BIZTECH: How can you achieve that automation without employees and customers feeling like they’re just talking to a robot or a screen?
Wright: I think there’s a lot of elements of hyperautomation from things that happen in the background. So, you may be chatting with an agent or you may be chatting with a person. And as that information is entered, the system establishes what kind of issue it is, and it does the categorization and prioritization. That’s where you start to get automation that’s effectively invisible, where the user doesn’t even realize it’s happening.
Tasks that happen frequently or are always done the same way are candidates for this type of technology, because no one wants to be contacted again for a password reset or anything like that. Those things that are repetitive or mundane, they are the first things to be targeted. The next thing I see customers do after that is things that are incredibly complex, things where it’s really likely to go wrong. Those are probably the two targets – the simplistic and doable and the incredibly complex are two goals that people go for.
BIZTECH: How does hyperautomation specifically benefit IT employees?
Wright: From their perspective, it can do anything from integration, orchestration, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence or machine learning. It might be doing things like predictive event management. If you have enough data, you can say, “Hey, I’ve seen this system of events happen. I’m pretty confident that within the next six hours, you’re going to see this event happen.” That is the concept of predictive events management. Another thing you can use is predictive analytics. If you set key performance indicators you want to achieve, you can use predictive analytics to predict whether you’ll hit those KPIs. And if you don’t want to, what can you do to achieve it?
The next stage after that is what is called prescriptive AI. You don’t just say, “Hey, I’m convinced this event is going to happen in the next six hours.” You have a system that says, “And this event has happened 7,000 times before. These are the 10 ways we’ve fixed it, and this way is the most successful, so I’d recommend this as the first solution you try.” That’s prescriptive AI, where you don’t just predict the problem, you prescribe the solution that goes with it.
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BIZTECH: In terms of employee retention, what are some of the biggest trends you’re seeing?
Wright: I think it used to be about the benefits, what you were going to give people, and all those benefits were centered around the office. When you don’t have people in the office, you need a new set of benefits. Today, we see people focusing on flexibility and experience. What people want is the ability to work how, when and where they want to work. Here at this location, I may need to connect from a mobile device. From home, I might want to go for a web client. Or, I might want to collect a conversation. People are looking to expand the employee experience to give people freedom of choice.
The second element goes back to what we said at the beginning about understanding what people do, because it allows you to build trust. And the biggest thing I noticed when we got into a work from home scenario was a complete lack of trust. People just aren’t sure what people are doing. So, yes, it’s about giving people the freedom to work. Then the second element is about making it as easy as possible to get things done.
BIZTECH: All right. I feel like the offboarding process is something that is often overlooked when we talk about employee retention. Can you talk a little bit about its significance?
Wright: I think it’s important to have a record of why people choose to leave a company. So being able to go through and classify that, being able to analyze that and understand what the reasons are behind people leaving allows you to see what you need to address. When you look generally at companies, most people leave because they don’t believe they have opportunities for career advancement. So how do you make sure you deal with that?
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BIZTECH: This employee experience is very similar to the customer experience. In what ways are they the same, and what are some of the key differences between the employee experience you’re trying to build and the customer experience?
Wright: From the perspective of how it feels to use a system, we want to keep them the same. You want to have something that is easy to use and that you don’t have to train to use. There is more complexity on the customer service side. What used to happen with customer service is you have an issue, and all you want to do is eliminate the issue, make the customer happy again. Now, people have learned from what IT people have done — if I have a customer with an issue, I can solve it, but can I find out what the root of the issue is? Because what you want to do is prevent future issues from happening and get that customer centricity. This is something that happens on the employee side but more often on the customer side. When a customer engages, you want to know what products the customer owns, what the customer’s demographics are — maybe even what sentiments the customer has — to understand how you can address that from a customer service perspective.