Robotic Automation - Software that Automates Software (RPA)

Why every worker should have their own Robot (RPA at scale)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 22:12:00 +0000

To gain the biggest value from RPA, you should also have a robot on every desktop (RDA, also known as RPA Attended)) as well as server room robots (RPA unattended).

Put simply, very few jobs are composed exclusively of repetitive, non-cognitively driven tasks – fewer than 5%, according to McKinsey’s research. However, the same research found that 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their constituent activities automated.

So if you have 300 people in the back office, you could start with trying to de-humanize their rote work through automation and put the robots in the server room (RPA unattended bots). Automating 5% of the 300 is equivalent to about 15 people and 5 robots (1 Robot per 3 workers). That's not too shabby but how long does it take to automate 100% of peoples work and then get these robots into production? Some are quick but most are not.

But what if you could also use RDA (RPA attended) bots to automate just that 30% of the common activities of most of these same 300 workers? The ROI would be quicker and significantly greater. In fact, in less than 9 months, a banking client achieved 50% automation across a back office team size of ~300 people. That meant that the same number of people can now do twice as much work or half the team can be moved onto other more important work! Since RDA attended bot automations can be implemented and deployed to large groups of desktops with an agile delivery methodology, this client automated the equivalent work of 30 people in just the first 3 months from the start, and accelerating each month from there! That’s what deploying RDA attended bots on the desktop looks like.

OK, even if you double the savings with RPA unattended bots to go from 15 to 30 people in that group, it still on its own doesn’t come anywhere close to the ROI both RPA methods will get you. And by the way, RDA (RPA attended) bots just run on your existing user desktop hardware as is, alongside your workers!

So, having both RPA models combined, gets you a much bigger ROI and much faster using the exact same automation technology. The difference being is that if you build 100% automations up front, or eventually where 100% of the work is automated, you simply move those automations to the server room when ready. If it never makes it to the 100%, which for many processes becomes cost prohibitive or complex, you just keep the robotic automations on the desktop and allow the worker to get two (or three or four) times as much work done as before. One product to learn, two ways to deploy.

There are lots of RPA customers that have fallen into the trap of believing they only need RPA unattended bots and quickly start reaching the wall trying to automate 100% of harder and harder processes done by less and less people. This is because many RPA vendors cannot provide an RPA attended option at scale and thus don't even introduce the idea of the approach or give some excuse as to why you don't need it. There are already major use cases in financial services, telco’s, insurance, healthcare etc., companies, some using over 20,000 RDA (RPA attended) bots and RPA unattended bots together in their enterprise every single day, automating billions of transactions.

Check out the Gartner market guide https://www.gartner.com/doc/3506217/market-guide-robotic-process-automation authored by Cathy Tornbohm where she speaks of the different RPA vendors and their different capabilities, attended, unattended and much more.

When Robots Integrate!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 10:59:00 +0000

Why would you use a Robot to do integration?

We often hear from the less technical savvy that “Integration is easy” when in fact integration can be extremely hard to impossible for much more of a project than most realize. Alan Trefler uses a term that clarifies just how hard integration can be with “Applications that cannot be opened, even with a can opener”. Funny but true. And my old adage was “if it were that easy, it would have been done already”.

Let me clear up something else not always so obvious. Accessing a database and accessing business “data” are two different things. Databases of course contain data but most data is meaningless unless you first pass it through the years of custom developed business logic. Imagine writing a balance to a credit card field straight to a database without first calculating all of the interest, currency rates, charges etc., Or in reverse, reading a data field that looks like “last name” but actually needs to be used to part verify one of many names on an account as to who owns the greater share in an LLC. This is why building API’s is hard. Many application developers never envisaged this data being accessed through anything other than the 1000’s of man hours of business logic they’ve evolved. If only they had a crystal ball in the past to have considered;

Providing access to business logic level data through API’s

SOA and Enterprise Service Busses open up new worlds of accessibility

Their own applications would one day become legacy (or historic even!)

So, if building API’s on top of old legacy applications is hard, what are the alternatives? Enter the world of Enterprise Grade Robotics. Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) from Pega are truly Enterprise Grade.

Pega Robotics allows you to put a wrapper on the one interface that pretty much guarantees to go through the business logic and security layers when you extract or enter data. That is, the user interface. These applications have been built to run on desktops to display and take data all day long from workers, and ALWAYS go through the business logic layer securely.

Using Pega Robotics to build an API through automation (wrapper BOTS) to write or read business data against the desktop applications UI solves a significant problem quickly; How to deliver time to value for any BPM, Transformation and/or digitization project without having to break the bank and risk missing key critical security, governance or business logic.

So, with Pega Robotics you could automate an entire process (say to open a new account) and then when some or all of the account opening capabilities become available as fully-reengineered API’s, you can switch to them quickly. More importantly and uniquely, Pega robotics can partially automate just the key steps in real time, or in a longer running process by running alongside the workers (assisting) on their own machines. These Enterprise Grade Robotic options give great flexibility when you want deliver value quickly, to scale and robustly.

Any Pega Robotic Automation that is built can be called from a fully integrated server process, from another Robot, via BPM or Customer service application etc., In fact, Robots can even call Robots and self monitor their own work to your set SLA’s. It just makes sense to stop paying people to do work if it can be automated. Let your employees, do what they are best at, interacting with customers or using their intelligence where it’s required.

Pega Robotics has been designed to work fast (most competitive RPA only products are 3-5 times slower and require you configure more servers than is really necessary). In addition, Pega Robotics is fully integrated into the Pega platform meaning every aspect critical to enterprise security, auditing and control becomes part of the fully integrated solution as if it had been designed from the ground up to do so.

So, the next time you hear that building API”s is easy, think again. Build API’s using Robotics and it is much easier but more importantly, buys you time, and delivers value early so you can reap the rewards or whatever transformation journey you are on.

Check out Damon Lockwood's post ; BPM AND RPA: BRIDGING THE LAST MILE OF INTEGRATION

Why I am at Pega Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:29:00 +0000

As you know, OpenSpan was acquired by Pega Systems recently. Proud of the founders, the management and the OpenSpan team, I am now very excited to be a "part of Pega" and their incredible teams. What a great fit.

I for one have always been passionate about application development done right and the subsequent importance of the end user experience. It is critical in the race to remain competitive, not just from what customers see, but also how cost effectively enterprises can serve those customers.

However, over the years, more and more legacy systems have become unchangeable or stretched to their limits to the point where many of them are beyond legacy - they are antique! Don't get me wrong, they can and do work but the business models in IT to support these old applications has run it's course and it is no longer acceptable for enterprises to ignore them and expect to remain competitive. To be quite honest, if they don't transform, over the next few years, I see it hard to see how they will survive!

Pega systems brings me back to my rapid application development days but on steroids. Where you are able to quickly build and easily change applications to match business requirements. But more than that even, the Pega 7 platform is a combination of all things phenomenal in application development ; it's fast, has the right visual tools, it's open, it can be deployed in cloud and on-premise, it's secure, it's flexible, you can build/adapt code quickly, without "coding", it allows instant creation of standards that drive reusability that is critical for long term maintainability - and the applications built can run on any platform! The Pega 7 platform is core to any business that wants to transform - To me, Pega is transformation.

