Transcript: Transforming the Contact Center Experience in Banking with Automation

Insights from Our Conversation in Partnership with UiPath

SPEAKERS

Jenya Doudareva, Eli Federman, David Burnie, Brad Beumer, Amit Kumar

Jenya Doudareva  00:03

The webinar is called Transforming the Contact Center Experience in Banking with Automation. I am Jenya Doudareva, a Senior Engagement Manager and Intelligent Automation at Burnie Group. We are recording the webinar today so all attendees are in listen only mode. If you have a question, please use the chat function in the lower area of your screen as we will be answering questions. And if we run out of time during the Q&A, we can answer anything remaining in our follow up email when we share the recording.

Jenya Doudareva  00:34

Now I would like to introduce our speakers. David Burnie is principal and founder at Burnie Group. He founded Burnie Group in 2011 to help organizations dramatically improve their operations.

Jenya Doudareva  00:47

Eli Federman is our Omnichannel and Contact Center Practice Leader. Eli is a strategic customer service and sales leader who works with contact centers to optimize customer operations, generate revenue opportunities and build an differentiated customer experience.

Jenya Doudareva  01:06

Amit Kumar is VP Financial Services at UiPath. He leads the financial services go to market strategy and business value engineering, specifically for large banking and capital markets clients.

Jenya Doudareva  01:20

Brad Beumer is UiPath’s Customer Experience in Contact Centers Lead in the Americas. He evangelizes UiPath’s platform for customer experience and contact center automation. Today, we are going to talk about our insights from our contact center benchmark, the benefits of contact center automation, and how the UiPath solutions can improve productivity for your frontline employees, as well as improve overall efficiency. We’ll review some use case studies along the way. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Eli.

Eli Federman  01:57

Jenya, thank you. And good afternoon, everyone. We are so happy to have you with us today, I’m going to first start by giving you a very short overview of our contact center benchmark right now deployed with Canada’s big five banks. One of the great ways to figure out just how valuable automation might be for your business and contact centers in particular, is to have a really good robust understanding of your performance.

Eli Federman  02:23

So let me tell you a little bit about our benchmark. We feel it’s innovative and quite different than other benchmarks in the marketplace. And here’s why. First and foremost, we build this context center benchmark in partnership with our clients. And that is the product that we have out now today with the banks. A couple of things that I’d like to point out. One is, we make sure that any data point that we’re going to decide to measure on that it can be measured the same way with all participants. We’ve also gone out of our way to come up with a very simplified process, which means the framework we have in place, keeps in mind the amount of effort our clients need to put into doing their part in gathering the data. And then in terms of output, we have a very streamlined set of reports. We work with a company called Tableau, and that allows us to ensure that the information we produce can be easily read, understood, and analyzed. Plus, we give our clients the opportunity to leverage Tableau and come up with any additional reports they might like to do for themselves.

Eli Federman  03:33

The second component is we produce a quarterly benchmark. So a one-off benchmark is very popular in the marketplace, we find the quarterly cadence accomplishes one very key thing: it allows our clients to see how they’re performing four times a year. So it really pushes the thought of understanding where you might have opportunities and coming up with shorter-term remediation plans to drive performance improvement. And thirdly, we go out of our way to leverage a very deep set of reference points and network to come up with inputs and insights that our clients find highly meaningful. And we do that as part of our quarterly cadence. And in addition to doing a comparative in this case with the banks that we work with, Burnie Group will also bring an outside-in perspective with the 25 years of contact center experience that we’ve been fortunate enough to have. So that gives you a summary of the context center benchmark for banks.

Eli Federman  04:37

And just before handing it over to Dave, let me just share with you as you see in front of you a few key insights from the latest quarterly benchmark. First off, this may or may not been a surprise to some of you, but Canadians are still highly dependent on the phone when it comes to their channel of choice. That does not account for IVR and online when it comes to banking. We’re talking about channels to engage. And the phone is predominantly still how Canadians are engaging with their banks. The second one is, most of the banks were very dependent on in-home operations prior to the pandemic, and they had to really rethink their businesses, like many other companies across industry and geography, because of COVID. And now, just over 80% of all bank frontline employees are now working successfully at home.

