ForHousing is a forward-thinking social organisation whose members own and manage more than 24,000 homes across the North West.
ForHousing is about improving lives for communities, customers, and staff, delivering excellent quality, affordable accommodation, and housing services across the region.
Committed to creating positive opportunities for its customers, ForHousing build much needed affordable homes, empower people to gain training, secure employment, whilst also providing access to health and wellbeing support, creating sustainable and safe communities.
Amillan have worked closely with ForHousing (and the wider ForViva Group) since the introduction of a new multichannel contact centre platform in 2016 and have become a valuable technology partner, helping them in delivering their commitments to provide high customer satisfaction. In 2019 Amillan began a partnership with Converse360 who offer an innovative virtual assistant solution built upon an industry leading service automation platform.
THE PROBLEM
ForHousing were looking to reduce costs within their current contact centre solution whilst also maintaining and increasing customer satisfaction for their tenants. They have a customer service team that are extremely busy, with most tenant interactions provided through a manual process. This meant agents were handling thousands of incoming voice calls, email enquiries and webchat sessions every month, with the number of interactions continually increasing due to the pressures of Covid-19.
ForHousing have always strived to improve how they communicate with their tenants by utilising the latest digital communication technology, they recognized these technologies could help uncover more efficient ways of delivering their current services, streamline processes and reduce costs.
As with most Housing Associations, voice is still the media platform of choice, however this meant only limited services could be offered to tenants at night or at weekends. ForHousing wanted to continue offering voice but also promote new media channels such as Web Chat and expansion into social media. Providing additional channels would allow many tenants to perform self service, which after extensive research they concluded could easily handle simple questions and by following workflows they could even provide interactive responses for more in-depth processes.
ForHousing were looking for automation which could deliver the following benefits:
ForHousing recognised that the key to providing this service successfully is avoid creating a technology silo, the automation needed to integrate with wider business and communications environment (Housing Management Systems, CRM, Contact Centre) and be able to communicate across all media channels that the audience require.
THE SOLUTION
ForHousing engaged Amillan as their contact centre partner of choice, to assist with the automation project. Amillan worked with Converse360 to provide a Service Automation Platform that can deliver Web Bots, Speech Bots and Digital Humans, seamlessly integrating with the Enghouse Interactive Contact Centre Platform which was already used at ForHousing.
It was proposed to set up a dedicated Cloud based instance of this platform for an initial period of 12 months which will provide the evidence required to show the cost savings achievable whilst improving excellent customer service standards for ForHousing’s tenants. This period would also allow ForHousing to plan for the expansion of services, with potential integration into housing management and other CRM or knowledge-based systems.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
Following acceptance of the proposal ForHousing were extremely keen to progress the solution as quickly as possible and wanted to be fully involved in building the FAQ’s and Workflows for the solution. Amillan provided ForHousing with extensive user training, split over several sessions, thus making sure the ForHousing staff had the knowledge, ability, and tools to be self-sufficient to build new FAQ’s and Workflows.
The platform is based on embeds technology from the four leading conversational AI vendors; AWS, Google, IBM Watson and Microsoft, therefore if ForHousing’s requirements evolve going forward, the “Best of Breed” solution can pivot to meet the new requirements.
The training was also followed by a workshop to gather in greater detail the ForHousing requirements around colour schemes, company branding, opening, and closing statements and the general design for the ForHousing Web Bot. The name and design of the Web Bot was devised through tenant consultation and the tenants voted to call the Bot “Zippy” to give a friendly, more personable public persona to the Bot.
BUILDING WORKFLOWS
ForHousing created most of the FAQ’s and Workflows for Zippy themselves, utilising the Contact Centre team to build them. The feedback from ForHousing was that process was very easy, enabling self-sufficiency with Amillan and Converse360’s technical team on hand to assist if required. ForHousing found the Bot solution easy to build and only needed to involve the IT Department when Zippy was ready to Go Live and a simple line of code was added to ForHousing’s Web Page.
The workflows that ForHousing built cover:
TESTING
A testing instance of Zippy which was identical to the final solution was provided during implementation, this allowed ForHousing to review the look and feel before go-live. Testing itself took a couple of weeks, making sure the workflows functioned correctly and adjusting them where necessary.
THE LAUNCH
Zippy’s Go Live was on the 19th October and tenants began embracing the Web Bot’s features instantly.
Zippy has been trained to respond to enquiries across a range of topics and there are multiple workflows where the questions asked lead to additional detailed information being requested before responding.
ForHousing wanted to reduce the number of routine FAQ calls which come through from tenants to the Contact Centre and as such would point the tenants to Zippy for self-service.
ForHousing also wanted to reduce agent chat time, so when an enquiry does get through to an agent, Zippy has gathered all the relevant information and able to transfer this to the live agent, when required.