So how does the OpenSpan Robotics play in this space? First, it allows us to bring together amazing product teams but second, it allows Robotics (RPA and RDA) to be at the critical start of the transformation journey whilst living and breathing with it. Robotics is tactical, no-one will argue with that, delivering great ROI, quickly and without question, enabling businesses to be agile now. Just imagine, having this agile Robotics engine that starts the transformation journey and then runs along side it for as long as necessary why the full transformation journey takes place. Need to rapidly bring one of those antique applications into the transformation journey whilst you build out it's replacement in Pega? Use the Pega robotics. Want to have a robot or two execute an entire process or single task that runs across 1, 5 or 20 of those antique applications? Use the Pega robotics. Want to have a robot or human continue a task or process that is an integral part of your BPM, Case management or new development strategy? Use the Pega robotics.

You see, Robotics has been waiting for Pega and I'm excited by the future, I am excited for what this brings to the Robotics space and transformation journey combined.

When is a Robot, not a Robot?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 11:35:00 +0000

I live and breath Robotic Automation every day for my enterprise customers so I thought I'd wrap up this week on something for you all to ponder on!

A few weeks back I brought an Amazon Echo. It's a lot of fun, and if your into tech, you just gotta get one yourself.

However, would you consider the Amazon Echo as being a "Robot". Perhaps not literally but let me explain why she (Alexa) very much might be!

Take one simple chore in our lives... going grocery shopping. "Do we need milk" isn't a difficult question/chore a but in reality we have to maintain some kind of shopping list back home. When we realize we need something, we need to find some paper or existing list, a pen (or phone), open up the app/paper and write on it. Then we need to remember to take the list (if paper) with us. Repeat throughout the week and we all get to eat!

This shopping list task is no different to an enterprise worker, opening up an application, looking for information, taking notes and/or remembering to pass information onto a customer.

Either way, we waste billions of hours globally, doing stuff we could simply "automate" to Robotic Automation.

So, is the Amazon Echo a Robot? You tell me because now I use it to fully automate my shopping list gathering process. Whenever I realize I need something, all I have to say is "Alexa, can you add milk to the shopping list please" (Please is optional by the way but my Mum brought me up to be polite). That's it. Alexa (the amazon echo) automatically adds that to your "cloud" list and when you go to the shops, you pull up the amazon shopping list and hey presto. Also, anyone at home can ask Alexa to add items to any kind of list. She's not fuzzy who speaks to her.

Most of these "micro" tasks, at home and, more importantly, in the enterprise, are readily auto-matable with technology. The benefits in cost savings to the enterprise are massive once you know the technology exists. And now you do... Robotic Automation

Robots prefer Intelligence !

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 11:31:00 +0000

I've had fun over the last 2 weeks with my new found friend of the most "intelligent" photo album application I have ever used - Google photos. That gave me an idea for a blog - I hope you like it.

If you are embarking on any Transformation program, for Robotic Automation (RPA, RDA), BPM and/or re-engineering program, check out why I believe the games changed on how you figure out where to start. No more guess work on where the opportunities for improvement are ripe... Robots will be deliver significantly more value if you base their work on real intelligence of the workers work first!

http://www.openspan.com/2016/03/07/intelligence-is-the-new-driver-for-robotic-automation/

Taming The Robots - Hype v Reality of Robotic Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 01:02:00 +0000

The last 24 months has seen more attention to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) than any other “UI” automation approach since the invention of the term “swivel chair” integration.

In fact, as a side-note, if we were to actually assume that most kinds of integration could be considered a “software” robot then in fact there is already a Googolplex of software robots in the workplace today. Architecturally incorrect but food for thought given the end results are the same - human optimization!

Using software Robots to do the work, in the same or similar way as a human, was often called swivel chair integration. This had it’s benefits, even if sometimes a little brittle! But now the technology has dramatically matured into significantly more robust “Robotic Automation”. For further clarity, Robotic Automations that do all of the work of a human is more commonly today known as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) whereas Robotic Automations that works alongside the human, solving the swivel chair conundrum in real time with the human, is known as RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation). Collectively all known as Robotic Automation.

So, what’s the hype v reality?

Well after 10 years, RPA case studies are showing us that this still really has only ever achieved savings in the few 100’s of workers in the larger enterprises across the globe. Not too shabby but replacing a few hundred employees in a 10,000 or 50,000 employee back office business with multiple years of development effort isn’t exactly going to win any big CEO pats on the back. Still, it's very powerful and cannot be ignored by any serious organization on their transformation journey.

However, when RPA is combined with RDA, the case studies and testimonials for large ROI are rampant. Some of the worlds largest banks, insurers healthcare and retail companies are using Robotic Automations on tens of thousands of desktops with hundreds of thousands of Robots (RDA) deployed globally. Offering the opportunity to more rapidly enhance the productivity of the larger workforce groups with 20-50% improvement in a matter of months starting with RDA, and then implementing RPA where applicable provides a significant contribution to the transformation strategy.

The C’suite is learning that you need to pick the right Robots for the right tasks. A 20% improvement in productivity and increase in customer satisfaction for the front office is highly important. Robotic Automation can be everywhere, front office, back office and in the branch. Taming these Robots, for RDA and RPA, to run the right ones, to provide maximum value for each environment is key to success.

2016 - This is the year of Robotic Automation….

Definitive Guide to Robotic Automation (well mine anyway)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:53:00 +0000

Definitive Guide to Robotic Automation

Robotic Automation describes a task or groups of tasks of processes that would normally be completed by a computer user but are now automated by software.

For any benefit of doubt, I am not talking electro-mechanical robots, but rather simply, software automating some other software.

Robotic Automations can;

run on the desktop alongside a human (Desktop Automation)

run in a server room (Robotic Process Automation) without humans

Desktop Automation is also known as Interactive or Attended Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is also known as Autonomous or Unattended Automation

Robotic Automation uses new forms of software specially designed to automate the software applications that humans normally use. Although this might sound strange, it allows humans to work much faster and provide greatly improved customer experience whilst also in some cases, may mean not needing humans at all.

All kinds of software integration and re-engineering projects occur to optimize tasks and transactions so that the need for humans to process them is reduced or eliminated. IT might be on a path to Nirvana of needing no workers through these transformation projects but in the meantime, just count the number of humans in the contact center and back office across the globe and you’ll see they still have a long way to go.

The need for Robotic Automation has never been stronger. CEOs are expected to run their businesses efficiently and deliver increasing shareholder value; added to the fact that enterprises cannot just cut costs to the bare bone and ignore the strong competition facing them. Improving customer experience and staying ahead of their competition at lower costs is paramount. How do you deal with this conundrum?

