Courtesy of UiPath's Brad Beumer & Element Blue's 'Joe Nieto' below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Improving the Customer Experience with Automation' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at the Customer Experience Excellence Virtual Conference.

Session Information:

Improving the Customer Experience with Automation

Transform your customer’s experience with end-to-end automation that goes beyond the contact center. Whether a customer seeks help online, in a store or branch office, or with your back office staff, UiPath enables organizations across industries to automate the entire customer journey.

Join Brad Beumer and UiPath customers as they discuss the following: 

• Zero-touch customer experience to reduce call volume and improve first contact resolution 
• Automate follow-ups and handoffs to decrease customer wait times and improve customer satisfaction
• Gain insights with customer journey analytics

Session Transcript:

We have Brad Beamer and Joe Nieto.

Welcome, welcome.

I'll just give you a brief background of these two exceptional individuals.

Brad is the, she acts and contacts center lead of Americans at UI path.

He's UI path, Customer Service and Contact Center of Practice, she's led that for the Americans to evangelize UI path platform for customer experience and Contact Center automation.

He's built two CRM consulting practices from the ground up. Wow, that's amazing.

Leading strategic direction, client acquisition, people development and solution delivery, It's like architecture and delivery, technical delivery of technical, customer engagement, and experience solutions for leading global organizations.

Very tenured getting some expertise here.

Then we have Joe down in Houston.

My favorite, southern city, uh, director of customer customer engagement, health sciences, beyond RPA, and cognitive automation.

Joh really cares about the impact that his work has on the world and is passionate about working at the intersection of emerging technologies and fixing the problems that matter, love it.

Joe enjoys leading the vision and brings trinh transformative, thinking to his clients. He is a proven leader who empowers this team to achieve excellence.

Joe has experienced to help his clients connect the dots by constantly keeping a pulse on their industry, The impacts and changes that put them on the path of success.

So welcome, Brad, and Joe.

I look forward to an incredible presentation.

It's all yours.

Alright, thanks Jen. We're really excited to be here. And to be talking today about, really, kinda being the wrap up here, around how you can use automation, right, UI path automation to help, improve customer experience. That's topic, you know, as you talk about your career debt reduction, you know, Joe and I are both very passionate about. So, we're really looking forward to discussing this. Let's see what the audience today.

Our agenda is pretty simple. I'm gonna start off talking a little bit about something that's new for us, that We haven't really talked about a lot, but something we call the honeycomb effect with an iPad, and then we're going to talk about, I know you don't want our abstract. We talked about customer stories, so, we're gonna focus on something yet. And some snippets of customer stories, along with how UI path really helps around automation, helps improve customer experience. And I'm just going to wrap things up. He's going to tell us he's going to be the exciting part of the presentation today, which is going to be around the customer story and how they're using chatbots, conversational AI, technologies to help hospital, network, improve health outcomes. So we're really excited to learn to learn more about that.

So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into things.

As I was starting to think about how we're going to talk about this idea of the Honeycomb effect today, something that came in to kinda came up this week, was our CFO was presenting to that group of analysts. And he was talking about how our top customers started back many, many years ago with UI Path, and maybe they started in just one specific line of business, such as finance and accounting, maybe IT or legal, maybe in the contact center. And then, how, over the years, I've seen value in have been able to, over the quarters and years, they've been able to see value and expand into other parts of the business, because of these linkages between those different lines of businesses and especially how automation can help with those linkages.

So, for contact center, what this might mean is a lot of times we think of using attended robots or automation to help a contact center agent with things like taking away all the keyboard strokes that they might have to remember or memorize copying pasting. Those mundane tasks that they have during a call that also requires them to maybe put a customer on older, maybe lack of talk, talk about.

A lot of that activity is what a robot robot can help with a robot could do so that way, the patron, of course, can talk to the customer, But one area that we see, especially now, I would say, a lot of customers, I was talking about customers starting with engagement, A lot of customers I talked to you now, especially over the past 3 to 6 months.

Want to start off with Omni channel or how do we provide new self-service capabilities to improve the customer experience?

So, this might be, for example, F, customer, like ours, if I serve her, has automated, essentially, 10000, credit card debit card card reload order request per day, Not per month, per week, quarter per day, by using an unintended robot, what UI path, and handing that off to her?

Handing those transactions off to an unintended robot, instead of them going to an agent, so, why customers are, looking at, how can they improve self-service, and also provide a consistent self-service experience.

And that's a key problem that we help solve here in this omnichannel omni channel code that you see on the screen.

