Ceox InView Issue 1
Insight and Tips on Digital Transformation, Case Management and Microsoft Technologies for IT & Business Leaders in the Public Sector and Social Housing
How can technology help organisations deal with the increase in enquiries resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Welcome to our founding issue of Ceox InView, our way of providing insight and tips to help organisations navigate the world of Digital Transformation, Case Management and Microsoft Technology. This first issue focuses on how organisations are responding to growing numbers of enquiries with a background of rising user expectation and reducing budgets.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations have needed to rapidly adjust to massive fluctuations in service demand whilst quickly adjusting to reduced capacity as team members cope with remote working, variable working hours and team availability. Indeed, some organisations have seen teams reduced in size as they’re furloughed or assigned to other parts of the organisation or even other government departments. This has left many leaders looking for ways that technology can help deal with the increase in enquiries resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
This month we look at how RPA can remove some of the pressure created by an increase in enquiries as well as improving customer service team productivity. We also pick our top 3 features from Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Wave 2 release and explain how these technologies can further help organisations deal with the increase in enquiries resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
We hope you find this issue interesting and informative, please contact us via the usual channels if you have any feedback.
“In March and April this year, as a result of the pandemic, our organisation saw a year’s worth of enquiries.”
A record increase in queries, an expectation of being engaged on more channels 24/7 but less resources!
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around for a long time and is starting to really enter the mainstream. Often viewed in the same way as Artificial Intelligence (AI) as something complicated which industry experts were touting as the future it all seemed very far off until now.
Robotic Process Automation is where processors act as ‘Robots’ to run pre-programmed automations. Unlike AI, the Robot only performs the one task it’s been taught and doesn’t learn as it runs the automation. This is the main difference between RPA and AI, with AI using machine learning to get smarter over time. One example of RPA use is the creation of a new team member’s IT accounts. In this scenario, the hiring manager will raise a request using a form, detailing the new member’s personal details and the required level of access. That will then go through an internal approval process which RPA will handle without the users manually having to send emails. It can even be setup to send reminder emails if a senior manager doesn’t approve the account creation within a certain time frame. Once IT have given their final approval the automation can be setup to automatically create the account with the relevant permissions and send the login details back to the manager who requested the account creation. This kind of assistance can obviously have a massive impact with Gartner predicting that organisations who implement RPA will see a 30% productivity gain by 2024.
In recent years, companies like UiPath, Blue Prism and Microsoft have brought RPA to the desktop and into the hands of users. Suddenly users can make their own RPA workflows and automate the mundane tasks they complete on a daily or weekly basis. With an environment setup and a minimal amount of training, users familiar with Microsoft Office can use RPA to make themselves and their department more productive.
How does all this impact handling public enquiries? Well the first place RPA can help is by automating the capture of enquiries from different sources. For instance, enquiries might come from physical letters, emails, Hansard and even social media. RPA can automate the capture of all of these different sources so they end up in a single Public Enquiry Management solution, leaving the users to deal with the replies rather than moving data around. The next scenario where we see RPA deployed is in the processing of enquiries. Previously, someone would have to sift through incoming enquiries and categorise them according to type. For instance, complaints would typically go to one department, Freedom of Information requests to another and data access or GDPR requests to a third. With an RPA automation in place, most enquiries can be diverted to the right department. Furthermore, RPA can be used to lift key information from the enquiry, like contact name, address and email and enter them into the enquiry management system. For example, RPA will be able to identify that a letter written to Boris Johnson, First Lord of the Treasury or BoJo are all intended for the same person. These days it’s possible to take a scan of a handwritten letter, retrieve the address, name and enquiry text then send to the correct department for answering all without a team member even viewing the letter.
RPA is beginning to live up to its hype of enabling organisations to do more with less. The automations remove mundane chores from users enabling them to concentrate on higher-value tasks.
The 1st October sees the release of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2. We’ve been through the release plan to understand the impact on users and selected our 3 most relevant takeaways from the upcoming release.
3rd Place - Dynamics 365 Improved Customer Service Usability
Whilst not the most groundbreaking or innovative of features, the improvements to the way customer service users can handle note taking and email generation is likely to have a big impact on their day to day lives. With something used so frequently, if Microsoft can make users even 5% more productive then it’s likely to have a big impact on their working day, making them less frustrated and enabling them to handle more enquiries.
2nd Place - Easier Creation of Power Virtual Agents
Many organisations haven’t been brave enough to build their own virtual agents (chatbots) yet and part of that was the perceived complexity. Microsoft have just made that a lot easier with a richer user experience and a drag and drop interface. We’re increasingly seeing organisations take their first step into virtual agents by providing internal bots to support customer service teams access knowledge to improve their performance.
1st Place - Windows Automation Capability within Power Automate
Likely to be a game changer for organisations stuck on legacy systems unable to upgrade. The new functionality allows users to record RPA automations including their mouse clicks and button presses. Those automations can then be used to perform data entry into the legacy system. This can eradicate double entry scenarios (where data has to be entered into more than one system manually) and save hours of team time. Users are also likely to find this useful whenever they’re performing a repetitive task, for instance filling in a spreadsheet from an email or other spreadsheet. Power Automate can now be used to automate the task, freeing the user up from the mundane tasks.
With this latest release Microsoft are really investing in their RPA capability, perfect for organisations looking to improve their ability to handle a rising number of public enquiries.
Technology, especially RPA, really is helping organisations deal with the increase in enquiries resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Ceox is actively engaged helping Government Departments deliver solutions so if you’d like to learn more then get in touch.