Robotic Automation in more detail

Users sit at a computer terminal most of the day processing tasks using legacy, web and windows applications. For the sake of argument, let’s say everything the human does (pressing keys, moving/clicking the mouse, reading/thinking) is manual. So, if we could train a physical robot to sit in the user’s chair and press the same keys and click the mouse accurately every time at super-fast speed then we have Robotic Automation. Obviously, a robot on the chair approach is not practical to replace the manual computer- based work of humans. However, the computer is already capable of being the “robot,” (in fact, it already is a robot, but generally restricted to operate within the bounds of a single process or application,) we just need to teach (automate) this robot to correctly read the business applications (both on-screen information and non-visible object information), select the right commands, apply the right thinking (rules) and navigate. If we put the trained piece of automation software on each worker’s computer and do just that, we have Robotic Automation.

Robots to replace or augment humans to make them more efficient

If we use Robotic Automation to do everything a user does from end to end, then we do not need the worker to perform that task anymore. This work can be transferred off the worker’s desktop to a server, mimicking pretty much the same user environments. You now have autonomous Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

If we use Robotic Automation to do much but not all of what a user does, building automations more gradually, we can dramatically increase the amount of work they do and reduce their error rates. These Robotic Automations run on the user’s computer at exactly the same time the user is still using it. This is called interactive Desktop Automation.

RPA or Desktop Automation?

It is not whether you use one or the other; you should plan for using both. Robotic Automations are built to replicate tasks done by a human. These tasks can be automated together for a complete process automation or called independently and dynamically as the user performs their work

Sample things to automate might be;

· Find the 5 pieces of data across 4 applications that allow verification of a customer and put them in clear view automatically (heads up display)

· Move 7 fields from 1 application to 2 more applications (e.g. address change)

· Providing the customer with intelligence (via phone, text, email or letter) confirming their installation details

· Refund 50% of a charge by changing 3 systems after supervisor approval

· See if customer exists in any of systems of record for compliance

· Work out (5 rules) if customer is eligible for upgrade or credit

· Check to see if insurance claim is a duplicate – deny if yes; approve and pay if no.

· If Insurance claim is a duplicate or not approved, deny it or route it. If routing requires opening a new case, open and enter all appropriate fields and notes.

· Check four or more 3rd party websites to validate customer address and sort codes

· Update the systems to instigate a payment to a customer

All of these tasks start life with a human logging in (if not already in) to perhaps 3-10 desktop applications (windows, web, green screen, java) and remembering everything they have been trained to do. They jump around, hunting down information, applying learnt or hard coded rules and making decisions to update yet more systems. Some desktops are a myriad of complexities resulting in processes being completed extremely inefficiently.

If a live customer / worker interaction isn’t occurring during the transaction process and the tasks within are fully mapped, allowing for the entire process and all its variations to be automated, then the Robotic Automations can be run on a back-end server with no human ever present (RPA). If however, the user is working with a customer on the phone or in complex process requiring human intervention in many of the steps, then you will likely need to be able have some or all of the Robotic Automations executed interactively with human involvement as and when required at the computer (Desktop Automation).

Virtually no enterprise exists today, where both Desktop Automation and RPA would not be applicable. However, it is imperative a business prioritizes what is the most important. Whilst RPA can at first look the most attractive as vendors tout 100% savings, finding enough repeatable RPA opportunities to deliver large savings in short order is much harder and often impossible.

With Desktop Automation the initial savings can be delivered in weeks across a much larger workforce because you build the interactive automations that affect the largest groups in the workforce first. RPA tends to be the other way around and thus target opportunities found are for much smaller groups of workers. In contact centers and larger back office groups, Desktop Automation doesn’t just save dramatically on the cost side but it can have a major impact on improving the entire customer experience.

Because Desktop Automation runs interactively on the human desktop, the end users application and computer systems are also dramatically enhanced. New user interfaces and enhanced 360 degree customer / task views, process guidance, upsell, assisted sign in, auto notes, guided reconciliation are deliverable as part of the same solution.

Robotic Automations in a server (RPA) is typically trying to eliminate the worker and deliver 100% savings so what’s not to like? However, companies find mapping and automating these much smaller groups take much longer to deliver large value.

Robotic Automations in a desktop environment that can deliver benefits immediately to much larger groups of workers and the same automations can be moved to an RPA model as well. Desktop Automations can call RPA if that’s feasible too. These automations of tasks can be re-used interchangeably between servers and desktops.

More to follow on how the different vendors support each of these technologies and also, how the technology behind the "software that automates" software actually works.

There is also a disconnect on how long RPA has been around. Recently it has been touted as new and that's the reason there are few very large scale case studies. However RPA is not new and nor is Desktop Automation What is driving the market for these technologies is the need to cut costs and/or improve the cost to the business for processing transactions (Back Office and Contact Center).

When is a Robot not a Robot (Software Robotic Automation)?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 May 2015 10:30:00 +0000

When I was 17, I wrote my first Desktop Automation. Sure, it wasn't called that 35 years ago! It was called a "Programmable function key". I programmed the F6 key on a dumb terminal that automated a task for every user in a large banking company. When pressed, the robot would navigate the screen to the HR employee record, regardless of where the user was at the time and all it would do was simulate pressing the keys on the keyboard instead of the user doing it, using the shortest route to that screen. We used to stick labels on the F6 key back in those days too :)

One of my other jobs, early in my career as a software performance expert was to speed up the length of time it took to run overnight payroll runs (which in this large bank was starting to take longer than there were hours in the night!). The bank didn't want to throw more people or expensive hardware at the problem so what I did was ran a series of benchmarks and determined there were areas in the source code that were very poorly written. After a few months of re-coding just these poorly written routines, the payroll process actually ran in 25% of the time. Far few people were now needed to complete their work in less time. I remember this story because I was working till 4am, the only times we could test! That was 32 years ago.

I started a terminal emulation business 28 years ago. Our "intelligent" emulator was one of the first that would allow mainframes to be programmed to automate client server programs running on a PC. Long before the days of clever export/import, file sharing and triggers, we allowed users to press a button in a green screen mainframe app and it would move data from the screen(s) into a word processor or spreadsheet (Lotus 123) dramatically cutting process times and eliminating errors. In the 10 years I ran this business, we sold over half-a-million licenses! In1985 we created a product call HostAccess server that allowed automations without humans at all. This was far more robust automation than just programming the keys because our emulator checked what screen the user was on, looked for errors and could navigate in multiple directions!

So, I hope I'm making my point. Any program that does what a human used to do, and either does it by assisting the human or replacing them, could be deemed a robotic process automation. Any software program that nips away at the employees time, and uses the computers time fits this category. Of course, it's a stretch to call software integration a robotic software automation but the end result is often the same! Integration software, BPM, hyperlinks, process guidance, single sign on and even an ATM is a software Robot assisted by a hardware robot that fully automates checking your security, credit and request to give you cash. Robots are everywhere.

OpenSpan has 100's of thousands of Desktop Automation licenses in live production environments, assisting or replacing humans who used to do the manual work that software robots do. Millions of Robotic Software automations (Desktop and Server side) are running on OpenSpan every single day of the year.