Now, the other part that comes up more and more often is how can you help with voice of the customer? We get create surveys, results from Battalion Qualtrics and similar organizations. Maybe you're just sending out a simple NPS survey. Maybe your customer has said that they're not happy. So how does that turn into a ticket, gets assigned to someone, or a case that gets assigned to someone, if you can identify who they are, set, where you can start to be proactively worked. And maybe, in some cases, the robot can actually start working on that. So, how do you take that information that you're soliciting from customers, they spend the time to respond to a survey. How do you take action on that?

Oftentimes, automation, robots can help put those, those actions Likewise With customer experience analytics, a lot of our customers, we talked a lot of our Contact center, customers and Business Process, Outsource partners and others are implementing tools, I call mine or one of our partners for customer, for post call analytics.

Well, those post call analytics. The information you get, such as, maybe a training, maybe an agent, needs some additional training.

Actually scheduling that training into a learning management system.

Scheduling the time off and workforce management that are blocking the time and workforce management. Maybe blocking the time on their calendar. Scheduling a follow up with that agent supervisor. Those are all activities that a robot can do. So handling, having a robot handle, or an automation handle, some of the CX analytics activities.

And by the way, I'm talking about postcard that also applies to, also applies to real-time analytics to. So if there's a next, best action, For example, from a partner like the crust AI, those actions can actually be handed off to a robot to go to go and do. So, maybe fulfilling that next best offer, or taking that next best action, the robot can do instead of the agent having to do it.

So I spent a lot of time talking about the contact center piece, you're probably wondering, well, what about the other line of business? Where do they fit in here? So it's actually pretty interesting because we've got some good customer examples here.

So on the logistics side or supply chain side with logistics, we have a global retailer and that global retailer has its own trucking fleet. So they are getting goods from 1 to 1 store, to another store, from a distribution warehouse out to a store, and they also have third party or independent trucking firms.

Well, one of the challenges they have is that they have a 24 by 7, 365 staff that's on call taking to take updates from these truckers. For example, if the runtime, if there are maybe a third delayed that, needs to feed into the just in time logistics, supply, chain, warehouse management system, and other things, so right. Now, an agent has to do all that well.

You could grow on an app to help with that, but are to have to have these drivers started started started update their status.

But then that's a huge organization change human change management problem in terms of, how do you get your own fleet of truckers, how to get independent trucker's to be able to start to do something different. So instead of doing that, you're able to truck.

Drivers are actually able to still use a phone call, call into the phone system, Give the phone system the exact same information, and then the phone system hands off to a robot to do all the work that the agent used to do.

So, at least the staff doesn't need to be there to help with help with, to help with those calls.

If they need to talk to an agent, There's still a warm transfer there from from self-service to over two over to an agent, but the key is a big reduction.

And the amount of people that, you need to be able to get.

Those status updates and you didn't have to make a big change on the, on, the, on the drivers, are still able to do things the way they're used to.

So another area where we see us, Helpdesk, IT service, IT helpdesk, so we have some customers that will actually try or prototype automation ideas in their helpdesk before rolling them out to their contact center. So, some of these organizations have tens of thousands of agents. So, sometimes you want to, maybe, maybe push something out in your IT helpdesk, like Africa Work Automation, or maybe it's an automation that involves speech to text, and sentiment analysis before rolling it out.

And then we have other cases where, where we have Contact Center automations started or automation that started in the contact center. Then the helpdesk said, Hey, we'd like to have that automation, too.

We have a telecommunications client that does Internet troubleshooting for them.

They have agents to help with troubleshooting problems.

An interesting part of this is, if a customer is past due on their bill, maybe it's automatic payment, maybe their credit card, for whatever, reason the number changed or something like that.

The agent becomes somewhat of a collections agents are helping to turn in order in the cache. By by the first step is not so much to troubleshoot the problem, but actually to get the customers new payment details. We have other customers and the distribution space that have fairly complex contracts. So these contracts for further largest customers are often unique to that customer. So, went here.

When I went out when a customer calls into place, a new order, or maybe a re-order, that agent become someone who is actually helping to translate those terms and conditions.

Finally, last, but certainly not least, is on the HR side.

So, being able to use conversational AI and chatbots to help offer recruiting capability.

So, this is something that one of our customers are looking at in terms of, how do you here's a chatbot to help a potential candidate find a position. Find the recruiter purpose for the position, and maybe even schedule time on that, recruiters calendar. So, all that happens automatically, through the chatbot.

Working together with working with UI path robot. We're gonna talk a lot more about that later on, Somebody got too much detail there.