Eli Federman  05:32

Hold time, which is something that many of our clients struggle with, you can see the range there between 60 and 90 seconds. And that’s a good metric to keep in mind as you start to think about contact center automation, which Dave will talk about shortly, because that can have a very positive impact on reducing hold time.

Eli Federman  05:52

And then finally, we have a range of attrition. There is a huge thirst for talent in the industry. Right now, the banks, along with other industry, are having to come up with very innovative ways to hang on to the most prized possession, which is their frontline employee. And because we measure by line of business, you see some of the fluctuation that you see here in terms of the range of performance. And finally, with NPS, the banks are equally concerned with their customer satisfaction. And this metric. like it does for many, gives them a checkpoint on a quarterly basis. Thank you so much for listening. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Dave.

David Burnie  06:33

Thanks, Eli. And for those of you on the call who have participated in our contact center benchmark, I think many of you have talked to that the insights that gives every quarter being able to understand just how you’re doing relative to others. So if there are others out there who are interested in learning more about our benchmark, please feel free to give us a shout or or reach out to me as well.

David Burnie  07:00

So let’s transition to talking about contact center automation. You know, we’re thrilled to be joined today, by Brad and by Amit, from UiPath, who can take us through some specifics around how UiPath specifically can help as it relates to contact center automation. Burnie Group has been operating has been leading automation initiatives for many, many years now and contact center of late has been a real focus for us, combined with the expertise of Eli, who leads our Omnichannel and Contact Center practice with our automation capabilities. We’ve been really leading the charge around automation in the contact center.

David Burnie  07:51

The thing that’s a little bit different about contact center is the importance of being able to automate live, while you’ve got a customer on the phone, having a conversation compared to back-office automation, which has been working in force for many, many years. Recent innovation in automation has allowed us to do more of the live automation while we’re interacting and engaging with customers.

David Burnie  08:24

So through our work, we’ve identified 12 different benefits that come from context center automation. I thought I would highlight some of those. So the the first and most obvious one is reducing or eliminating time spent on high volume, time-consuming tasks. So you know, this is traditionally been the strength of automation tools, and those repetitive activities or tasks that a frontline employee needs to do can happen in an automatic fashion, leveraging the contact center automation. So I think that that that one’s pretty clear as to the benefits. Some of the other benefits I’ll go through are really particular to contact center and have really driven great impact. And I’ll talk about the impact shortly.

David Burnie  09:19

Second is around automating customer validation. So for those of you working in contact center, I’m sure you’re familiar with the challenges of you got a customer on the line, you’ve got to go through all those validation steps. One of the benefits of contact center automation is we can actually do all of that validation before that customer speaks to an agent. So whether it’s through the IVR or through a chat bot, we can leverage automation to have that customer pre validated so that when they come on to have a conversation, we’re not spending all that time going through all of the customer’s background information, but we can dive right in and help to address that customer’s most pressing problem.

David Burnie  10:09

Third is around optimizing FAQ access. People, you know, see this one as – they don’t immediately come to mind to think about how we can add access to this FAQ. But if you think about it, when you’re dealing with a customer, you know, frontline employees need to go and access FAQ’s is really important. And automation can really make it quicker, faster and get the better information to our frontline employees. So they can have a better and higher quality conversation with our customers. So optimizing FAQ access is one of the things that we found is a really big benefit to contact center automation. Fourth is automating after-call work. This is similar to some of the back-office automation that’s probably already in place in many organizations. But once a call is terminated, much of the after-call work can be automated. That doesn’t need to be live while a customer’s on the call. But I think that that really takes away the amount of time that a frontline employee needs to spend doing that after call work so they can spend more time with their customers.

David Burnie  11:36

Fifth is around reducing and eliminating switching between screens and systems. This is one that we have found can be a huge impact. One way to do this is through the development, the design and implementation of a unified desktop. And what this allows frontline employees to do is rather than needing to switch from screen to screen to screen, we can have one unified system that has all the information, has all the work that needs to get done can be done right there. And so that is going to save a tremendous amount of time, reduce errors, improve overall quality, and that interaction with the customer.