So, what's new with Software Automation, and why is it becoming interesting to the large SI, BPO's and big enterprises all around the globe again? Some think the reason the fresh look at automation is to cut costs but in reality, that is only a small part of it. For most enterprises, competition has never been fiercer so significant money is being invested to make sure they grow and maintain their customer base. An impressive customer service is what sets one company apart from another and this problem is common today and needs to be fixed by many big companies. How can you gain customers if your processes are too slow and inefficient? If an insurance company takes too long to respond to a customer request or a customer calling in to a telco call center doesn't get the right information for a new rate plan for their phone - that customer today, can far more easily switch to a one of your competitors!

Automation gets you to this mission much faster. It's been proven the world over and no longer just a tactical solution. It is part of the transformation journey every company wants to make or is making. Typical tried and trust integration works BUT it is hard and expensive and carries with it great risk. The business needs solutions today. Desktop Automation and software Robots are tactically strategic in delivering solutions quickly - with little risk (more risk from Robots as you have to do it all). Desktop Automation robustly automates what your humans already do, so it happens much faster and without costly errors!

What's not to like... Desktop Automation is growing in every part of the world. Here is a snapshot how many industry leaders are leveraging OpenSpan to impact their business and build world-class customer experiences:

· Three of the UK “Big Four” and five of the top six US commercial banks

· Eight of the top global telecom / cable providers

· Healthcare – Four of the top six US managed health plans

· Four of the top five property and casualty insurers

· Some of the world’s largest online retailers and global commerce leaders

· Two of the top five US food and drug retailers

The Rise of Bionic Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 15:01:00 +0000

“Humanator” - The RISE of the Bionic worker - A smarter, faster and more accurate employee!

It’s hard to miss the press around Robotic Process Automation (RPA) these days. Even though it’s been around for many years, the idea of using software to automate other software, through the UI, to emulate a desktop users work, is gaining significant traction. Is this because so many other integration projects have failed to live up to the promises of optimisation benefits or is it because the economy is driving companies to cut human costs even faster? Who knows?

Anyway, what it has achieved, is to draw everyone’s attention back to the human desktop worker (in the Call Centre, Back Office, BPO) and just how much we pay them to do work, on the computer, that in fact that computer could do all by itself! Any end to end transactions that require no human discretion, you have to ask why you still have humans doing them at all! Alas, it’s often because the cost of doing so outweighs the cost of having the human doing it, or it’s been seen as too hard to solve. However, there are still a significant number of process steps that can be automated today. Any organization not looking at this seriously, must question why their team likes to keep humans around doing this work!

Let me get to the real point of this blog - I’m introducing the world to Bionic Automation - yes you heard that right - BIONICS. We all agree, until everything is automated / digitized, we are still going to need plenty of humans doing the work they do well. So, how can we apply the benefits of automation gained in robotics, but delivered when a human is still involved? Simple - automate just the time consuming / error prone steps in their processes. Choose the ones first that require no human discretion and yet consume their time (and your cost) to do it. This is what Desktop Automation is or what can perhaps be described also as Bionic Automation.

Desktop (Bionic) Automation is what OpenSpan has been selling for many years. Large numbers of call centres and back offices in many of the worlds largest banks, insurers, healthcare, telecoms, retail, digital enterprises use Desktop Automation today to improve their employees performance. Hundreds of thousands of call centre agents and back offices workers are already "Bionic" in these organisations.

Imagine a world, where your human call center agents and back office workers are all working super efficiently, fast and without error. Delivering a fantastic customer experience because they are not having to take time navigating across multiple applications, searching, rekeying or calculating. Imagine how grateful your customers would be if it takes half the time to take a payment, buy a product, open an account or buy a new plan (and costing half as much to do the same transactions!).

This is what a Bionic workforce looks like. The same work will be done, but their computer will do more of that work for them, using Desktop Automation. Finding information for an upsell will be done in the blink of an eye and presented back to the agent, making them look like superstars to the customer - who might be used to hearing “hang on a minute whilst I look that up” or “can you give me that account number again”. It goes without saying; there are many automations that could be delivered to your desktop workers in just weeks, that start turning your workforce into a Bionic workforce (smarter, faster and without error).

OpenSpan has been selling Robotic Process Automation for years and many customers glean great FTE savings from it, one department, one process at a time. However, Bionic Automation (Desktop Automation), delivers these same benefits, iteratively, and across your ENTIRE workforce - immediately.

“Bionic Automation” turns your employees into smarter, faster and error free human workers. You’ll need less of them, or if you are an expanding company, you’ll be able to take on more customers, across all divisions, whilst delivering the most enviable customer experience.

2015: The End of the Contact Center

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 11:50:00 +0000

I was asked to write a column over Christmas to reflect what I have seen over the last 12 months from the Call Centre executives I deal with day in, day out.

The facts speak for themselves. CEO's / CIO's CFO's and COO's from across the gambit need to get positioned for growth in a tough economic climate. What decisions they make need to reflect where they are going today for the years to come.

Read the full article re the end of the contact centre here from Call Centre Times

Robots meeting Cyborgs in the Desktop Automation world!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:23:00 +0000

Hello all. I’m now back in the UK (London) driving the OpenSpan EMEA region. Our 140% growth with our human (Desktop Automation) technology in the last 3 years has been global and the EMEA team has been great part of that. Being both a US and British citizen, it was obviously a great assignment for me to take this region to the next level.

So, what’s been happening in the world of human automation since I spoke to you last? Well, as you know OpenSpan has been doing Desktop Automation for the last 10 years and I have recently seen some other great companies (and people) create more and more acceptance around the back office automation space. Most of this has been around what looks to be called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and what OpenSpan has previously been calling unattended, full automation or automation broker (we used any term that suited the particular audience at the time). I do however like “RPA” and if that’s what the industry wants and likes, I am up for playing along,. After all, our customers have been also using RPA for over 10 years!

So what’s the difference between Robotic Process Automation and Desktop Automation? Staying on the “Robotics” theme, we could say that Desktop Automation could be classed as “Cyborg Process Automation” (CPA). In fact, those that remember our super human “The Six Million Dollar man” may not have realized this series was based on a novel called “Cyborg” by Martin Caidin,. A human, with robotic like qualities – needed in critical places where you still need a human to make key decisions or interaction with a customer (call centers, support centers etc.,)

So, CPA, which automates a lot of what a human does at the desktop whilst RPA, automates all of what a human does and thus replaces the human entirely! There are processes that are ripe for both and there are some processes that are not applicable to either! CPA solutions can ultimately evolve in an agile manner to run 100% robotically. Effectively, the Cyborg becomes the robot!

For OpenSpan, it has always been the same core technology that does both CPA and RPA. Our customers build a center of excellence around our agile Automation, and business and IT decide together the right processes to automate. Since the discreet automations built for CPA can be moved into RPA (and vice versa), you are not tasked to having two teams, two security models and two different long term maintenance headaches!

Whether you start with CPA or RPA, the ROI can be significant and fast. CPA critically though, often effects a much larger group of users first (say 1,000 or 10,000 call center agents) whilst RPA effects smaller disparate groups (back office/operations). CPA offers 25% reduction in task times in the first few months which can result in FTE cuts, better customer service or whatever the customer chooses to do with the saving. In back office banking, we’ve even seen some them use CPA so that 50 people get the same productivity as 300. RPA is pretty much looking for 100% straight away, and in smaller groups.

