The Rise of Bionic Automation

“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.