David Burnie  12:21

Six is around increasing the speed of retrieving information. So this is just simply when a customer asks a question through a combination of going to the right places. So related to the, you know, the FAQ access, but also just processing. And in combination with things like unified desktop, we can just get work done faster. So when a customer, you know, customers, when they call us generally they’ve got a problem, and they want that problem to be solved quickly. And so through contact center automation, we can increase the pace at which we can get answers to our customers.

David Burnie  13:03

Seventh is around providing a 360-degree view of the customer. Digital assistants can quickly pull data from multiple systems to allow a 360-degree view of the customer and share that back with frontline employees. So if you think about the ability for frontline employees to have a good quality conversation with customers, by giving them all the information that they need across multiple systems to really understand that customer and have that 360-degree view is going to allow for much better interaction. And that’s going to lead to things like you know, first call resolution, net Promoter score improvements. And so that 360-degree view can be a real benefit.

David Burnie  13:50

Eighth, seamlessly integrating between systems. Our digital assistants through the contact center automation can pre-populate information from multiple systems onto a single unified desktop, reducing time spent waiting for screens to refresh or searching for information. So that integration and some of that integration can actually start because we know systems can take a little while to work and to populate the information that can get started when that customer is in the IVR. Once they’ve logged in, before they speak to an agent, we can already start that process through our digital agents to pre-populate all the information that the frontline employee is going to need in dealing with the customer.

David Burnie  14:40

Ninth is around fully automating specific call types, and so we see what we found is there’s an opportunity by leveraging IVR through the use of chatbots, where we can take specific call types and we can actually get those call types resolved without ever coming to a frontline employee. So think about address change as an example. Clearly, there’s ways to do that online. But if someone calls in, or if someone is using a chatbot as an example, we’ve been able to build automations that will actually interact with other digital agents or robots and get work done. And in some cases, completely bypass the need to speak with a frontline agent. So that can really enhance the customer experience because the customers getting on, you’re getting their problem resolved right away, very quickly. And it actually eliminates the need to have that engagement with the frontline employee.

David Burnie  15:50

Number ten benefit that we wanted to call out is routing calls more effectively. So digital assistants can evaluate the initial customer responses from an IVR or chatbot while considering profile customer profile information, to then read them to the most appropriate queue or frontline employee. So we find is through the use of our intelligent agents to understand what their needs are, we can get that customer to the right frontline employee in the right queue much more effectively than in a traditional system.

David Burnie  16:33

Number 11. Eliminating errors. I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. You know, robots don’t make mistakes. So you know, typing errors, you know, these are things that just don’t happen. So as long as you’ve programmed things effectively, it’s going to take the quality up quite a great deal. It’s going to learn and eliminate many of those errors.

David Burnie  16:58

And then finally accelerating improving decision making. Digital assistants can provide recommendations to frontline employees to facilitate quicker decisions based on a comprehensive view of all available information. So we can, what we have found is that in combination with our contact center automation, our frontline employees are getting better information. And they’re getting better recommendations from the system in order to be making the right decisions and providing the right recommendations to customers. So all in all, we’re able to serve customers better and faster and quicker, and resolve their issues. And then that opens up time for us to have other conversations to drive some top-line revenue growth. So overall significant benefits.

David Burnie  17:52

Just to think about some of the impacts that we’ve seen, you know, reduction in operating expense 30 to 40% within the first year. And so depending on, you know, where, what the focus is, and what the opportunity is, these are, we’ve delivered these like this is real, this is not just theoretical, the impact can be great. And as mentioned in depending on what activity or call type you’re looking at, it can go as high as you know, 100%, where you’re completely eliminating that interaction with the frontline employee. So that a customer can just get to get things resolved in an automated fashion. 50% reduction in call duration. And so this allows, it can be one of two things: we can just reduce the length of the calls. And then we can have frontline employees essentially doubling the number of calls that they can handle. Or we can take that savings and reinvest it to drive top-line revenue growth. So I think there’s a choice of how different organizations choose to use those savings in driving improvements.