Either way, we are in interesting times as Enterprises and Governments are under urgently increasing cost-cutting and austerity exercises themselves, you can be sure CPA and RPA use is only going to accelerate.

Call Centers - from the "mouth" of the Customer

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 15:45:00 +0000

Whilst not all of these may be applicable to your customers feelings towards your Contact Center, I doubt there isn't one or two that makes you smile. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone. And if you want to see how OpenSpan clients are addressing these issues with Desktop Automation, be sure to drop me a line!

Now, try and sing along....

------------------------------

One the first day of Christmas,

Our customers like to say

Why do we need such delay

On the second day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the third day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the fourth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the fifth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the sixth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the seventh day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the eighth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the ninth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the tenth day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the eleventh day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

When will this nightmare end

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

On the twelve day of Christmas

Our customers like to say

Goodbye from me to you

I know my date of birth

You ask me to wait once more

That is not my right name

Transfer me all over

You lost all my details

Five times I’ve called

I want to pay my bill

You keep repeating questions

I’m getting tired of waiting

And why do we need such delay

Activity Intelligence - the new weapon in measuring worker activity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 11:55:00 +0000

Today, OpenSpan announces a significant new product that fills a missing void in the Call Center and Back Office worlds (in fact, for any computer user across the entire Enterprise). Sure, both of these worlds are full of highly successful (and many not so), detailed analytics on what your users are doing and how their work is going. Speech Analytics, Voice Recordings, Screen Recordings, activity reports, transaction analysis etc., - all deliver value to varying degrees.

However, when it really comes to knowing what your workers are doing deep down, technology has been lacking. Within every enterprise, there are many types of desktop applications being used to get work done and workers can go in potentially hundreds of directions through these applications to do so. Employee cost is where you spend most of your budget and yet you don't know what workers are really doing, how they interact with these applications, why some people are better than others, what is the REAL gold standard, which all should be striving. It has just been too hard to collect this level of granularity - and yet, if you had it, this level of detail would change how you manage and optimize your work force.

With OpenSpans new technology, Activity Intelligence, we have now closed the loop on this missing and significant piece of insight to date. Not to be confused with other technologies like Desktop Analytics, Activity Intelligence changes the way we capture the granular level of detail of activity and it does so, with very little configuration on the part of our customers.

Activity Intelligence is deployed through a highly secure SaaS model, taking care of virtually all of the infrastructure required to deliver the collection, intelligent analysis and reporting capabilities. With a simple lightweight run time on every users desk, with little to no configuration, OpenSpan's Activity Intelligence collects virtually all activity from each users desktop, masking out secure and sensitive data for compliance purposes on the way. Once we've collected this "activity" of your workers interactions across all of their applications, then the core part of OpenSpan's product kicks in. This is the powerful analysis and pattern matching Intelligence we've built to identify unique workflows across your organization. Once we've identified a pattern, say as an "address change" process, we can then find all other users who perform address changes, and then compare how they complete them from an efficiency standpoint. Other examples could detect identifying a wire transfer pattern initiated by a bank teller, a mortgage verification process completed by a back office worker or the booking of a customer call-out from a contact center agent.

Whatever the patterns we find, identifying unique processes, we can then drill into the detailed make-up of of those processes, across continents, or work-groups, and compare them with each other, to a defined gold standard or to agreed performance levels.

Finally, with Activity Intelligence, all levels of management can obtain a near real-time view of the activity of the core of their productivity workers across the entire enterprise. Whether you are interested in monitoring compliance activity, boosting performance or using it as feedback to your process optimization groups, Activity Intelligence will set the bar for how worker productivity is measured in future.

Webinar for anyone that cares about Call Center efficiency!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:19:00 +0000

The latest ContactBabel US Contact Center Decisions Maker’s Guide is out and includes data from more than 200 contact center leaders across the US.

OpenSpan is a platinum sponsor of this really informative report, and Steve Morrell from ContactBabel and I are co-hosting an enlightening webinar about the agent desktop and the strategic role it plays in today’s contact centers.

During this lively session, Steve and I (a fellow Brit) will discuss the findings from this year’s report – what are the hottest trends, where is contact center management struggling and how are companies dealing with specific issues, to name a few.

In response to Steve’s portion of the session, I’ll dive into OpenSpan’s core capabilities and how we are helping companies across the globe impact their contact center operations by driving agent performance and improving the customer experience. Why are we still forcing agents to perform time-consuming manual processes that the COMPUTER can do more easily? How can our contact center implement a 360 customer view without heavy lifting from an IT perspective, or costly integration consulting price tags?

These are some of the questions we will answer during this webinar – and I hope you’ll be there to participate. Tell your neighbors and friends and I look forward to seeing you there.

http://www.openspan.com/program/ws/2013/#top

Call Centers Can Be Wasteful

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:29:00 +0000

I know, it’s an attention-seeking headline so don't take offense. Although it’s true, it’s not deliberate and if you think about it from a human resource standpoint, there really IS a significant amount of time that your agents are forced into wasting for things like redundant data entry, manual activities, inefficient system navigation and much more.

Ah, but there’s help!

There are new technologies that allow you to eliminate this massive waste in the contact center. Companies are realizing tremendous ROI – close to millions or tens of millions of dollars – so why not see for yourself what I'm talking about – Desktop Automation.

You see, Desktop Automation is the new secret of the world’s top class call centers – and you’ve probably never even heard of it! Yet, Desktop Automation is now the number one way to eliminate the costly waste I am talking about. So what do I really mean by “waste”?

Just one example of waste is perhaps, at the end of every call, your agents are trained to “manually” enter notes about the call and the type of activity that was performed to service the customer. Sometimes known as “Call wrap-up” or “Disposition Notes,” it can be a pretty time-consuming, yet essential part of the customer interaction. Notes are important but it is wasted time if your agents are having to take the time to enter this data themselves.

To give a bit more clarity on this “wasted” manual effort, perhaps it’s easier to break this down to a more Monty Python like “sketch”:

Johnny (Trainer): “So Billy (Agent), what we want you to do, is type in what you did on the computer after each call, in that little box there.”

Billy: “Why?”

Johnny: “Why? We want to make sure all of the activity is included on the customer account so the next time the customer calls, we know how the interaction with them went”

Billy: “No, I mean, why do *I* have to tell the computer what I did? Doesn't it know?”

Johnny: “Of course it knows! It’s a computer – it knows everything!”

Billy: “Then why do I need to tell it, if it knows everything? Does it forget?”

Johnny ; “No, Billy, the computer doesn't forget, it remembers everything.”

Billy ; “Then why do I need tell the computer if it can remember all this by itself?”

Johnny: “Billy, I don’t know why but it only takes a minute for you to do it”

Billy: “Yes, but you said I was one of 300 people doing this, 40 times a day…so that's what…… 12,000 minutes a day, which comes to 4,200,000 minutes a year ….. and that's about 70,000 hours that we are all sitting here, typing something into the computer - that it already knows.”

----

Whether it would normally takes 20 seconds or two minutes for your agents to take notes during or after your calls, using Desktop Automation, you are effectively training the computer to collect the notes in real time and thus you get this same information, in seconds and error free.

