An omnichannel is a business communication strategy that focuses on giving customers the power to choose how they want to contact you. Whether through a chatbot, email, phone call, or text message, an omnichannel is designed in a way to provide a seamless experience no matter which method of communication customers choose. Research has shown younger-generation customers prefer messaging-based communication over phone calls and emails due to the lack of disruptions. Customers want to receive assistance while performing their daily activities without having to put their lives on hold, but a personalized experience is not the only advantage of an omnichannel. Here are four other benefits.

1. Less agent effort needed

Many call centers are the culprit of high turnover rates. Employees are overworked. Dealing with frustrated customers is not easy. Nothing is more demotivating than doing repetitive tasks all year long. Agents are not always recognized for their efforts. A call center job is not your typical 9-5. These are just a few of the downsides of a call center. With an omnichannel, requests are distributed across multiple channels, giving employees more time to focus on more rewarding tasks without overextending themselves.

2. Improves and enhances customer experience

The modern customer does not want to be restricted to a single channel when reaching out. They want to get in touch with you whenever and wherever they want, without it disrupting their lives. An omnichannel does just that. It provides customers with a stream of seamless communication with the same high quality level of service across every channel.

3. Cost effective and efficient

Expect a significant reduction in costs when you opt for sending messages to your customer’s channel of choice compared to when you overwhelm them through every outlet possible.

4. Centralizes data

Due to the shift in technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation, data is now seen as an essential asset to how organizations can improve their efficiency. What was once a step that required information-gathering before serving a customer is now readily available for agents. Employees from different departments within a company can access real-time customer data from a single place. This means call center agents no longer have to gather all the customer’s information before serving them, saving more employee time and effort and dissolving any customer frustrations. Unifying your database can also help identify patterns in customer behavior and deliver valuable insight to improve a customer’s overall experience.

5. Deflects calls

Calls are deflected when your points of contact are distributed across multiple channels. For example, customers can opt for other means of assistance like chat or email, where they are not required to pick up their phone. Customers can even start or stop a service, send complaints, enroll in recommendation programs, and personalize their Customers can self-serve and be more efficient to solve any issues they face on their own. 

Looking to adopt an omnichannel business strategy? Let us handle it from start to finish. Book a demo with us today and reap the benefits of an omnichannel.

Today, more and more companies are keeping up with the latest digital trends in an effort to build a future-ready workforce. Some are looking up to digital agents. However, the majority of companies resort to human labor-based business process outsourcing (BPO) for back and front-office operations. This is in the hopes of a high return on investment. But there is a major downside that companies seem to overlook with this decision. 

Human-based BPO has a lifeline of up to five to ten years. This makes it a non-sustainable solution for companies seeking future-proof solutions. Aside from that, BPO fails to measure valuable insight on user-experience, creating a ripple effect of endless consequences. Overall, companies begin to suffer financially from high customer churn and investment failure. On the bright side, digital agents are the future workforce, and they are already here. However, just like anything else, they are no exception to being a target of criticism and misconceptions. Let’s tackle them one by one.

1. Robotic sounding voice based conversational agents are not fluent in enough languages

While this may be true, covering enough languages fluently and localization go hand in hand. Artificial intelligence, the technology responsible for conversational agents, adapts through progressive learning algorithms when given new data. AI can recognize and extract structure and regularities in data and convert them into algorithms to learn a certain skill. The quality of voice and human-like interaction increases in maturity the more conversational AI is used through its evolving capabilities. This means companies can improve the capability of these services the more they use them.

2. Intent and context need to be updated every now and then

Natural Language Processing is a self-sufficient technique that is capable of independently performing a syntax and semantic analysis to better understand the user’s inquiry through a digital agent. 

– Syntax analysis refers to the rules and regulations for writing any statement in a programming language. 

– Semantic analysis refers to the meaning associated with the statement in a programming language. For example, when utilizing different machine learning techniques, models can run in both, supervised and unsupervised manners.