Zippy can offer the tenant the option to speak to a customer advisor at any time and should the Virtual Assistant not understand the tenants request, then Zippy will hand-off to a Live Agent to continue the conversation. If the tenant clicks the agent button the system will engage with the Contact Centre, which will look at agent availability, advise the tenant of the estimated wait time and route the chat to a live agent.
In the first week Zippy had:
THE RESULTS
Now Zippy has had time to ‘bed in’ the statistics are surpassing all expectations.
A review of the monthly statistics are as follows:
Summary of Statistics
Total Time Saved every month equates to 391 Hours or 52 Days or 2.6 Agents
The statistics show that Zippy is answering most tenants’ questions without agent involvement. As the Web Bot is being constantly trained by the ForHousing staff, Zippy will be able to answer even more questions in the future.
THE FUTURE
ForHousing have already seen the benefits of the Web Bot solution deployed, providing potential cost savings as well as the increase in customer satisfaction.
ForHousing, Amillan and Converse360 are looking to expand Zippy into Phase Two, with integration into Aareon QL, ForHousing’s housing management system. This would mean that tenants could use the Web Bot to:
ForHousing continue to seek new ways to innovate and improve their customer service with communication and automation technology. A Speech Bot version of Zippy is being considered to intelligently automate voice responses by phone. Also, ForHousing are considering other add-ons for both Web and Speech, such as the customer survey feature.
Organisations are under increasing pressure to meet rising service expectations from digital customers. While customer experience continues to rise to the top of every business agenda, Customer Service Representatives often struggle to navigate a collection of disconnected desktop applications whenever they engage with customers. This leads to wasted time and the potential for error, switching between different applications to copy, paste or review customer data. This is both frustrating and time consuming for both employees and customers.
Have you considered a ChatBot and AI strategy for your contact centre? By connecting and simplifying the automation and connectivity process between machines and humans easily. By using ChatBots, it frees up organisations to focus on higher value human to human interactions which in turn increases productivity and efficiency and provides the agility needed to stay ahead of ever changing customer needs
ChatBots and AI in the Contact Centre
ChatBots are intelligent machines which can perform various automated tasks on behalf of contact centre agents. The digital age has given rise to a culture of customers who are used to interacting with machines and getting immediate gratification. ChatBots and AI are not just buzzwords, think of them as a tool for enabling self-service via digital communications channels. Making use of natural language and augmented intelligence to provide information not to just customers but agents as well. Let the Bots concentrate on the data driven tasks but ensure you have the ability to escalate to live agents with information as needed. Continuing to deliver a seamless customer experience from end to end for the customer.
We have built a library of predefined Bots, which can be customised using sophisticated natural language processing systems which allow interaction with customers and deliver a data driven intelligent response to service requests. The library addresses common use cases and can be integrated into an existing contact centre solution.
Contact Amillan today to discuss how a Bot can help you to better serve your customers.
Microsoft has announced it will be taking its first steps into the Robotic Process Automation market with UI Flows, part of the Power Automate application, providing enterprise organisations with a range of automation for their business and customers.
It enables end-users and developers alike to build workflows that automate highly repetitive, manual, time-consuming tasks, also enabling automation across legacy, on-premises, and cloud apps and services. This has the potential to offer automation for your entire IT landscape.
Why Power Automate?
The enterprise application landscape is filled with a mixture of legacy applications and modern services, some running on-premises and some running in the cloud. In some cases, the use of such applications is at the surface level, while in some cases cognitive skills like natural language processing (NLP) and vision understanding are required. In an increasingly connected, quicker, and app-heavy world, there is a strong customer demand for rich automation capabilities that allow customers to do more with less. Microsoft believes this should be a core capability of the Power Platform and are therefore adding new capabilities to Power Automate.
What is the new RPA feature in Power Automate?
UI flows is an RPA capability in Power Automate that enables enterprise customers including business users, technical users, and end-users to automate repetitive tasks across legacy applications — to simplify how they work in a scalable, secure way. They can streamline how they work by recording mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry and automate the replay of the steps to be included in more complex process automations.
What are the key benefits of the RPA feature called UI flows?
UI flows within Power Automate is Microsoft’s feature for UI automation. Previously, Flow played primarily in the digital process automation (DPA) space where one could use the service to automate business processes that provided APIs. With UI flows, the Power Automate platform extends to also automate legacy applications that can only be driven from their front end. This allows customers to create complete business process automation. With UI flows, customers can record step-by-step UI actions—such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry—and then replay those actions.
This enables organisations to:
• Automate in a single platform across apps and services that do not have APIs
• Customize, build and manage UI flow scripts in a secure cloud environment
• Low-code experience with a step-by-step record and playback experience
• Seamlessly Integrate UI automation with API based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows.