The last part is, the Department of Commerce did a great webinar with us just a few weeks ago to talk about how they use UI path in their HR Contact center, or ... for some of their HR activities, such robots working together with HR for, for Employee Relations. So when we look at all this, this is what we really think of as a side effect. When you maybe start with one area that we can use cases and other areas, and it just tends to expand out through, through Thursday through all the different lines of business.

Now, we're here to talk a little bit more today about, of course, customer experience and the contact center, first part is omni channel. So, how can we help with self-service? So, and so, when we talk about omnichannel and, maybe customer starting out on a website, look for a product, Then, maybe they start a chatbot session. That chatbot may start off as automated chatbot, together with the UI path robot, and the chatbot tool, that maybe, at some point, they decide, Hey, you know, I'd like to talk to someone.

Well, each one of those transitions, from the website, to the chatbot, to maybe a live person on a phone call, there should be seamless. Customer shouldn't have to start over again and again.

Each time. That's a key problem.

A key challenge that we have solved it, and you can probably think of brands that you may be bought from are, or work with today. And sometimes that can be a little disjointed. So, we're trying part of our story, around being able to help improve customer experience around, how do we make that journey less, help make it less disjointed?

We have a large regional banking customer here and here in the US, that uses the UI path robot together with one of our partners, Amazon Connect two, to provide self-service for a lot of high volume, low complexity transactions, these may be things like Account unlocks, password reset for, for the mobile banking application, international travel, soldier traveling from one. You're traveling out of the country. You usually need unlocker your credit card, and sure that works for that, for that trip to Paris when we are able to go back to Paris.

Another similar transactions, so they reported back at that, this helped their call deflection rates by about 30%, but also helps with that seamless transition over to the agent.

And when you're on the agent's desk, some of the key things that we like to be able to provide a single single view of the customer, so. That way the agent isn't having to go around trying to find information about the customer and a lot of different systems.

And how does that robot really help throughout the, throughout the call.

And these may be things like just helping with automating, automating into certain screens, the command. So keystrokes, et cetera. Automating after cold work.

Maybe helping an NHS start their day, or in their day are going to break several customers here in the space that are, that have early for reported, very various benefits, but you can see here on the screen, average handle time reduction of 40%. First, contact resolution rates, increasing a 10%, and decreasing at training time. By 20%, we have a Customer, Australia Digital Health Authority, that reported that their training time actually decreased by almost 50%, 49.6%.

By using UI past, that means just by taking away a lot of those keystrokes commands and things that an agent needs to know.

Taking that out of the training means that you didn't have to spend as much time training the agent, or what I sometimes say more often, as at training time, gets repurposed for soft skills, rather than training on current skills.

A few of the other areas here, It's just, we've already talked about some of these forces that customer, as how to use the robot to help with those follow ups.

And then, on the customer experience analytics, the robot could actually be that next best action, well, the follow up for for quality assurance review.

Yeah.

All right, Jim, we've got our first poll. I've done, I've done enough talking. Let's get the audience engage chair.

Launch this, OK, There it goes.

So, the first question is, What are your top customer experience improvement priorities?

Please select one, Add self-service capabilities to increase agent productivity, three, improve agent soft skills and engagement.

All of the above is the fourth, and the fifth is rehab. Other improvement priorities.

So, let's see.

Can everybody see the poll?

Collecting responses, it says.

Mmm hmm.

So, anything else you had to add, Brad?

Most of them are coming in that adds self-service capabilities at 50%, 50%, let's say, nothing for the second and third right now, 30 some percent for all of the above, 17%.

Got it. While the certainly the fifth, I think you said 58% for self-service, that's pretty consistent with what I've seen, and speaking with customers and partners, and some of our partners on it. On a daily basis. That's a, That's a key priority. That's a key priority. Right now, is how do you help customers do more through self-service?

I think the reason for that is that this is one of the rare win wins where by providing more self-service options, consistent self-service options.

It actually increases our customer satisfaction, while also helping the business lower cost, because it's usually much cheaper to do Turk to perform a transaction and then a self-service channel versus with a call to an agent or an e-mail to an agent.

Great, so, you can see the poll results there, right, Brad?

I cannot, but I think I've got the general idea, OK, great.

Closed out the poll.

So, I think you can go on.

All right.

Because it's just confirming, you can see my screen.

Pulse still shelling drawing. There we go. There we go. OK, OK, very good. Thank you.

So the next part I want to talk about a little bit is how does the UI path platform help with all those things we were just talking about? So oftentimes, we tend to think of robots as unintended robots. So he's robots that run on their own without. a person.

Should be more for the self-service are omnichannel capabilities were talking about earlier. And you might have attended robots as well. So we have both varieties. We think that this is really important, especially for being able to provide that exceptional customer experience. Because oftentimes, there's a handoff from an unintended robot to an attendant or to an agent, maybe to someone in the back office, which might be an unintended or attended robot.