David Burnie  19:09

And then 30% in reduced agent attrition. This is one that’s a little bit counterintuitive. But what we found is that through the use of contact center automation, all of the really monotonous, menial work that frontline employees typically have to do is significantly reduced or even eliminated, which allows them to have better conversations with their customers. And because you’re getting customers to the right agent, they’re able to address the customer queries more effectively. And so you have a much better first call resolution. So it’s a bit of a virtuous cycle. You have your customers, you’ve got team members, employees who are working doing work that’s more rewarding. So overall, we found great benefits from just an employee’s overall perspective. So overall, and that diagram below is just meant to show that, you know, that one example where we can actually take automation, and we can go to an agent, or we’ve actually found ways to automate by taking a query from an IVR or chatbot and just doing it in a completely automated fashion.

David Burnie  20:38

So overall, some great benefits, very specific to contact center and some great impact. And so we’ve been able to really see those with our clients and really deliver this value. And the results have been just really fantastic from a customer perspective, from an employee perspective, from an efficiency perspective, and really top-line growth, as well as people can invest time in working with customers and uncovering some of those unmet needs that they didn’t necessarily know that. So that’s a high-level overview of contact center automation, and why it’s so important in some of those benefits. What we thought we could do is we asked our partners UiPath to come and share some examples of how this works, and so that people can see this, see some examples of this working in reality. So I’m going to hand it off to Brad, and Brad is going to take us through some real life examples of how contact center automation can work.

Brad Beumer  21:45

Excellent. Thanks, David. Thanks for having us here today, by the way. Those are some great numbers that you guys shared. It really, really exciting to see those. You know, we want to talk a little bit about just how we see our customers, improving customer experience across banking. And one of the first key areas that we hear a lot about is self-service, you know, how can you bypass help us offer or improve the self-service options for our customers. One of the main reasons for that is because contact centers, as we talked about earlier, are under staffing stress. A lot of the clients I talked to were at 80%, oftentimes much less, of their typical staffing.

Brad Beumer  22:25

One of the ways to help alleviate that pressure is to allow customers to do more in self-service. So I’ll give you one example, one good customer example here. We have a financial services client that we work with, and they provide services to the big banks. But one of the services they provide is for cards. So this would be for example, topping up a pre-loaded debit card or credit card, replacing a credit card or debit card in similar services. Those requests they automate today, they automate about 10,000 requests per day, using a robot connected to their phone system connected to their IVR to automate a lot of these phone calls from reaching their agents. So those are 10,000 calls a day where the average handle time went to 0% because the robot handled all of the requests. So pretty significant there. So if you can think about being able to automate 10,000 requests a day, that’s going to have a pretty significant impact on your contact center and help to reduce that staffing pressure that they’re probably experiencing.

Brad Beumer  23:33

Another area is around just how do we assist the agent. So not every call is going to be handled in self-service. How do we actually help those agents? David talked a lot about that. An example here is we actually have several banks that use us to help start their day and help automate that upfront verification and validation of the caller. So if you can do verification and validation in the phone system, and give the agent a red, yellow, green alert on their screen, a dashboard-type alert, that usually eliminates easily 30 seconds off the upfront start on the call part of the call.

Brad Beumer  24:11

Now another area that oftentimes gets neglected, but we can often help with what we call citizen development tools. This would be our Studio X tool for the operations teams. So these are the folks that are doing onboarding of agents, off-boarding of agents, scheduling, quality assurance and monitoring. We can automate a lot of that. We have a financial services client that uses us to help offboard their agents. One of the key reasons isn’t necessarily the time savings, but actually for compliance reasons. Because if you think about PCI compliance, and some of the other standards that are out there, regulatory standards that are out there, you have to have agents out of your systems in 24 hours. Otherwise, if you get audited then an auditor finds that you had an agent around in a system or anyone in a system for 48 hours, 72 hours or longer, you’re facing potential fines and reputational damage as well. And you know, if you’ve seen anything from UiPath, and you know that we really feel we believe that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are invariably wins. So all this is really designed, especially those last two areas are designed to help increase employee satisfaction.

Brad Beumer  25:26

Alright, let’s talk a little bit more around self-service. And I talked about phone examples, but one of the areas that I hear most often are chatbots. So how do we leverage chatbots with our existing system? There’s an example on the screen here where the chatbot, you know, this could be any chatbot tool. By the way, Google, we have a partnership with a company called Druid, Boost AI, Query AI, Cognigy is a leader in this space. You can use your UiPath robots together with a chatbot to surface data that isn’t usually available. So this might be not only surface data but also process information or process requests. So this might be as simple as an account unlock, maybe as simple as looking up transactions, maybe a transaction dispute, stop payment, international travel request. We actually have a client, another regional banking client here in North America, that uses us together with AWS to do a lot of those same transactions we were talking about, a request from a request, but instead of having to do them with an agent, they do it in a chatbot, that AWS chatbot. So let’s go ahead and move to the next slide, please.

