Ceox InView Issue 4
Insight and Tips on Digital Transformation, Case Management and Microsoft Technologies for IT & Business Leaders in the Public Sector
5 Ways to Deliver Public Sector Efficiencies and Savings with Intelligent Automation
During the recent General Election there was significant focus on the delivery of public services with all parties making promises over how they will run the Public Sector. Improving public service delivery whilst controlling public spending is not only on the agenda for political parties but a key goal for many Public Sector Executives and Managers.
In this issue of InView we look at 5 ways in which Intelligent Automation can deliver efficiencies and improve productivity in the Public Sector. At Ceox, we specialise in Intelligent Automation, combining Next Generation AI with Robotic Process Automation. On a daily basis we’re working with organisations who engage with UK citizens and increasingly we’re helping them use Intelligent Automation to be more efficient, improve productivity and deliver the same or better service for less.
Top 5 Uses for Intelligent Automation
Our Top 5 ways that Intelligent Automation can deliver efficiencies and improve productivity are based upon our experience of delivering real world solutions for Public Sector organisations. Below, you’ll find a description of each use including the problem it solves and the benefits it delivers. The 5 top uses we see can be summarised as Personalise, Capture, Triage, Process and Respond.
Personalise Their Experience
UK Citizens have expectations about the service they will receive when interacting with Public Sector organisations. Citizens expect an organisation to be proactive, recognise their needs and provide the relevant response or information in a timely manner. Public Sector organisations are constantly striving to make it easier for citizens to get what they need from Government 24/7. However, personalisation is time consuming as public sector teams need to search and assess multiple data sources and the enquiry to ensure the response meets the citizen’s needs. The solution to providing this experience is by giving citizens the information which is relevant to them and nothing they don’t need. In terms of technology, there are a few ways of doing this and we’re increasingly implementing Intelligent Automation solutions which provide information based on a specific set of data. This approach of using data to personalise experiences can be used in a range of scenarios such as:
- Guiding citizens through complex documentation to access the information relevant to their needs.
- Serving-up personalised public service information on new legislation, guidance or advice relating to evolving news, events, incidents.
- Proactively showing status updates for a Citizen’s appeal, complaint, registration or application.
These capabilities can also empower internal teams by helping staff find internal information or instructions using AI. For example a Chatbot or Intelligent Searching with AI which provides more accurate results using context as opposed to keywords. These solutions intelligently automate the analysis of data and identification of the right information to give the citizen clear, relevant and useful information without forcing them to go search for it. The example below is a demonstrator we built that helps guide citizens and businesses to the information they need from an extensive library of complex legislative information.
Personalised Citizen experience with Copilot Chatbot
The IA solution takes in information on the user and their query and tailors the response based on their circumstances. This enables the citizen to self-serve the information without manual intervention from Public Sector staff and hence saves hours of work. This type of solution can be surfaced via many interfaces including web pages, email or, as in the example above, a Chatbot.
The benefits to this type of solution are clear, in that it reduces human effort responding to often repetitive requests, makes organisations more efficient and reduces workload on public sector teams by enabling citizens to self-serve the information rather than submitting a time consuming enquiry. Enabling ‘personalised’ self-service for just 10% of an organisation’s interactions could save hours of effort for hard-pressed public sector teams and allow time to be re-directed to more value-add tasks.
Quick Capture
Public Sector Teams often have a need to rapidly capture citizen engagements like applications, appeals, enquiries and interactions with stakeholder organisations or suppliers. These can come through in several different formats. Structured formats, for example web form submissions which are relatively easy to deal with or unstructured formats which can prove a major challenge. Unstructured formats can range from a direct email with free text content through to forwarded emails with attachments. Teams often utilise a single location where they can manage all the incoming information, regardless of format. The challenge is that citizen expectations are increasing, and the volume of digital interactions has increased significantly (up 4-fold in some Government Departments). Manual data capture of these structured and unstructured submissions is time-consuming and can be mundane and un-rewarding. However, utilising intelligent automation to deliver unattended capture of enquiries and applications ensures they are captured rapidly, with reduced error rates and allows valuable resource to be diverted to more complex or value-add tasks. The solution to capture involves having a single back-office system which is fed by automated capture and the data is verified, formatted and uploaded and can include:
- Returns from supporting organisations providing regular submissions such as local authority data, rebate claims, and status updates from local service providers.