Eliminating the agents’ wasted time in this case means the agents can move to the next call almost immediately, thereby increasing the number of calls they can handle during their shift. Time and money savings from eliminating this type of waste are astounding!

With Desktop Automation there are hundreds of these mini use cases that can be automated in just a few weeks, even if you don't own the applications you want to automate. This is not a massive IT project and this now means you are empowering your contact center with technology that enables agents to do their jobs better and faster since you are removing the time they waste having to do something the computer can do for them.

Workforce Optimization (WFO) and Worker Optimization are NOT the same

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:49:00 +0000

For these last few years, as I have watched OpenSpan grow (130% increase in license revenue last year), I have been lucky enough to help educate a number of executives on why "Worker Optimization" is an important differentiator to WFO. WFO is not new and that's obvious but why do people think that WFO is typically the main route to take when you are looking to optimize your workforce?

WFO typically takes a swathe of workers (or call center agents) and attempts to break them down into their refined areas of expertise and efficiency levels. It might even go so far as to help identify processes those workers follow and suggest alternatives or retraining. WFO then starts to match the necessary tasks or calls to the correct workers with the right skills and proficiency. WFO also makes sure you have enough workers around as peaks and troughs in demand occur and helps ensure you don't have people sitting idle for too long. All good. Nothing wrong with WFO.

However, when you break it down to the actual worker, all the worker primarily uses to do their work is a computer, a keyboard, a screen and a mouse. I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but bear with me, this is going somewhere! Through all of the screen navigating, searching, clicking and typing at the desktop, a worker can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes to hours or days to complete their tasks or complete a call with a customer. The worker (human) is really only as fast as they are at their keyboard and mouse. Their desktop applications and complexity may contribute to their work taking longer along with their own ability and speed. The desktop is "where People and Technology meet" and represents the place where the real work is done today and thus, the biggest cost to the business.

What then, could we accomplish, if we could make the interaction between the people and the technology better? That's where Worker Optimization is realized, through Desktop Automation - making the worker better and faster and as well as more accurate. If it takes 15 minutes for a worker to complete a task normally, but with Desktop Automation assisting in the task, it only takes 5 or 10 minutes, wouldn't that be where the real value comes from?

So whilst WFO is important, if the workforce is not optimized, you are not getting the biggest part of the value. You are leaving massive amounts of money on the table if the worker needs 15 minutes to do something that could take just 5 minutes. Every second truly counts in the workforce and for some customers, a one second reduction on every call or task can mean millions in savings. Imagine then, reductions of minutes or hours. That's what Desktop Automation delivers. It takes what your workers already do and speeds it up through automation - right there on the desktop - where your people and your technology meet.

WFO should be used around an optimized workforce. Priceless.

Happy 40th Birthday, Copy and Paste (give or take a year).

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:33:00 +0000

Actually, it's older than that if we include scissors and tape but I'm talking the revolutionary "technological" version still in use today!

On most desktops, copy and paste still thrives en-masse, costing our businesses BILLIONS of dollars in the manual labor cost (it takes a computer user approximate 5-10 seconds for every click, copy, toggle, paste, toggle back). Training a human on what to copy, when to copy along with mistaken copies, adds billions more. It's because in reality, our desktops (and smartphones) are still cluttered with many applications our employees need to simply do their jobs.

Call Center agents witness this every day. They sit on a desktop with 4 or 5 open applications and toggle all day long, collecting and moving data between them (costing the Call Center lots of time, money and frustration). I call this "manual work" because it's just that. Humans, bashing away at the keyboard trying to figure out where data resides, apply their brain-trained rules and move it around. Manual work and wasted time.

And it's not just legacy applications. As a big Salesforce user myself, you'd think this super-duper, SAAS based cloud thingy wouldn't be tarnished with the same brush, right? Well, you are dead wrong. Most applications built yesteryear and today have little to no ability to be connected cost effectively to much else. Sure, there are plug-ins for salesforce and office to cut back on the number of manual integrations but that just makes the cloud application, bigger, clunkier and slower. Either that or have a development team constantly customize your salesforce and plug-ins until they too make just one new legacy mess.

After 40 years it's got a little better to be fair. Click on a phone number in an email on your smartphone and there's a good chance (unless it's an international number with a zero in the wrong place) that number will be magically dialed for you. Yippee, progress. However, if you have a 100 employees, or a 1000 or 10,000, sitting at a desktop, manually navigating applications, they have been trained (and hopefully remember) on, the Average Wasted Time (AWT) adds up. Especially in a call center where AWT is unacceptable (Cost and Customer SAT score impacts).

I say, if you can't beat them, join them but do it automatically instead. Desktop Automation enables business and IT to figure out the appropriate joins quickly (automate application and human interactions) and eliminate AWT. Desktop Automation allows you to train the computer to do the things the computer is perfectly capable of being trained to do. This way, humans (Call Center Agents, Back Office works etc.,) can focus on the stuff the computer doesn't do well (human interaction, discretion etc.,). AWT costs money, lots of it. Desktop Automation can eliminate most of it, and customers of Desktop Automation are rewarded with the clear financial ROI as well as the virtual elimination of errors.

Screen Scraping, Macro's and Scripting are old tech. The new Desktop Automation technologies allow Agile, Drag and Drop automations to be built and rolled out quickly. Take a look. Your "human" workers will thank you for it, and your desktop computers likely won't care that they have to work a little harder for you :)

Of course, Desktop Automation can do much much more than just help eliminate AWT but since it's a birthday for our copy/paste nemesis, I thought I'd give it it's own special post ;)

I'll post some use detailed cases shortly but here's a quick one for you. A recent Desktop Automation project that took 12 weeks to implement allows 50 people to do the work of 300 people (about $1.5m a month savings). Yes - the numbers are big!

The Agile Desktop for Call Center Agents and Back Office workers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:14:00 +0000

So, what is the Agile Agent Desktop?

Imagine you could design a car in a few hours? Sure you need the off-the-shelf "Body" and the "Engine" but after that, imagine if the rest was up to you. Want a digital fuel gauge or a old indicator style? You choose. Want really comfy seats, deck chair or tight sports leather? You choose. Want a wooden dash, brushed metallic, gold? You choose. Want a GPS system, Google Maps on a Tablet in the dash, iPad? You choose. Want a CD Player, USB drive, Bluetooth, LP's <lol>? You choose or have them all.

You get the idea, choose the car, the engine and the main body and the rest you can configure, and change as easily as using a smart phone with a few touch selections. OK, not possible yet is it? But for the desktop - your every day work dashboard - it IS now a reality!

Your workers and agents arrive at their desks every morning and are stuck pretty much with the same old apps, the same old complex work flows and the same old slow painful navigation across all those apps to get their job done. Not only is it pretty uninspiring, it is often incredibly inefficient (with so many apps). Agents have hundreds of options (and have to be trained on each of them) and dig around the screens to get their job done.