Brad Beumer  26:44

Now, the interesting part here is we talked about account unlock, and potentially new applications and other interactions, and you see those in the middle of the screen. Now, once you built them, using UiPath for your chatbot, you can actually reuse them across other channels, like your phone system, like email, like any social media, that you may have your website, mobile, and others. One of the other areas that we hear a lot about is email and how we can help automate email because that also helps. If you’re able to automate email, it helps reduce some of that staffing pressure that I was talking about earlier. And we have a really great case study we’re going to go into a little bit more detail. Amit is going to lead us through that so Amit, over to you.

Amit Kumar  27:28

Thanks, Brad. Thanks to David and Burnie Group for giving us this opportunity today. I think Brad has really well, you know, sort of created the whole hour possible as well as how does the technology work across omnichannel as a landscape. But when it comes to, you know, one of our favorite case studies in terms of where we are seeing this in action, we’re tried to articulate the same on this particular slide. The background is very, you know, quite common across large banks, which is millions of emails coming from both the retail as well as from commercial channel. 1000s of shared inboxes, where typically the pain is that a lot of team members have to go through them manually, triage them, have to extract information from these emails. And come to think of it this is not exactly an RPA problem. It’s actually a problem that requires artificial intelligence and [natural language processing] NLP and machine learning so to say.

Amit Kumar  28:32

So enter AI Center, which is one of our key components as part of our automation platform. And using AI Center, specifically the out-of-the-box machine learning models that we offer, one to classify these emails, these emails have no format, they don’t have any structure. So leveraging our out-of-the-box platform, out-of-the-box model in our platform to retrain. And secondly, use the named entity recognition model to extract specific insights from these emails so that you are detecting the intent automatically. you’re prioritizing these requests automatically, whether it is about credit limit, upgrade, whether it is about via repair, whether it is about address change, and then it can get through the hole straight-through processing. Brad talked about self-service. Self-service happens when intelligent automation takes that downstream processing as well. Not necessarily just a digital facade, but also an end-to-end – a true end-to-end – automation. Using a combination of AI, RPA and other automation technologies. Some of the numbers speak for themselves. And this is just one client and we are seeing this kind of a use case really proliferate across believers as well as regional banking. You know, our courts and our clients. Back to you, Brad.

Brad Beumer  30:03

All right, thank you. That’s a great story. If you think about 700,000 emails a year that aren’t going to an agent, that could make up that 20%, that staffing level difference that we were talking about earlier.

Brad Beumer  30:15

Alright, let’s talk a little bit about how we actually help the agents. But first, let’s talk a little bit about the challenge. So, this is a challenge that has been around for the 20 plus years I’ve been doing this. Actually, the reason why I kind of got into this space was frontline employees, agents, others, when a call comes in, it could be an email, it could be a live chat, could be a social message, any channel that they’re working with. When it first comes in, they’ve got to go into a lookup in the CRM, then maybe take some information and put it in the core banking application. Then based on the call type, let’s just say it’s a fraud or a dispute, maybe they go into that application or applications that maybe they have to go out to an external system. I only have four applications on the screen here. And we oftentimes see six to eight applications to use in a given customer interaction.

Brad Beumer  31:04

So the solution, when we look at using UiPath to really help with this is actually a couple of ways that we can help. So one is those applications that we just saw can go to the background. And what you see on the center of the screen is they are using our low code apps tool. This is a 360-degree view of all the data that you need. So there may be something as simple as 20 data points, 30 data points or more, we can put it on that screen. Now a lot of customers come back or have some customers that come back and say, “You know what, UiPath? We don’t need you for that 360-view because we already have a 360 view,” maybe in something like Salesforce, like you see on the screen. That’s actually okay because the key for us is that we’re solving the problem, the key problem that we’re trying to solve is that swivel chair, that swivel chair from one application to the next, and also being able to guide the agent through those applications and the customer’s request. And if that’s in Salesforce, or if we can use our robots inside of Salesforce, that’s great. If you can use our app solution to help create that single view, that’s fine as well. You can see some of the benefits on the side of the screen here, and some of those match with what David was talking about earlier, too. So we won’t cover too much on those.

