Demand is growing for attended robots that help human operators with manual activities, enhancing productivity, accuracy, and customer and employee experience. Today we’ll cover what attended automation is, where it’s used, how it works, and why your business could benefit from onboarding it. Let’s get started.
What is attended automation?
Attended automation works by giving employees a ‘robot companion’ (in the form of a piece of software) that helps to augment the work that they do. The addition of a bot can speed up processing times, improve customer and employee experience, and reduce errors – if used in the right way. Here are three distinct attended automation use cases; to give you some insight into what it can be used for.
Live Employee Virtual Assistant
Triggered by an on screen event, employee chat, voice calls, or any kind of interactive callout to the bot, it works side by side with the user and helps them to execute their current task in real-time. The bot can also continue to execute tasks while the attendant can focus on other jobs.
Real-Time Guidance
Again, triggered by screen events a bot can be used to work side by side with the user – to help guide them through a call perhaps, reminding them to ensure certain data fields are filled during a customer call. The bot can also collect information for future use to improve the way it helps the attendant.
Manual RPA Assistant
This potential use of attended automation is distinct from our other two examples, in that it is manually called in by the user when they want assistance. This means that the user needs to be trained in how to work with the bot and how to get the most out of it. Also, because it is a manual process, oftentimes the bot will need to complete the automation before the user can move on to their next task.
How does attended automation work?
Fundamentally, robotic process automation involves taking human activities (such as clicking the mouse, pressing keys on a computer, or dragging and dropping files) and automatically, quickly, and accurately carrying them out.
For an attended bot, you can set up trigger events to create certain actions that a bot automatically carries out when required. This trigger could be a human worker picking up the phone or hitting a button on their screen. The tasks the bot takes care of could be finding consumer information from one platform and automatically updating it in another, saving the human operator time and removing any potential human error.
Why do you need attended automation?
The automation of tasks and processes has a number of key advantages. In an environment where attended automation is going to offer the most value, likely a customer focused role, it allows a human employee more time to focus on delivering a personal service to a customer. It’s suggested that automation helps augment human intelligence – because it provides human operators with additional knowledge and insight right when they need it to make better decisions.
Could attended automation help your business? Contact PAteam to find out.