Enter the new AGILE desktop. Where you can take your existing desktop (your PC and the applications on it) and improve it quickly with dashboards, automation and helpful guidance and navigational tools that make your workers more productive - WAY more productive. As in the car, it doesn't change how the car works and doesn't risk you steering off into a lake in the middle of nowhere. The Agile desktop takes what you have, and just makes it better. It doesn't even have to do it all at once, you can change what you need to improve, as you need it. The same engine (applications) run underneath and there's no risk to transactions or business logic being missed or bypassed. The ROI of the OpenSpan Agile desktop customer base is typically 20% straight in the first year and closer to 30% for the back office workers. And it doesn't stop there. Our customers continue over years and years to use OpenSpan to improve the workforce as needs change. It's flexible, it's fast and it works.

The Agile Agent desktop for the Call Center Agents or the Agile Worker Desktop for the Backoffice workers just plain makes sense. Check it out, it's so easy, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it yourself :)

http://www.openspan.com/solutions/contact_centers/agent_desktop.php

2013 Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Call Center Executives

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

I was thinking to myself on New Years Eve (resting up after tearing a calf muscle doing Zumba earlier in the day!), what would be the best way to start my 2013 blog schedule. It had to be a traditional top 10 to go with the untraditional me (how many guys do YOU know who do Zumba?).

So, here we go, a traditional top 10 for the new year, with all the trimmings. Enjoy.

What are your goals for optimizing call center operations and impacting revenue for 2013?

Consider these top 10 resolutions for world-class call center performance!

10.	Stop measuring what you cannot fix - it's meaningless. Look to key insights from Desktop Analytics to drive change and impact your agents, customers and bottom-line
9.	You are not just a cost center -- you are a revenue generation center; change your contact center this year through actionable data driven from Desktop Analytics
8.	Focus on improving your agent's desktop environment -- your agents and your CSAT scores will thank you!
7.	Be picky! Partner with only the best – see why over 300,000 agent desktops use OpenSpan over all other agent improvement options
6.	Instigate the best new measure for agent standards from fact based, real time Desktop Analytics
5.	Make introducing innovation a joint business and IT initiative
4.	Understand why an Agile Agent Desktop strategy succeeds and a Unified Desktop strategy fails
3.	See how Desktop Automation changes the way you think about agent desktops
2.	Remember AWT (Average Wasted Time) is the new thing to "cut"
1.	Investigate new technologies revolutionizing cost reduction in the Call Center

Screen Scraping is DEAD - Long live Desktop Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:05:00 +0000

I often refer to screen scraping as "click and pray" since the results from it, are at best, Highly Brittle!

But the growing demand for obtaining better performance out of your workers through user optimization technologies is driving the need for better clarity on what works and what doesn't!

So, what makes Desktop Automation better than screen scrapers?

First, Desktop Automation (what OpenSpan pioneered as "Surface Integration") lives inside each running application it's going to automate - like a plug-in. It takes robust control over the UI objects so that you can automate against any object that the user would normally have to interact with. What I mean by living "inside" is that you then have the same control over the object as if we were the developers of the application. You can tell if someone clicks a specific button or changes a piece of text in a field or selects a menu. We don't "hope" we detect that click, we ALWAYS get that click. Likewise we can tell the application to change the text value of a field, or click a button or navigate to a page on behalf of the user. Again, we don't hope the application receives the click and we don't tell the user not to minimize the application or take the application out of focus - since we are living inside the application.

Second, screen scraping is often only used for small batch like operations or simple tasks. Desktop Automation from OpenSpan is running on close to 300,000 real active desktops, in mission critical and hectic environments. On call center agent desktops, on branch tellers pc's in banks, in insurance and healthcare claims environments, airlines, travel and much more. If you tried to extend screen scraping to these environments then the brittle click and pray approach just won't last long at all.

Third, screen scraping technology vendors try to mask the fact they are screen scraping. They hook onto the MSAA band-wagon. MSAA is Microsoft's way to explain how well written desktop applications (to MSAA spec), can talk to each other. Good luck with that considering probably only 20% of the applications even come close to supporting it properly and even then, it's very limited it what you can use it for.

Fourth, Desktop Automation doesn't have to rely on pauses and sleeps (the pray part) to detect when automation can occur. Since we see exactly when an object is ready to be automated against (by the fact it we see when it's created on the screen or page it's on), we know exactly when to automate against it. This event driven model means again, the resilient and robust automations are going to work, each and every time without the delays and "prays" associated with screen scraping.

It is wrong to put screen scraping and desktop automation in the same bucket but since they both claim to automate the UI, it's probably too late to create a new bucket. You MUST however look at the success stories for Desktop Automation. It's running in organizations with instances of over 25,000 desktops, all running powerful Desktop Automation solutions to drive out significant productivity gains from their call center agents and user bases. In some cases, customers are in their seventh year of running projects of Desktop Automation and they continue to expand it's use. With screen scraping, the approach is destined to small click and pray projects with short (weeks/months) at best. Now Desktop Automation is here and has firm presence at some of the largest enterprise customers in the world, and now on close to 300,000 seats, I think, it's fair to say, screen scraping is DEAD and Desktop Automation is very much ALIVE!

How to cut AHT overnight

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:46:00 +0000

Sound too good to be true? That's because most people think "boil the ocean". I'm going to blog 6 ways over the coming weeks on how you can take simple, easy to implement steps to eliminate "chunks" of AHT in short order.

The first one is reducing the time (by around 80%) it takes an agent to do call wrap-up. AND for those that say their agents don't spend time doing call wrap-up, I think you are denying reality. I've seen call wrap-up actually take place during the current call and even during the next call ("please hold whilst I look up that information for you"). Call wrap involves making notes during the call so your agents remember what they did - which is incredibly ironic since your agents are using a computer - and your computer is pretty good at remembering things for itself!

And this is where the first trick comes in. Simply use OpenSpan's desktop automation to teach the computer to remember, during the call what the agent is doing - EXACTLY, down to the last click / field change / credit / debit etc., across all the apps they use and feed that info into the right notes field instantly. 100% accurate and it won't forget!

I told you. It really is that simple. Our customers swear by it.

How OpenSpan changes the game for a BPO!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:22:00 +0000

It is well understood, that some of the best outsourcers in the world, not only just take on their call center customers work (plus front and back office) but they take it on so they can do a better job than the customer themselves. Sometimes this is simply through economies of scale (doing it cheaper / onshore or offshore). Sometimes it's because the BPO has the depth/breadth of experience of that customers sector, across their entire peers. Lets be honest, if you are the outsourcer of a telecoms company, it's likely you could add significant value (best practices) to another telecoms companies outsourced call center too.

In order to learn, scale up and deploy, the BPO has to make a huge commitment to their new customers (infrastructure, hiring, training). After all, they need to be great out of the gate. For an outsourcer, it doesn't make sense to take on new customers without at least a 2-3 year commitment and probably more in many cases. However, in return, the BPO is often guaranteed to be paid, say, a price per minute for taking call center calls or doing back office work.