Amillan and Power Automate
Microsoft Partner Amillan is ready to support organisations looking to be the early adopters of Power Automate and UI Flows. With experts in Microsoft Robotic Process Automation in-house, we can create tailored and bespoke systems to elevate your business processes.
Contact us today to start your RPA journey!
About Polygon
Polygon is the European market leader in property damage restoration, serving a range of sectors including insurance, property management, government and industrial clients.
For over 60 years, they have delivered best-in-class service, while their constant investment in people, technology and equipment ensures that their solutions are proven, repeatable, environmentally sustainable, results-oriented and cost-effective.
Their combination of people, knowledge and technology makes Polygon the global expert in property damage control, preventing, controlling and mitigating the effects of water, fire and climate.
To learn more about Polygon Group please visit their website: https://www.polygongroup.com/en-GB/
The Solution
Polygon was looking for an RPA solution that could bring significant benefit to the process of preparing, collating and distributing Time Control reports.
The requirement was to automate the creation of a finance tracking report for hourly and monthly paid employees. This was a laborious manual process involving data manipulation that could run to over 15,000 entries. The process was open to cut and paste error and took over 4 hours to complete so could only be justified running 2-3 times per month.
Amillan has developed a solution using the SAP IRPA platform that complies the report in under 10 minutes, is run up to 8 times per day and automatically distributed to authorised recipients. This gives Polygon daily cost tracking data that brings a new level of accuracy to budget forecasting and management with associated benefits to the business.
We are moving towards an enterprise world where highly repetitive human tasks are automated. By increasing the level of automation and reducing the number of tedious, repetitive tasks, organisations can give employees more time to focus on valuable tasks and increase human interaction.
We can embark on the intelligent enterprise journey by automating key business processes using two technologies, intelligent robotic process automation (arms) and conversational AI (eyes and mouth), working together. They perfectly show how human expertise and computer insights can build the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow.
This article will use the example of ordering IT equipment to show how it works. You can enhance quality and reduce cost by using both capabilities to create a digital workforce of robotic applications that automatically run your business processes in the background.
Common issues in manual processes
Nowadays, many companies around the world use complex and manual order-management processes for things such as IT equipment ordering. They face several issues, including:
These kinds of processes make it difficult to get a complete picture of your sales-order processing cycle.
Speed this process with intelligent RPA and conversational AI
Let’s start with a concrete example. An employee’s laptop is broken, and he needs to order another one.
That’s it! The purchase order, with a specific order number, is created automatically because the conversational AI chatbot triggers an RPA bot in the background to create a purchase order in the cloud system. The employee will receive the new laptop within the next few days.
In this case, RPA acts like the arms of the digital assistant, ensuring hands-free order creation. On the other side, the conversational AI chatbot keeps interactions natural and engaging, regularly communicating results to the user. It acts as the ears and mouth of the digital assistant.
To sum up, this process provides:
How intelligent technologies elevate employees
This example of IT equipment ordering is just one of countless examples of how intelligent technologies can speed business processes and help your organisation achieve the high level of automation necessary to become an intelligent enterprise. It’s easy to imagine other use cases, including purchase-order approval or flight-ticket booking, for example.
With intelligent RPA, the first step is to let the bot know what to do, which you can do with a visual interface to create new skills for your bot and define the workflow of tasks to execute. The second step is to schedule the RPA bot execution – to define the trigger that will start the RPA bot.
Then the RPA bot will do the tasks independently, which brings two major benefits: First, by responding to user needs proactively and augmenting resources, it delivers a streamlined experience. Second, by reducing repetitive and time-consuming manual activities, it helps employees focus on higher-value processes, leading to new levels of operational speed and efficiency.
Meanwhile, with conversational AI technology, you can effectively train, build, connect, and monitor intelligent chatbots for the enterprise – for example, guiding the user to the right page, answering FAQs, and executing repetitive tasks. Natural language processing (NLP) technology in the background analyses text inputs and enriches key data for a human-like understanding of information in any language.
Chatbots can be connected seamlessly to external communication channels like Messenger or Slack, as well as back-end systems. With training analytics, you can also understand how your users interact with your chatbots and improve their user experience based on collected data.
Original blog from SAP: Automate Your Enterprise IT Support With Intelligent RPA And Conversational AI Bots (2019)
Senior Software Consultant Esben Ehrenskjold has achieved the advanced SAP IRPA certification ‘How to Build Bots with SAP Intelligent Process Automation’, allowing Amillan to provide its customers with greater IRPA solutions.
This development comes after Amillan’s partnership with SAP to offer tailored IRPA solutions to its clients, formed in July 2019.
The course provides a solution overview and step-by-step tutorials on how to create a bot, from initial application declaration to workflow design, deployment, and how to design user interface elements and make bots run in attended and unattended modes.
