
- Improved customer satisfaction – With intelligent automation, your business is capable of delivering faster and more accurate customer service responses, thus enhancing customer experience and satisfaction.
- Reduced operating costs and improved efficiency – An intelligent automation platform helps you automate processes and make better decisions, resulting in less money spent on the workforce and business operations that are a mistake.
- Improved decision-making quality – We no longer live in an era where businesses must guess or rely on intuition – vast amounts of data enable informed decision-making. Intelligent automation solutions let you analyze all that data and make the best decisions possible.
- Increased agility – With automated systems relying on data and tracking changes, businesses become more flexible and adapt to a rapidly changing market. This means an intelligent automation platform will help you stay ahead of your competition.
Intelligent Automation Use Cases
While all the above is a theory, now let’s focus on the practical. What is an example of an automation intelligence solution? We’ve prepared a few use cases below.
Enhancing IT Operations: Knowledge Base Efficiency
Consider a scenario in IT operations where a team encounters a problem and needs quick solutions. This is where intelligent automation comes into play, acting as a highly efficient assistant capable of swiftly sorting through vast amounts of information.
For example, let's look at a major retail company. With a multitude of data, articles, and files at their disposal, finding relevant information used to be as challenging as searching for a needle in a haystack. However, thanks to intelligent automation tools, locating the necessary information has become significantly quicker and more accurate.
Now, when faced with a problem, employees can simply input a query, and within moments, they receive precise and timely answers. Moreover, this retail company is exploring further enhancements by enabling the system to respond in natural language, thus simplifying the interaction process and providing a more intuitive experience.
Continuous Micro-Segmentation in Marketing Operations
Let's talk about how marketing teams use AI to make their lives easier. It's all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time, and that's where intelligent automation comes in.
Instead of using generic communication to target the audience, marketing teams continuously evaluate segment membership based on real-time behavioral signals, as well as other customer transactional data and customer data attributes to optimize audience activation with respect to campaigns and offers.
With intelligent automation, marketing teams effectively target their audience with campaigns and offers, ensuring they reach the right audience members with the right communication. This process involves fine-tuning strategies and maintaining proactive oversight to optimize outcomes.
Expense Management in Finance
Intelligent automation is also widely used in finance to provide recommendations on inventory purchasing timing, interrogate business anomalies, or provide real-time data-driven insights for CFOs.
For example, intelligent automation tools help find hotels that meet certain preferences, like airport shuttle service or proximity to venues, and restaurants that cater to specific dietary needs. It ensures these choices align with the company's travel policies, including budget constraints and expense allowances. This simplifies decision-making and enhances traveler satisfaction while adhering to corporate guidelines.
How to Select the Right Solution and Implement Intelligent Automation
Choosing the right platform is key – you need a solution to help you realize your business’s potential, not block it. To find one, you can use Buyer Guide. Or simply ask yourself several questions:
- Does the intelligent automation platform integrate into any known applications, and how (i.e. APIs, coding, no code)?
- Does the solution have an orchestration function that can automate across multiple systems and processes - not just within one system?
- How can you observe what is happening within the processes while they are executing?
- How can you discover where to improve processes once they are running?
- What happens when there is an error in a process?
- What training, onboarding, and ongoing support are offered with the platform?
- What type of security policies and practices are included in the platform?
- Is the company agile enough to make quick updates and feature additions to the platform without waiting quarters or years?
By finding out the answers to these questions, you can make an informed decision and select a platform most beneficial for your business.
What Intelligent Automation Trends Are on the Rise?
Since you know how to select the right platform and thus implement intelligent automation, let us provide you with a quick overview of the recent trends in this field – it might prove helpful when making the decision.
Democratization of Technology
While platforms like ours, with low-code or no-code integration, have existed for quite a while, they were scarce. Yet, now, we can observe a tendency to change that. Enterprise leaders recognize the benefits of low-/no-code implementation, so they are most likely to invest in such solutions, which should stimulate the development of more such platforms.
Since we’re on the topic of the biggest companies, read our article on the five ways intelligent automation helps enterprise leaders!
Generative AI
The emergence of generative AI has not remained unseen by intelligent workflow automation tool providers. Generative AI is more and more often implemented, and we may expect this trend to continue in the next few years.
Cloud-Hosted RPA
Another interesting trend is that the RPA software is frequently hosted in the cloud. This has its benefits, as businesses no longer need to download, install, and upgrade their solution. Plus, they only need to have a stable connection to the internet and do not need to upgrade their hardware when the program scales due to the growth of the business.
Key Takeaways
- Intelligent automation combines RPA, ML, NLP, BPM, and AI to improve efficiency, uncover new growth opportunities, make data-driven decisions quickly, and automate processes.
- Intelligent automation solutions benefit both employees, who get more time to focus on more demanding tasks, and customers, who receive better, quicker service.
- Intelligent automation has become popular due to its capability to drive business growth and integrate data.
- Intelligent automation solutions are utilized by many organizations, including healthcare facilities, customer service teams, and even automotive manufacturers.
- How to select and implement the right intelligent automation platform? Choose a platform that can be integrated with the tools already used in your company, is regularly updated, and comes with training for your employees to learn how to use it.
Want to see a different approach to this technology? Read about Five Ways Intelligent Automation Helps Enterprise Leaders and learn how leaders perceive it.