- Key data from customer applications, appeals, registrations, complaints and enquiries submitted from web forms or emails.
- Supplier registrations where applications are captured, validated, formatted and uploaded to multiple corporate systems.
- Parliamentary questions and ministerial correspondence submitted direct to a Department or forwarded by Constituency Offices.
Next Generation AI can be trained to understand and process incoming content and extract key information like date, topic, sender name & address. The automation can strip the key information out and within minutes put it into the back-end system for users to process.
One of our clients must deal with fluctuations in incoming enquiries. Over one period they saw their case volume increase from 2,500 per month to over 8,500 monthly queries. The queries were not simple, many come at the bottom of chains of forwarded emails, others require opening and processing an attached PDF rather than the original email. Our Intelligent Automation solution was able to handle all these examples, using AI to strip out the core information including all the sender details. The solution reduced our client’s workload by entering over 90% of their enquiries into their case management system without manual intervention. Over the course of the year, the solution saved over 1,800 days of effort.
The main benefit to this type of automation is the huge amount of effort it saves. In addition, the automation can run 24x7 so there is never an unknown backlog of items waiting to be entered into the system, within a few minutes every new item is available to the users. In our experience of implementing systems like this the reduction in human errors leads to an overall improvement in quality, for example the AI rarely mistakes Davis and Davies which is a common human error.
Precise Triage
Once organisations have received information from citizens they need to get it to the right team. Business units need to rapidly and accurately understand incoming information and allocate and prioritise it appropriately. Where there are time restraints (often due to legislation or departmental KPIs) on how quickly the organisation must process and respond to the information, there is extra emphasis on getting the information in front of the right people as quickly as possible. This is a time consuming and repetitive task that requires skill and organisational understanding. With many organisations facing issues such as staff churn and knowledge loss this puts pressure on hard-working teams to triage the numerous applications and enquiries in quick time.
To solve this issue, many organisations are turning to automation and Next Gen AI. The AI can understand the context of the incoming item based on prior training. We typically train the AI on which team to divert information to and the automation assigns it to the relevant group or team for processing. Potential use cases for ‘category classification’ and triage to the right team include applications, registrations, appeals, claims, invoices, purchase orders, monthly returns, requests, enquiries and complaints and in particular scenarios where volumes can vary due to seasonal fluctuations, events, announcements or crises.
To support precise triage the AI needs to be trained to work properly and we do the initial training as part of delivering a project and ensure it is kept up to date as part of our ongoing support. On one such project, we saw an improvement from 79% automated processing on day 1 to 93% automation by day 5 following 3 updates to the training.
Triage using Automation and Next Gen AI
One of our clients uses Intelligent Automation to process their incoming enquiries. Prior to us setting up the automation it was taking on average 3.5 days between a case arriving and it being entered into their case management system and triaged to the right business unit. The Intelligent Automation solution we implemented reduced that time to less than 5 minutes.
The main benefit of this type of automation is that it minimises manual processing. This saves days of time from individuals reading incoming information and assigning it to the relevant team. Like the capture, the automation can run 24x7, so the information finds its way to the right people quickly, even overnight. As well as reducing effort, the automation also ensures managers have better visibility of caseloads as cases find their way into case management systems and reporting within minutes of arriving.
Efficient Processing
In the current economic climate, Public Sector organisations are being asked to deliver the same services, or better but with a reduced budget. The challenge is that hard pressed teams are often spread too thinly across an increasing remit trying to balance their time between routine transactional tasks and complex added value activities.