Brad Beumer  32:27

A few common automations that we see. So this is a question that we often get asked is, What are the high-level use cases? What are the high-level automation opportunities? So the first one is starting the banker’s day, getting logged into workforce management, there Safa there, they’re VPN, Citrix, if they need Citrix or other VDI. Then once you have those, you got to get logged into all the applications. So and then you think about doing that every time you come back from break, that’s three times a day, you’re going through that process. Well, that can be automated. We call that Start My Day. We have customers that are using it today, they tell us they save around two to four minutes per agent per day with just that one automation. Now that you have the robot running, we can actually help start the call, whether we integrated with the phone system, where the robot can listen to the software for the call to come in, and then that can lead to what’s listening to the soft phone will know the call type. And we can actually guide the call. So these might be the same things we were talking about earlier stop payment fraud dispute, check on the status of an application, and many others. You can see the savings at the bottom of the screen there. And David talked about the last one where we can automate after-call work and part of his presentation there. But the savings that we tend to see is usually about 10 to 20% of average handle time over total average handle time. Call wrap-up notes are important but also automating any handoff that might happen from one agent to another agent or to someone else. We actually like to say that those handoffs are low-hanging automation fruit because the handoff could be to a robot instead of to a person.

Brad Beumer  34:13

The last area that we’re going to talk about on the next slide, please, is operational efficiency. And I’m really going to talk about the whole UiPath stack. We focus on robots so far. But there are so many other parts of the UiPath platform that come into play for the contact center. And you can see here on the screen, I’m not going to go through all the product details. Please reach out to Burnie Group or us if you’d like to learn more about the platform.

Brad Beumer  34:38

But some things that we can help with are automating time and motion studies. When I was starting out as a consultant this used to take weeks and weeks to do. We can literally automate it in minutes. Then create a document that shows you some of those exact same statistics that you get from those time and motion studies. Mail and fax – Amit, David, Eli and I, we always talk to customers that still have fax and regular postal mail or white mail that they’re getting in. We can automate that. As we digitize, that customer asks our robots, we’re going to go and pick it up off the fax machine. Now it has to be an e-fax will pick it up off the e-fax and will process it from there. But low-hanging fruit for us to be able to automate. We’re talking about after-call work notes, and forums and emails.

Brad Beumer  35:27

Last part, that we’ll talk about the platform helps out is with engaging, and we were mentioning chatbots and being able to create a single view, but a key thing in the contact center is the digital assistant and the ability for the agent to work side by side with the robot. So with a lot of automation platforms, RPA, the agent has to take their hands off the keyboard while the robots are working. A key difference for us is that we built with this in mind so that the agent and the robot can actually work together so the agent can work while the robot is working too. Amit, I think we have some other case studies that highlight some of these examples here. So I’m going to hand it back over to you to cover those.

Amit Kumar  36:08

Thank you, thank you, Brad. And it all comes together, you know, in the form of different success stories that we are seeing across the financial services landscape, and I’m going to take some time to, you know, go through each of these three on the slide today. The first one is relative to cards and payments, you know, specifically the cards as the business. You know, Dave and Eli were talking about the need for doing contact center automation. I think that need got a huge boost at the start of the pandemic because a couple of things happened: contact center capacities were at risk, you know, they were not really operating 100%. And secondly, the cards and payments as a transaction volume just went through the roof. Some of the governments issued, you know, bailouts, some of the government’s issued cards. They were also online transactions that went through the roof. Now what really makes it difficult is certainly the 60 to 90 day wait time that Eli was talking about, you know, at the start of the conversation. Those wait times were also they went through the roof, because we just did not have that kind of capacity to to cover things like our activations to cover digital journeys like car decline to say. So we saw a huge uptake in leveraging attended automation.