But, the robots aren't, we feel like there's for a platform, especially for customer experience, but deliver it truly exceptional customer experience. You need to have quick time to value.

And, you need to have tools supporting those robots, So, discover tools, or schools to help you discover automations. Tools that help you build those automations. Whether you're a non developer or a coder.

All the same tools to help you manage and govern those robots. What happens? How do you tell if your robots are being used?

What happens if one robot is functioning properly, being able to, to be able to fix those updates? And, then, finally, how do you engage with your robots, do more than just baby.

Simple interface: How do you provide complex user interfaces for maybe, simple ones through conversational AI and chatbot tools?

So, these are free tools, like, you can see some of the different products on the UI, On the screen here, from UI path, that help with these areas. I'm going to talk more about these in a second, so we're just going to go through and build this out. But when we look at the different tools here, and we talk about Discover.

So oftentimes, we think of discovery tools as being able to help us discover automation opportunities.

But for customer experience in contact center, we actually have customers that use us for, for example, or task capture tool for time and motion studies, task ..., for things like time and motion study. So I used to spend when I first started out in the space, I spent a lot of time, sometimes weeks when I was a consultant.

I'm just trying to gather information about how long agents were spending on certain processes and steps and then documenting that.

Well, those tools actually automate a lot of that down to what used to take me weeks, down to maybe just a few minutes or hours.

But the other part here is that once you've used task money or task mining tool, you can actually discover what your best agents are doing. And how are they?

What are they doing differently that's making them at that top level, at the top tier.

The other interesting part is, once you've discovered who your best agents are and what they're doing, what you mean, we're gonna get our, but discover what they're doing, that's maybe different Can also automatically document that. So we have a customer in the utility space that's actually used, our task capture, told the document over.

a great document. Over 200. Standard doctor operating procedures and training information that goes out to their agent agents, a process that they felt would have taken them easily over a year of a person's time.

Maybe not a full year in terms of length, but a, you're a person times number of hours. Down to just a few weeks through, automating that process with these tools. The last part is around customer journey, customer journey analytics, or process mining tool.

If you have phone box, while everybody has these, you have phone logs, website logs, maybe chatbot logs, if you've rolled out chatbots, e-mail logs, and others, right?

So, we can actually ingest those logs into our tool to help you start to analyze and look at, get an idea of what your customer journey might look like.

That might help you identify where customer pain points are, and how you might be able to use automation or other solutions to help fix those pain points. So, that's to discover side. Now, I mentioned building one of the key parts Here are the key things. When I, when I first started out with build a lot of custom solutions, we had to take agents off the floor to help us with focus groups and help walk us through the process and other things, but what happened up here and discover?

So we've actually already documented.

The process from the best agents have already documented the process, so that documentation can actually be fed right into UI Path Studio. So that way, you don't have to take those agents off the floor, especially right now. Because I know it's hard to find contact center agents, and a lot of contexts, our customers I talk to, are understaffed, and maybe a little overwhelmed. So when you're rolling out automations one to help fix that problem, you don't want to exasperate exacerbated by having to pull people off the phone calls and e-mails, et cetera.

Tools, I mean, again, are for developers and developers alike.

But the Integrates the Way UI Path works, where robots work is, that we can integrate with just about anything.

And we also try to make it really easy and configurable, to be able to integrate with anything, and to be able to pull those integrations together into a workflow. We said, let's, what can we do to take that?

To the next step? What can we do to take it a step further? So we created a marketplace with several integrations for things like Amazon Connect and eight other AWS services, Twilio, Genesis, Salesforce. You see a few others here on the screen.

Doesn't mean those are the only solutions that we work with, actually, can work with just about anything, But we built connectors to help make it all that much faster for you to achieve target value by creating those connectors and doing some of the plumbing to help to help integrate them into your, enter your process flows.

You know, I think, when it comes to work from home agents, I think our Citrix Integration, a lot of customers that I talk to deploy their, their their applications through a VDI solution like Citrix or others. I think some of our integration capabilities there, or help us stand out, but also, how to use AI centered.

How do you leverage newer technology to help her out e-mails intelligently so that it just doesn't go to an agent, the agent has to try to figure out what's going on. Your route it to the right person. Maybe you can actually use a robot to respond to the customer, to the customer's initial request. Text summarization. So we can collect a lot of data for Africa Workspace.

if it's 5000, that's 5000 characters, nobody's ever going to read it. So how do you get that 5000 characters, the key points from those characters down to 200 or 250 that someone can easily read when they open a ticket for, for a follow up call?

one that comes up a lot is, how are you doing your IVR testing? Especially?

if you're heading conversational AI and natural language processing and understanding other tools, those can go off the rails, but if you have automated testing, that helps make sure that, it helps make sure that those, that AI is, is doing what you want it to do.

