Digital Adoption – Intelligent Automation Powered Chatbots to Ensure Business Continuity in Services Industry

WHITEPAPER DIGITAL ADOPTION – INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION POWERED CHATBOTS TO ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY IN SERVICES INDUSTRY

With the recent trysts with pandemics, storms, and war-like situations, disruption in business operations is becoming inevitable. Service industry, which caters to customers across geographies, naturally faces the brunt in such situations resulting in loss in productivity and revenue. In order to avoid undesirable fallouts, the businesses have to take prompt action to ensure sustenance and business continuity.

Service industry comprises banks, retail, health care, hospitality industry, real estate, educational services, social work, information technology services, recreation, media, communications, gas, electricity, and water supply. All these are essential services and cannot afford downtime.

Intelligent Automation solutions such as chatbots not only future-proof business but also disaster- proof them. The unmanned assistance during disrupted business circumstances enable service industry businesses to stay relevant and stay ahead in changing business scenarios.

Businesses face inherent risks of disruptions in business continuity amidst emergency situations such as lockdowns, pandemics, wars, storms, et al. Manual efforts and semi- automation does not help to stop the resulting avalanche in time. Businesses need to stop the cascading effects on operations and the wider ecosystem to minimize damage. SOLUTION

This paper discusses the use of Intelligent Automation solutions to prevent damage due to sudden business disruptions in face of lockdowns due to emergencies.

We have seen different types of business automation, namely simple automation, digitization, and digitalization powered by Intelligent Automation

Automation improves processing time and eliminates error due to manual operations without any major transformational changes. • Digitization refers to conversion of paper assets to digital assets. • Digitalization implies use of digital technologies to change prevalent business models for generating new business opportunities.

Intelligent Automation is one such Digital or Digitalization technology. It leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to generate value-added opportunities. Today, chatbot powered by Intelligent Automation is a very relevant use case to keep the business running automatically in a “lights-off manner”, where you need to intervene only for handling exceptions. WHAT ARE CHATBOTS? HOW CAN THEY HELP A BUSINESS?

Usually positioned on the business website or social media page, chatbots are intelligent bots that are programmed using RPA and AI / ML algorithms to answer the common queries of a customer while interacting with the business during off hours as well as working hours. That means, using this hybrid technology, a business can now cater to global clients who approach your website in their time zone or during the grave yard hours of your time zone.

The Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a subset of AI, enables the chatbots to understand the dialect and language of the customer in voice or in text. This Intelligent Automation solution in omni-channel customer service arsenal, enables the business to auto-respond back in the same mode and carry out intelligent interaction with the customer as a human would. The chatbots can be even programmed to use rather complex languages such as Taiwanese and Arabic.

Primarily designed to augment and simplify customer interactions with the businesses, chatbots are typically useful when you are not supported by a 24x7 customer service desk and don’t have a follow-the-sun-model in the business-as-usual scenario. These chatbots are now more useful than ever during sudden lockdown situations related to wars, pandemics, storms, and similar types of emergency situations.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY RUNNING A BUSINESS IN SERVICE INDUSTRY IN A “LIGHTS-OFF MANNER”?

Chatbots are capable of answering customer queries in an automated setup without the intervention of humans by using a question and answer format. A promising technology, the Intelligent Automation powered chatbots enable businesses to intelligently interact with customers right from query handling to order booking, payment acceptance, and invoice generation in real-time. The chatbots are capable of handling complex interactions depending on the maturity level of the training data set as well as the detailing and the robustness of the existing CRM database.

CAN CHATBOTS ALSO HELP IN DATA DISCOVERY?

During the interaction, the chatbot takes the CRM information as the base thus enabling the chatbot to conduct intelligent interaction with the customer. Chatbot interactions are cleaned and stored in the database and help business executives to analyse customer data vis-à-vis the customer preferences and chatbot interactions. This is a crucial element that enables data discovery. WHAT OTHER VALUE ADDITIONS DO CHATBOTS BRING TO THE TABLE? DO CHAT BOTS HELP WITH CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ENHANCEMENT?

The NLP and ML modules are very intelligent and can understand the nuances of the customer interaction – whether the customer is irritated or happy.

Suppose the customer of a banking service has stated in a particular interaction that they like or want a particular product, the chatbot can make suitable suggestions in the current as well as T+n interactions. Suppose the customer was irritated about a certain aspect of service, the chatbot will try to alleviate the situation through timely measures such as pulling in an expert customer service executive for live interaction at the earliest.

Suppose a customer in a hospitality industry has a preference for a particular wine in their earlier interactions with a particular hotel or resort, then in the subsequent interactions the chatbot will make relevant property suggestions where that particular wine is available.

BENEFITS The chatbots offer direct benefits:

1 High accuracy of responses

2 Short turnaround time for query resolutions

3 Improved productivity and hence increased revenue CONCLUSIONS

Chatbots enables businesses in the service industry to be up and about even during sub-normal business scenarios such as lockdowns and war-like situations. In normal times, the chatbots enable seamless and easy B2B or B2C interactions across the time zones in a lights-off manner. Simply put, the Intelligent Automation powered chatbot solutions enables the service industry businesses to stay ahead and stay relevant even during unpredictable business situations. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ulhas heads the Process Automation at Datamatics. ULHAS KULKARNI He is a Masters in Business Administration from DMS- IIT Delhi, holds a BE in Electronics from NIT, SVP – Process Automation & RPA, Surat and PGDST degree from NCST (Juhu), Mumbai. Datamatics Global Services Ltd. Ulhas has been a part of the IT industry for over 22 years and has managed offshore IT assignments for major global clients like Sony Mobile, Canon, Manugistics (now JDA), Saudi Airlines etc. and from USA, Europe and Middle East. ABOUT DATAMATICS

Datamatics provides intelligent solutions for data-driven businesses to increase productivity and enhance the customer experience. With a complete digital approach, Datamatics portfolio spans across Information Technology Services, Business Process Management, Engineering Services and Big Data & Analytics all powered by Artificial Intelligence.

It has established products in Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Document Processing, Business Intelligence and Automated Fare Collection.

Datamatics services global customers across Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, International Organizations, and Media & Publishing.

The Company has presence across 4 continents with major delivery centers in the USA, India, and Philippines. To know more about Datamatics, visit www.datamatics.com

© Copyright 2021 Datamatics Global Services Limited and its subsidiaries (hereinafter jointly referred as Datamatics). All rights reserved. Datamatics is a registered trademark of Datamatics Global Services Limited in several countries all over the world. Contents in this document are proprietary to Datamatics. No part of this document should be reproduced, published, transmitted or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, nor should be disclosed to third parties without prior written approval from the marketing team at Datamatics. website: datamatics.com | email: [email protected]

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