AiThority Interview with Brad Beumer, Customer Experience and Contact Center Automation Lead, UiPath

Last month, UiPath expanded its AI offerings with new-age Generative AI capabilities. The UiPath Business Automation Platform hooked onto GPT-4 to extend automation deeper into business operations and turn data into actionable insights. The new AI features could have a massive impact on the customer service and communications management in cloud contact centers. We spoke to UiPath’s CX and Contact Center Lead (Americas)m, Brad Beumer to understand the role of AI and automation in the modern customer service organizations.

Here’s the full interview with Brad at AiThority.com.

Why is an RPA-assisted customer service plan better than human-only efforts?

Brad: Business executives used to view the contact center as a cost center and often, customer experience was sacrificed in favor of quicker call times. More companies today recognize the long-term benefits of prioritizing CX, and automation can play a crucial role when it comes to retaining customers and increasing loyalty. For example, with AI-powered automation, companies can put customer satisfaction first and ensure that client issues are treated more accurately and quickly, and that they receive a consistent, streamlined, and personalized experience.

By deploying unattended robots such as AI-powered chatbots, companies can resolve customer issues with more effective self-service and reduce call volume by up to 50%, freeing up workers’ time to put customer satisfaction first. Additionally, automation is highly effective in rerouting agent contacts to higher-level customer concerns and analyzing those interactions to provide coaching and guidance. In this way, automation can continue to improve over time.

What are the key components in a call center where AI-enabled automation can drive the highest quantifiable results?

Brad: There are an estimated 14 million contact center employees working worldwide across a range of sectors, company sizes, and geographical regions. Issues with customer contact centers are widespread for both organizations and customers. For example, call center employees may need to examine as many as 20 systems to handle a single client issue. Additionally, there is pressure to shorten call times and, ideally, fix problems during the first interaction.

When a customer calls a contact center, they often have to repeat information, wait for agents to find data, or are even put on hold. However, AI-powered automation can support a contact-less contact center. Organizations can automate the sorting of customer requests, rate tone and sentiment of requests, and prioritize requests to manage the most sensitive or urgent requests first.

Tools like Communications Mining can also assert the true intent of the customer request, even if the customer did not file it in the correct category. Automation is also constantly monitoring new queue items to alert agents to take action, and can display all relevant information about the request. AI-powered automation also provides agents with a recommended next best action based on the case type and business context. An agent can choose an action such as changes to the customer account or offering a refund. Then, an automation processes those transactions while the agent focuses on communicating with the customer rather than making the customer wait. With AI-powered automation, organizations can reduce the amount of data processing required by humans, lowering error rates and the need for rework. For example, Transcom, an outsourcing company, embraced UiPath’s business automation platform and the company has saved over 60,000 hours a year with automation, with 2,000,000 tasks executed yearly by automations.

Thank you, Brad! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.