– Supervised learning is a machine learning approach that uses labeled datasets designed to supervise algorithms into classifying data or predicted outcomes accurately. 

On the other hand, unsupervised learning uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and group unlabeled data sets. These algorithms find hidden patterns in data and get trained to recognize them without human intervention. Additionally, they can also perform rule-based pattern matching, classifications, decision trees, and the deployment of neural networks enabling intelligent decision-making, context creation, and more. This way, a digital agent is molded into a contextual and intelligent bot that is solution-driven and empowered for human interaction. 

3. They displace employees

Tedious exceptions can be automated so that employees doing menial tasks are trained into higher caliber professionals. Exception management is one example of a job that requires problem-solving as the main skill to solve high priority cases. A human agent is expected to monitor digital agents to ensure the digital workforce is running smoothly. In the case of an exception, these agents are trained to intervene and solve the issue accordingly. When human agents are coupled with an empowered digital workforce, more than half of process time is reduced altogether. Employees become more efficient and customers become more satisfied – a win-win situation for everyone involved.  

4. You can never automate 100% of the interactions

With proper segmentation engines, targeted personas, rules, tolerance, and approval limits, anything and everything can be automated. Through data mining and tribal knowledge, you can automate up to 80% of human-to-human interaction and business processes. Although some argue that the “human factor” would be missed from customer interactions, customers just want to be served and served efficiently. Additionally, digital agents can only execute requests that are within their approved limits, leaving critical tasks to the human workforce. Through collaborative intelligence, digital and human agents can serve customers efficiently.

In a world where technology is ever-changing, companies that outsource business processes must evolve and seek ways to ensure a future-ready workforce. Avertra is a digital experience company with an ongoing mission to simplify customer and employee experiences. With a decade worth of experience in various industries, we help automate businesses, even those that outsource business processes with a different solution provider.

With its proven track record of many successful and fruitful partnerships, Avertra has proven that not only can their digital agents handle complex business process executions such as start and stop service, and resolve high bill complaints, complex billing outsorts, and correcting asset placement and more, but all of these complex processes are executed without involving a single human and wasting their valuable time. In result, agents are repurposed for more meaningful tasks in need of human skill. 

Book a demo today with Avertra for a chance to be part of the digital revolution and expect a high return on investment

Companies that want to reap the benefits of digital transformation need to be prepared for some change. But change isn’t necessarily bad, especially when it can improve efficiency, employee satisfaction, and customer journeys. This is where Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) comes into play – the phenomenon defining the future of work. 

In an interview with Bashir Bseirani, CEO & CTO at Avertra Corp., we delve into how companies can innovate, enhance operational excellence, and most of all, create people-driven organizations. 

You may have heard of general conceptions about automation, but IPA stands to be unique in nature as it combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The core purpose of IPA is to “automate end-to-end business processes”, “mimic activities carried out by humans, and over time, learn to do them even better”. 

With a myriad of learning, reasoning, and contextual decision-making capabilities, IPA executes repetitive tasks without the need for human intervention. This reduces the reliance on manual processes while still sustaining the human touch that is essential to many businesses.

Let’s dive deeper into Bashir’s take.

How does IPA unify user experiences?

Bseirani: As consumers, we expect things to happen now. Silicon Valley enterprises, like Facebook, Uber, Amazon made us reliant on instant services. With the rising demand in customer expectations, they now expect quick responses to complaints and personalized experiences. IPA alone has the ability to connect systems and processes to each other to ensure an end-to-end experience with a people-first approach. For example, in the utility industry, starting your electricity service is automated without the need for an agent to intervene. This then automatically integrates the start service into the field services system and sends a direct confirmation to the client, completing the full cycle of the job. 

Investing in systems that can talk to each other allows for smoother interactions between humans. Self-service and automation together allow employees to remove low value purpose tasks while increasing customer satisfaction. For example, let’s say a user has a complaint or request, through IPA, a virtual agent can handle this request via the customer’s channel of choice without the need to contact a human agent. Automation allows you to go to a human only if necessary based on the context and the extremity of the request, which you can set tolerances for. This streamlines the relationship between human interactions and evaluates the best use of employees because their time is of value. 

