Integrated intelligent automation has a compounding effect on business success and transformation. However, change leaders so often lack the underlying data layer needed to coordinate their improvement programmes and bring these benefits together. Fortunately, Conversational Data Intelligence is giving them unprecedented insight and automation opportunities.
When intelligent automation works, it really works. Automation, process excellence, workflow, business and customer intelligence - if these streams are working together, they become a flywheel for success. They reinforce each other and create a compounding effect that quickly takes efficiency, insight and competitive advantage to new levels.
However, while you can build the wheel it will never turn by itself. Automation may be called intelligent, but if it isn’t integrated then the benefits will remain small. All too often, the different workflows operate in silo, with no connecting tissue to share data, insights or benefits. What’s more, many of the processes can be undermined from the beginning - totally reliant on manual processes that limit the speed and scope of automation success.
A crack in the wheel
Clean, structured data is the centrifugal force that drives the intelligent automation flywheel. Every automation and workflow tool is dependent on it. Yet the right data, in the correct structured format, is often lacking. Employees and intelligent automation leaders rarely have the full picture, making the most valuable automation opportunities hard to identify and implement.
This is because of siloed, disconnected systems and manual processes that don’t leave behind a structured data trail. These are based on masses of unstructured data, comprising 80-90% of all data in the enterprise. Communications-based processes - everything from emails and chats to support tickets - are some of the most important. They are the glue that holds operations together. But the business has no visibility over them, or if it does it’s because of inefficient manual processes that waste resources and can’t move fast enough anyway.
Business conversations are pervasive, but they aren’t being monitored, analysed or optimised. As a result, opportunities for improvement are lost and serious problems left unaddressed. For example, services could be made slow and sluggish because teams are weighed down with hundreds of emails and requests that could easily be self-serviced. Until the business has the tools to understand and action business conversations, intelligent automation tools will never be able to truly collaborate or make a real difference beyond their silo.
Conversational Data Intelligence: the hub of the wheel
The autonomous enterprise depends on an ecosystem of connected, intelligent tools. The best organisations are already achieving this and are increasing their lead over the competition because of it. They are able to drill down into the core of the business, identifying the process gaps and inefficiencies holding them back. They then have the connected intelligent automation stack in place to resolve these issues and enable straight-through processing.
However, to realise the full potential of intelligent automation, you first need a central cognitive layer of intelligence for the business. This is achieved by gaining insight into the business conversations that underpin every process. For this, you need Conversational Data Intelligence.
Conversational Data Intelligence is a class of enterprise software that uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to help businesses understand their communications processes from end-to-end, and create entirely new sources of structured data from which to build powerful automated workflows. It uses NLP to convert unstructured natural language into structured data that lets users see the causes of inefficiency and opportunities for automation. It creates a single source of truth from which the entire intelligent automation stack can draw from and automate against.
Process excellence (PEX) and change
Conversational Data Intelligence is fast becoming an essential tool for PEX. Applications like Process Mining will help you understand where there is inefficiency in a process, but it won’t reveal the reasons why. Conversational Data Intelligence does just that.
Through a process known as Communications Mining, change leaders can analyse what employees and customers are saying - highlighting the root causes of process breakdown and inefficiency. This reveals new opportunities for improvement while also making Improvement programmes easier to monitor, measure and improve.
Business, product and customer intelligence
Business conversations are an enormous well of insight into operations and the demands of customers. Communications Mining across all communications channels provides unprecedented insight at speed and scale. This information can then be fed into other workflows, augmenting everything from resourcing decisions to product innovation.
Customer relationship management (CRM) and workflow
Conversational Data Intelligence enriches data capture and can trigger workflows for greater productivity and efficiency. It’s key to an efficient CRM system as well as smooth and seamless services for customers.
Automation
Automation tools, such as RPA, have always struggled to automate processes that are heavily based on natural language. This is because they overwhelmingly depend on structured data flows, something rarely found in messages like emails or service requests. Conversational Data Intelligence overcomes this hurdle by turning communications into structured, machine-readable data. This opens up an entirely new frontier for automation opportunities. For the first time, businesses are able to automate many communications-based processes from end-to-end.
A cognitive layer for intelligent automation
Conversational Data Intelligence creates the cognitive layer necessary for intelligent automation. Tools gain access to, and are connected by, a central data source that enables them to analyse and automate the business like never before. It provides the quality, structured data to get the flywheel in motion and the momentum and integration to keep it spinning. Learn more about Conversational Data Intelligence.