Amillan Director of Operations, Patrick Daly had this to say: “Having Esben complete this advanced SAP course allows Amillan to expand on it’s already advanced RPA offering to existing and prospective customers. We look forward to continuing our work with SAP solutions to enhance the IRPA offering to our clients. Also, a huge well done to Esben, who is leading the way for Amillan in IRPA.”
Now having completed the course Esben will be able to create bots in the SAP Desktop Studio, know how to configure and monitor them with the SAP Cloud Factory, and understand how to make them run as digital workers or digital assistants, all fantastic assets for Amillan.
Software robots can accomplish multiple simultaneous activities, tirelessly, quickly and accurately, freeing up their human counterparts for more complex, high value, and sensitive tasks that require human attributes such as emotional intelligence, reasoning or judgment.
New innovative RPA applications are being developed by our team for end-user clients daily. Find out more about what RPA can do for your business here.
About Amillan
Amillan is a leading solutions integrator delivering unified communications, IP voice and data networking, contact centre, ICT infrastructure, robotic process automation and mobility solutions on-premise or in the cloud.
About SAP Intelligent RPA
SAP stands for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data. SAP was founded in 1972 in Walldorf, Germany and now has offices around the world.
SAP innovations help 437,000 customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively.
In many organisations, people spend a lot of time interacting with the different applications of their business systems. To carry out their mission, they frequently have to re-enter or to copy and paste data from one application to another or to compare and verify information from two applications. Robotic process automation, or RPA, consists of implementing “software robots” to automate as much as possible these tedious mundane tasks.
This “automation of white-collar jobs” can free up 15% to 30% of an employee’s time, which can be used more effectively for actions bringing real value for the organisation and improving the quality of the service to its customers.
This automation improves the comfort of employees, and this is not the least of its advantages: the employee who spends his workday in front of computer tools will adhere better to the strategic vision of the management who wants to accelerate the digital transformation of the company.
Enterprise’s business processes involve many components of the information system, from database servers where data is stored to employees’ desktops (obviously via various applications and software solutions), access to large transactional systems, client-server, intranet/extranet, cloud applications, CRM, ERP, ECM…
Automation can be done on the desktop, where the “software robot” will execute the interactions as the human being does: like a human, the robots read the content of an application window, identify the fields containing useful data, copy them into another window, launch a transaction, and so on. While performing these tasks, the robot may, if needed, “hand over” the person in front of the PC to make a decision based on his or her intelligence and experience. The robot can also carry out some checks on the data it handles: this gives the company additional guarantees regarding compliance with certain regulatory requirements and the quality of the result of the processes.
This aspect of the Robotic Process Automation where the robot appears as a software assistant for a human being interacting with a PC while respecting the business logic is called “attended RPA” or sometimes, “Robotic Desktop Automation” with the acronym RDA.
Its deployment is very fast and the “attended RPA” has no impact on the information system and does not require any modification on applications, which continue to function without any change. As a result, Robotic Desktop Automation’s projects are short, and their ROI is fast: it takes only a few weeks to set up an RPA robot that can save 20% of their time to tens or even hundreds of employees. And considering that the desktop is not going to be simplified by magic in the short term, “attended RPA” solutions will benefit the company for many years…
Some processes can be automated from end to end, by robots installed within server farms and running without any interaction with a human being. A software robot can autonomously connect to databases to retrieve information, apply business rules, perform processes that produce new data, and then inject them into other applications using their own programming interfaces (APIs). This aspect of Robotic Process Automation where the robot works at the heart of the information system or in the cloud is called “unattended RPA.”
However, this autonomous robot remains under the supervision of human beings: it is indeed necessary to monitor the execution of the processes to ensure that they are properly executed. In case of anomaly, it is a human expert, a “robot supervisor,” who will be able to understand the cause of the problem, to correct it and then to restart the robots so that the processes resume where they had stopped.
As they are installed on servers and therefore inside the information system, unattended RPA robots require the provision of some infrastructure. And because they act directly on application data, they need to use their APIs, which requires programming work. As a result, as we observed, “unattended RPA” projects are likely to be more complex, and therefore a little longer, especially when it comes to going live.
Clearly, organisations should consider RPA globally, taking advantage of the complementary approaches: it can start on the desktops with attended RPA, focusing first on the most repetitive and time-consuming processes. The first benefits are quick, and it helps employees to embrace the digital transformation of the organisation they are working for. Then the RPA journey can be extended by implementing unattended RPA on servers to handle complex processes.
Some business processes can even benefit from a hybrid RPA approach, mixing attended and unattended robots to maximise the benefits an organisation can get from robotic process automation.
RPA fosters digital transformation, and its main benefits have been proven:
Original blog from SAP: What is Robotic Process Automation? (2019)
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