This has worked for years and the BPO's have more often than not, delivered great value to their customers. However, once the BPO model has been established for a customer, when contracts become due, the competitive market for BPO's is hot. At that point. smart customers have been covering their bets and signing up more BPO's to outsource their call center seats to (spread risk). This is good in many ways for the customer since they can quickly add/remove seats from the best/worst performing BPO's (Customer service, SLA's etc.,). There are many other relevant angles for the BPO to gain more seats and the customers and BPO's are often trying outsmart each other to ensure they get the very best service at the very best price.

And that's the key - doesn't that last sentence "best service at best price" sound like a conflict to you? Of course it is.

What OpenSpan has seen over the last 4 years as a vendor to many of the worlds largest BPO's is that this game is changing. The customers are coming to the BPO's and are now asking them to improve productivity which in turn would mean less business to the BPO. Again the conflict. Why would a BPO be incentivised to reduce the number of minutes it takes to deal with a call in a call center if the BPO is paid by the minute? Now the BPO's are fighting back with OpenSpan. OpenSpan is a global leader in Desktop Automation and Desktop Analytics which enables Call Center agents and Back Office workers to perform significantly faster and much more accurately.

The BPO's are now leading with OpenSpan to offer their customers choices. If the outsourcer works uses OpenSpan to improve the process, the outsourcer wants to share in the productivity gains. Customers love it. It's a win/win. Outsourcers using OpenSpan are able to compete with a productivity improvement story against those outsourcers not using OpenSpan. Since OpenSpan is already used by over 250,000 call center agents across some of the worlds largest banks and telecomms call centers, it is THE proven and accepted technology to drive up productivity. OpenSpan Desktop Automation is used by more BPO's in the world, than any other desktop productivity tool, and as more and more of the "pay-per-minute" contracts come up for grabs across the very competitive BPO market, OpenSpan's BPO's are not only keeping the customers they already have, but using OpenSpan to win more customers and more seats than their peers.

Check it out, www.openspan.com

Is cutting call center AHT a good thing?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:53:00 +0000

A few years ago, I was telling a prospect about how OpenSpan's Desktop Automation technology can cut AHT in their call center. However, their response made me take a step back; They said, "we don't want to reduce AHT, we want to focus on customer experience and cutting AHT doesn't necessarily do that".

Hard to argue with that but this was a big part of my sales pitch. Sure we don't just cut AHT but what's the best angle to take going forward with my pitch. It got me thinking. Our customer service agents spend all day on the phone, at their desktop, they use the computer to help them during the call but the truth is, they spend the time typing into the computer what they need to get done. They spend hours doing this during the day, many minutes during each call is spent navigating the multiple screens, searching, duplicating the same things over and over using rules they learnt in training and hoping they don't make mistakes. Why are they doing this stuff? The desktop computer is a powerful beast and yet the agents do things it should be doing. They waste time doing lookups, searches, rekeying etc., and slow the call down and extend AHT. This often leads to poor customer service - especially if the caller is in a hurry!

Then it came to me. Just because we don't want to cut AHT, does not mean our agents should be wasting time on the call, doing things the computer should be doing. The average time they waste on each call is huge. If you could cut out the waste, your call center can choose to use the time saved towards cutting AHT or use the time to have a better customer experience. This is when I came up with a new acronym for the Call Center - AWT (Average Wasted Time). AWT should be reduced or eliminated on every call because it's pure waste. You are paying people to do things they simply should not be doing - and people are your biggest cost, right?

So now, when I talk to prospects about how Desktop Automation can save millions of dollars a year, I don't focus on AHT unless that's what they want - I focus on AWT - because EVERYONE wants that.

Check out our quick 3 min videos on What is OpenSpan - and Does this remind you of you

Why we LOVE Automation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 18:26:00 +0000

You have to love Automation

When people and technology meet there's one thing we humans all have in common; we hate wasting time doing stuff that our computers should be doing for us.

It struck me yesterday, when I got my new Samsung Galaxy S III phone (way cool btw), just how far we have come. After I activated the phone, I logged into my Google account and within 15 minutes it had automatically;

Downloaded all the apps I had download over the prior 2 years onto my old Droid X
Downloaded and configured ALL wifi and internet settings for home and office
Download and configured all GMAIL, Exchange mail, contacts, calendars and tasks
Restored all my bookmarks and phone favorites
and was ready to go as my replacement phone

We can all remember when something like this would takes hours, sometimes days, just to resync a phone to be like our old one.

We take it for Granted, that someone at, in my case Google, wrote some automation tools that would save whatever we do on one Google device, to a central place so it would make moving to the next device a breeze. Some might not call this automation! I guess it could be called backup/restore or synching but the truth is, it automated what I used to do so I don't have to do it any more.

Remember when you would get an email on your smart phone with a phone number in it and you had to write down that number just so as you could retype it in the phone app and press send (sometimes still faster than copy and paste)? Nowadays you just click the phone number in the smart phone email and the inbuilt automation detects it's a number and sends it over to the phone app and dials it for you (doesn't work for international numbers but heh, you can't have it all).

Now turn for just a moment to the most costly part of any enterprise; PEOPLE. What do our people spend their time doing all day? For many companies, call centers, back office, task workers etc., our people sit at a desktop computer; This is WHERE PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY meet. Why do our people spend their time, day in, day out, doing things on their computer that the computer could and should be doing for them. Some examples;

Updating 3 different systems with an address change (15 copy/pastes)
Taking an order and updating the delivery system with a date and then sending an email confirmation to the customer to confirm
Typing in notes at the end of a call or task (ironically telling the computer what they just did)
Traversing through spreadsheets, looking up the internet for each customer id and typing results back into the spreadsheet
Looking up some value(s) on the system, applying a rule (they've been trained on) and determine what to say to the customer
Searching 4 systems looking for some notes from the previous call/chat/email/tweet
Forgetting to check "account on hold" before booking an engineer site visit

How awesome would it be if you could automate all this work? That's where Desktop Automation from OpenSpan comes in. You can quite literally automate any of these steps (where people and technology meet) so all you leave your costly employees to do is to focus on the customer or key parts of the task. Automation is key to our lives. It saves us not just fractions of a percent in time and money but 10's and sometimes (as in my Phone migration), 100's of percent. Check it out. Where people and technology meet

OpenSpan Global Presence

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:49:00 +0000

Well, I racked up more air miles last year than I care to think and I've now just returned from another 2 week tour of the Middle East and Asia. Phew, what time zone and I am now?

I am very lucky though. I get to see our customers, prospects and partners first hand and nothing pleases me more than the close interactions we have them all. When a customer tells you, "this is how you've helped us" or "this is how much we saved using OpenSpan", it's priceless. When a partner takes you on a tour of some of the largest and advanced call centers in the world, you are enlightened. I've always loved presenting and demonstrating OpenSpan. Why? Well, it's because it's so visual and so obvious in the first 5 minutes what we can do to help, we quickly move from demonstration to POC in a matter of weeks. I love it. And then those prospects become the next set of successful customers for my next trip so we can share even more insights together.

I know this all sounds like 101 in the life cycle of a software vendor and I suppose it is. BUT, as we announced our 2011 achievements last month, the number of wins and customer successes is growing exponentially, it is no wonder then, I enjoy what I do, circumnavigating the globe virtually every other month, seeing this success, first hand. Love it.