As a result, many organisations are turning to Intelligent Automation to find ways to deliver cost savings. Whilst Next Generation AI is stealing all the headlines currently, we find the combination of AI and Automation works best at delivering efficiencies. Examples we have seen include automating mundane tasks such as:
- Unstructured and structured data validation, entry and progressing cases through a workflow including:
- Invoice receipt and processing.
- Ministerial Correspondence.
- Processing cases through operational business rules including validation, formatting and update to core business applications.
- Synchronising data (validate, formatting and upload) across different corporate systems or system reconciliation with auto comparison of data and unattended reconciliation.
One of the Intelligent Automation systems we implemented for a client takes unstructured data and automatically inputs it into the web interface of a legacy application via a browser. The legacy application is locked down and the organisation doesn’t want to update it for fear of it breaking so we built a solution which enabled them to deliver efficiencies without compromising the existing system. The team were processing 44,000 cases per year and had a growing backlog of 10,000 cases. The automation completely removed the need to rekey information from unstructured data and delivered a 20% overall productivity gain for the unit, enabling them to completely remove their backlog. This type of automation frees up teams, allowing them to provide a high quality, consistent service. It saves the team time and reduces boredom by removing mundane tasks. This enables teams to deliver more in less time, delivering performance and hitting deadlines.
Respond Individually
Citizens expect tailored responses to their interactions with Government. There is pressure on teams to rapidly respond with a considered and correct response. The response needs to be tailored to the individual and have relevant information about their enquiry or application. Drafting and manually tailoring responses to each individual involves a huge amount of effort and with the volume of interactions continuing to increase with Departments often receiving 1,000s of enquiries per month an effective solution is needed to avoid overloading teams.
The solution is to automate the process as much as possible, by automating the common 80% of enquiries, individuals are freed up to concentrate on the remaining 20% typically complex queries. Automation can provide suggested response options based on FAQs or pre-approved response content often referred to as Standard Lines, historic data or take key citizen data and generate a suggested response personalised to the individual. This uses GPT engines like the one made famous by Chat-GPT which are trained based on information specific to the organisation. The result is that the Intelligent Automation provides suggested responses which can be approved, edited or rejected by individuals working with the system. Where the volume is high this capability has potential use cases including drafting responses for:
- FOI and GDPR SAR requests.
- Parliamentary Questions and Ministerial Correspondence.
- Citizen enquiries regarding technical or legal policy or process e.g. grant applications and Visa applications.
- Staff enquiries regarding corporate policy or procedure.
We have recently created an Intelligent Automation solution which uses an organisation’s library of standard responses to generate replies to common queries. The Artificial Intelligence generates a suggested response based on the catalogue of standard responses which is then approved or updated as needed and sent to the individual who submitted the query.
Using this level of automation can have a massive time saving for organisations. It can deliver particular benefits where there is a high turnover in teams with new individuals frequently joining. The automation also provides a level of consistency between responses which isn’t always there when different individuals create responses independently.
Summary
The 5 examples we have provided above are the ones we at Ceox have seen implemented the most and deliver the biggest benefit in terms of delivering efficiencies and improving productivity. Our experience shows that customers derive even more benefit where these uses are combined, delivering streamlined, automated processes which remove bottlenecks. Having helped lots of Public Sector organisations implement Intelligent Automation, we understand the technology and how to use it to deliver real efficiencies and cost savings.
We specialise in using Microsoft’s Intelligent Automation toolset. Microsoft’s Intelligent Automation suite was already a Gartner quadrant market leader and the collaboration with Artificial Intelligence leader OpenAI has further boosted their capability. Many organisations are turning to the Microsoft toolset as it is secure, integrates easily with Windows and Office 365 and can be added to their existing Office 365 subscription. The cloud model allows them to start small, demonstrate the benefits, secure buy-in from staff and then scale up.
Intelligent Automation really can help organisations deliver more for less.