Following the latest trends technology trends, it is clear that chatbots and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are two of the most popular and widely implemented technologies being used by companies today.
Chatbots, specifically are used on a huge scale mainly thanks to their ability to solve many problems relating to customer service queries and waiting times etc. RPA on the other hand is often used to automate the business processes running in the background to reduce manual, tedious tasks associated as part of the process.
RPA – continuing to grow
Gartner’s latest report suggests RPA software spending will total $2.4 billion by 2022; this is up from $1.3 billion at the end of 2019. With figures such as these, it is obvious businesses confidence in the technology is continuing to grow as successful RPA deployments persist to show excellent ROI results.
A lot of the success that RPA providers have seen over the last few years is thanks to techs ability to implement it on top of existing IT infrastructures. Adding an RPA solution does not require a business to change their existing systems. Once business owners came to this realisation, it became a no brainer and the solution is now a staple of many businesses processes.
Additionally, RPA is appealing due to its flexibility. It is capable of being moulded to fit changing situations and can quickly learn and adapt to new more advanced processes.
Merging chatbots and RPA together
Chatbots work by engaging with customers or employees to try and solve their queries by simulating human conversations. The aim of chatbots is to reduce the need for human intervention in areas such as customer service. Despite being able to appease many low-level queries, chatbots do reach their limit when questions become more complex which has consequently led to criticism of many that have been implemented.
This is where RPA can come in handy. Integrating RPA into chatbots can provide a number of benefits, mainly due to the fact that RPA bots can navigate through legacy systems that may not have modern application programming interfaces. Consequently, RPA can enable chatbots to retrieve information from these legacy systems which allows them to deal with more complex queries quicker.
The combination works both ways as with the integration, chatbots can trigger the RPA bot to complete routine repetitive tasks meaning the request would not have to be pushed through to a human staff member.
By having such capabilities, business owners can have confidence that their customers are being dealt with accurately and quickly while also allowing team members to focus on high-level issues. As a result, both the customer and employee experience is improved while business resources are spread more efficiently.
Moving forward
As with most technology, the uses and capabilities are constantly evolving. The great thing about the chatbot and RPA combination is that they complement each other. What is meant by this is that chatbots need RPA to be able to process the more complex and detailed challenges. While RPA needs the help of a conversational basis to advance its own automation.
In knowing these facts, it is clear that the scope for chatbots to develop is huge. Businesses in this day and age need a form of automation to stand out and attract consumers that are becoming more and more impatient. Implementing an intelligent chatbot with RPA that can deal with a complex end-to-end customer query will only encourage customers to return.
If you would like to find out more about how ABP can help your business on your automation journey, please get in touch via our contact details on our website.