How does IPA support workforce empowerment?

Bseirani: Reducing manual touchpoints for employees means that you are reducing the overall number of steps to complete a single request or process. This opens up space for employees to really focus on the problem at hand and make productive decisions instead of wasting time navigating between screens, checklists, governance, and all different types of tedious tasks that come with process management. The main benefit of automation is enabling employees to work on more complex, high value tasks and quality output. Through enhanced work-life balance, employees are given the freedom to innovate and cultivate skills for their personal and professional growth. 

At Avertra, we practice what we preach. Our team is automating the entire employee lifecycle for our Human Resources department from onboarding, recommended health plans, performance management, career development, and beyond. This will lead to not only a great internal employee experience for us, but it will also provide detailed visibility into our employee lifecycle as a whole. There are many different use cases internally and externally for IPA that can support organizational efficiency and scalability. 

What are some of the benefits of IPA?

Bseirani: In a world where companies want to bring out the best of their employees and optimize internal processes, IPA is an effortless way to do both and has the power to build a polished business environment while also enabling businesses to reap these benefits:

1. Save employees hours: There is no longer a need to waste time on paper-based manual tasks. IPA can handle the bulk repetitive tasks for you. This will save thousands of employee hours a month, resulting in enabled and empowered teams.
2. Reduce operational costs: With high cost labor markets being a big financial burden on organizations, there is now an opportunity to reduce the overall costs of staffing, sustaining resources, and the human labor costs of executing processes.
3. Reduce human error: Humans make mistakes, it’s inevitable. Whether it’s the process of giving a discount or making a modification to a document, there is always a possibility for subjective error. This will have a downstream impact across the organization. With IPA, there isn’t a limit. IPA can read a document, understand an image and text, and most importantly, learn and understand contexts to make logical and optimized decisions. With a proper flow, training, and technology stack as the foundation, organizations can reduce reliance on human judgment to make logical decisions. 

What can you automate?

Bseirani: The question should be what can’t you automate? You can automate any system-to-system interaction, human-to-system interaction, and in some cases, up to 80% of human-to-human interaction. 

Processes within Call Centers, Marketing, HR, Talent, Sales, Back Office, Finance departments can all be automated. Imagine the time and costs saved and how much value could be delivered with such savings. According to Mckinsey, “automation can deliver over 100% return on investment and decrease 50-60% in process time”.

With our experience at Avertra, we’ve been able to work with enterprises such as utilities, banking, telecommunications, and Internet Service Providers to automate complex business processes of all kinds. This includes start and stop service, exception management and resolution, bill complaints, asset replacement, and beyond. 

What role does the employee experience play in achieving an overall great customer experience and how does IPA fit in?

Bseirani: As ironic as it sounds, IPA has the ability to create a people-driven organization. If you don’t focus on the overall well-being of your team, customers will suffer from a poor customer experience in various forms. To name a few, delayed responses and unresolved issues are some issues that customers will face. IPA can make internal teams happier by giving them the tools to solve their own problems in a quick and efficient manner. The higher the work quality is, the happier the employee is, leading to a great customer experience. 

Intelligent process automation is one of those things that can be hard to wrap your head around at first. But once you do, you’ll see the endless possibilities: imagine having a virtual agent that can handle all the tedious work for you so you can focus on what’s really important. Imagine having a system that knows exactly what needs to be done and does it without any human intervention — delivering it in a form that’s ready for consumption by your customers or employees. Imagine being able to track every step of each process, so if something goes wrong, you know exactly where to look for the cause of the problem.

Automation will stop being just a buzzword in the market and become more central for businesses to implement. Now is the moment to take strategic steps to ensure not only your survival in such a competitive landscape, but lead to greater creativity and innovation across your business, employees, and customers simultaneously.