Amit Kumar  37:39

Now, why? Again, those 12 reasons that they put out an earlier slide all those reasons, but the number one reason being the number of screens, the number of systems that each of these, you know, contact center agents have to look at. I mean, for example, looking at a core banking platform versus a CRM versus a fee and billing system in order to solve a particular transaction for a particular client. What we also saw as a result of this is the rise of two types of attended automations. One is the true digital assistant that sits on your desktop. And in some cases, clients also went ahead and started creating little widgets. You know, I’m not going to call it a unified desktop, because the unified desktop is has been a term in the industry for a long time and it means much more complex, but a single pane of sort of information. And that at least from the transaction perspective is able to cover and get all the information that is required to solve or to resolve that particular transaction itself. Balance transfers, you know, this one is it’s quite similar and yet different because it casts a very simple net, which is you can do these automations. You can implement these projects in weeks and not months.

Amit Kumar  39:10

Here is an example of one of the largest outsourcers of cards operation in the world. They handle card operations and card contact centers for hundreds if not 1000s of banks. That means the volume is and the complexity is really, really high. What they did is that they went ahead and looked at balance transfer as one pesky little journey that they wanted to automate, and they picked up 200 agents as a pilot. Within six to eight weeks, we were able to ensure that there is no key duplication using that ended automation, we were able to ensure that all the customer validations and verifications for automated, any kind of fraud or compliance checks have been automated as well as the handoffs and Brad talked about the problem with the handoff because handoffs eat into your overall operational capacity. So, how do you reduce those handoffs and hand it over to digital assistants or digital workers? You know, that was the mainstay of this particular case study. Again six to eight weeks, when you try to approach automation as a program or implement, you know, using classical means, you often find yourself you know, staring at well 18 months kind of a window, and that was one key feature or characteristic of this particular case.

Amit Kumar  40:40

Last, but not least, even today, you know, we are in 2022, end of January, there are still scenarios where mails, you know, documents, images plus faxes are being received. I mean, you look at a mortgage as an example, or some of the retail lendings, you know, product lines as well, wherein you have to ensure that there is a continuity, there is straight-through processing of these inputs, you know, document services. So, we have worked with one of the largest US banks, and they leveraged our document understanding, plus our overall automation platform, to, first of all, read and classify in terms of where exactly this particular fax or the document needs to go. Secondly, extract important information so that you are digitizing it, you know, you are drawing insights and actionable extraction out of these documents. So that, then you can almost do end-to-end automation. In some cases, you may have to bring in humans, let’s say, you know, it’s a document that has not been processed before, or a document type and the AI doesn’t feel very confident that it kind of, you know, highlights as a human in the loop. But again, an excellent example of how the automation platform is transcending those initial RPA routes, and becoming more and more intelligent, adding these new capabilities to give you true end-to-end automation in customer service, as an area.

Amit Kumar  42:22

That’s how I would you sign off on the case studies and the success stories that we have seen. There are many, many more examples. As Brad said, you know, as a next step, we would love to talk, you know, more about some of the case studies that we have. At this point in time, I’ll hand it back to Jenya.

Jenya Doudareva  42:46

Hello, and thank you so much, Amit. Thank you, Brad, Dave, and Eli. Now it’s time for our Q&A. So the first question that we have is around getting started with contact center automation. So a few questions here really are, How do we get started with contact center automation? And similarly, how do we identify opportunities that can be automated, and should be automated?

David Burnie  43:16

Yeah, and I’m happy to jump in on that first, Jenya. When this is actually an area that we do a lot of work with our clients to do an initial upfront diagnostic, going in and assessing end to end operations for contact center and highlighting these are the top areas where we think the opportunity is going to reside, and putting together a concrete plan with the leadership team to build out their automation roadmap. And so by understanding what are the biggest opportunities, working with leadership to prioritize, and then putting together a roadmap that makes sense for the organization, that’s for us the typical starting point. And there are many tools that we can use, you know, insert in terms of looking at data mining and other tools to help with that process. And that’s typically where we would start.

Brad Beumer  44:25

Yeah, I would just add, David, that part of that process – you’ve already highlighted this – is the data is getting access to the data and getting accurate data. And in the slide, I think my last slide, we showed an overview of all the different tools and what some of the tools were in the Discover area. Those are tools that will sit on the agent’s desktop to help collect data, and also sit in the back in systems or take data from the backend systems to help discover automation opportunities. And then once you’ve found those opportunities, and then Dave and his team have done the analysis on them, we have a tool called Automation Hub where you can enter those opportunities. And it’ll start to help you identify what the ROI might be what the best automation opportunities would be to start with first.

Jenya Doudareva  45:17

Well, thank you so much. And I will move on to our next question. So how does contact center automation integrate with other contact center technologies?

Brad Beumer  45:30

Yeah. So there are actually two ways. So from actually going back to the first slide that I presented, which had the three different buckets on it, the first one was self-service. So one of the questions that we get often asked a lot is, How do you integrate with our phone system? Whether it’s Genesys or Cisco or Via or maybe a modern CCAP solution, like Five9 or Amazon Connect. The answer is we can actually integrate with any of those systems. That’s a core part of our value proposition is the ability to integrate with anything. Now, we’ve said how do we make it easier in some cases, and we’ve created connectors for Genesys and Amazon and a few others as well, some other phone systems and chatbots, and conversational AI platforms, because at the end of the day, we can actually integrate with any solution through our RPA capabilities. And that goes, that’s the same on the desktop as well.

David Burnie  46:34

Yeah, we’ve found it to be pretty seamless and integrating with those contact center technologies. And there’s, you know, APIs and a lot of built-in solutions that make the integration very easy.

Jenya Doudareva  46:55

Thank you both for your answers. That concludes the questions that we have for today. And once again, I would really like to thank every single speaker that we had participating.

David Burnie  47:09

Jenya, I did see one just come in.

Jenya Doudareva  47:12

I know, that’s right. Wonderful. We do have time for the question, of course.

David Burnie  47:20

And I might actually direct this at you, Jenya, because you’ve recently led a very large enterprise implementation. Mark’s question was how are the agents retrained to use automation and tools? So Jenya, maybe you could help to answer when we did this work with, with our clients? You know, how have we gone about implementing this and retraining the frontline employees to be able to use the automation tools?

Jenya Doudareva  47:51

Of course. And I think that’s a fantastic question. And a couple of thoughts that I have. One, it is really, really important to make sure that there is a minimum of invasiveness into how agents are doing their work and how much retraining is required. The easiest way to make sure that frontline employees are really sold on and are excited about contact center automation is to make sure that the automation integrates really well and seamlessly into their existing process. So for that, we do recommend that whatever scripting applications exist right now and whatever general flow of conversations that frontline employees follow today, automation tools integrate well with that, as well as with the platforms they are using. But with that comes kind of a second complication is – and if you take a hat off, well, is the process that exists for frontline employees today optimal? So of course, you should work with the frontline SMEs really closely together to also design whether or not any changes are needed to how they’re doing work to ensure that automated process is potentially smoother than what they’re doing today and that they do have appropriate time to answer customer queries. And overall from what we have seen, automation tools can be very, very easy to use for frontline employees and do require quite little ultimate retraining.

David Burnie  49:37

Thanks, Jenya. And we did have one other question about sharing contact info for everyone in this session and we will share both our contact information and Brad’s and Amit’s in a follow-up email to everyone. We will send out a link to this presentation that you can watch and share, we’ll share our contact information. And of course, we’d love to set up a time with anyone who’s interested in learning more about contact center automation, and we can set up a one-on-one or set up a time with you and your team to get together and go into more depth. So I think that’s all of the questions. Let me just open it up before Brad, Amit, Eli, Jenya. Any final thoughts before we wrap and give people back a little bit of time?

Eli Federman  50:42

Dave, the only thing I’d add is just circling back to the start of the discussion when we shared a little bit of insight into our benchmark framework working with the banks. If you would like to learn more around our product, maybe you have some interest. Again, please reach out to Dave or me. We’d love to talk to you about it. Thanks, Dave.

David Burnie  51:07

Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for attending. We’ve enjoyed the past hour talking about contact center automation, but we’re really excited about this. We love the topic. So if you want to just catch up and talk more about it or if you have a specific opportunity, please do reach out. But until then, have a wonderful afternoon. And we look forward to hopefully seeing you soon. Bye everyone

Jenya Doudareva  51:37

Bye.

Eli Federman  51:39

Bye for now.