The last part here is, How do you create a true single view of the customer? So we have low code, plus RPA tools to help bring those together. And a few others that you see there, too. But we're going to talk a little bit more in just a good transition, is, how can you use RPA together with a chatbot to help to help also boosts your customer experience? This is for Joe is going to come in to talk a little bit more about that. But, before we go there, I just want to, one of the big questions I get, as: well, we have a chatbot, but why would we, at RPA, why would we at UI path, together with our chatbot tool?

And the answer is actually quite, quite straightforward.

So chatbots are very good at question and answers, FAQ type stuff. Sometimes, they have AI capabilities, but what they're not very good at. There's oftentimes integrating into your backend systems, and those backend systems that may or may not have an API, oftentimes don't have an API.

And then, creating a, following, a process flow, for example, maybe creating a ticket in the CRM, or a case in the CRM. Updating the order entry system with the ticket number.

Maybe pulling out a shipping status for shipping, a tracking number out of the order system.

Going in pulling, not tracking number and putting it into FedEx or UPS or some other third party logistics provider site. And then ultimately, getting shipping status, maybe updating the ticket, maybe even if a customer with that information. So that flow, there when it crossed APIs. You guys, you have different applications. That's where UI path really helps chatbots, is to be able to do more than that in some of those examples. So, with that, I think we've got one more poll question that we want to ask around technology. So, Jim, I'm going to hand it back over to you to do the poll question.

Then, we're going to hand things over to Jodi.

Talk about chatbots.

Great brand, so the poll question is, what are your top customer experience, technology investment areas?

Number one is conversational AI speech analytics.

Number two is providing agents at 360, degree view of the customers, Number three, web and mobile IO updates. Number four, Contact center as a service.

Number five, we are making investments and all of these.

So we have a lot for, the middle one is the web and mobile updates Coming in, and the second and third are conversational AI and speech analytics and contact center as a service are tied right now and we want to close it out.

Kind of rich cross-section. Oh, wow. We've got a bunch of new ones coming in. Let's see.

Web and mobile was number one.

And everything else is, is showing.

Yeah, so web and mobile updates at 6.4%.

Conversational AI at 18 and then providing agents a 360 view and contact Center as a services tide.

Um, and there's nobody who said they're making investments in all of these, OK? I would have thought conversational AI might, might have been a little bit higher, just based on some of the customers that I talk to. But, there is a conversational AI play together with web and mobile updates. Because a lot of, a lot of the, some of the chatbot, AI solutions that we're deploying, actually, also get deployed through through web, and also through, through mobile.

So, with that, Joe, I'm going to hand things over to you, so that way, we can start to talk about the customer. Which I think, is what most folks wanted to wanted to hear about, so. enough of me talking. And Joe, over to you to tell us what, on everybody wanted to, what I wanted to hear.

All right, Thank you, everyone. Well, hello everybody. It's a, it's a wonderful opportunity to sit down and talk to you guys about.

Some particular uses that we're doing with both.

um, UI path and, Oh my goodness, I lost my notes here.

UI passenger, a little bit of promise you, I won't do a lot of slides about us, but we've been in healthcare for quite a bit, and some are some of the customers that we work with.

Some of the different hospitals.

Um, am I supposed to change the slide?

I'll change the site.

Thanks, OK.

Yeah, you can kinda advance.

So, um, so we've been working in and out of chatbots for, for quite a bit here, and are, of course, mentioned in our background is in healthcare.

In this kind of situation where we're doing a presentation, uh, you know, over, I'm used to talking in front of people.

And here we are, I mean, multiple cameras, a little dot here.

So you can imagine from the from the patient side meeting with a provider and you go for your telomeres.

And you're staring needed a blank screen or a logo, and it says your provider will be with you shortly.

You know, if you're there for five minutes, 10 minutes you start thinking Geeze does. My is my camera work in Is my microphone working? Can anybody see me and hear me? Does anybody know I'm here?

So we built some chatbots around to address those kinds of needs.

We do some video testing. We do some audio testing.

We build that comfort level with the patient before they go into into their encounter.

Can you hit slide?

There we go.

And so, the products we worked with were always in and out of Cerner, Epic.

We do a lot of portal work, and we, we build a lot of automations that are specifically for healthcare.

Next slide.

All right, so today our compensation is really going to be about a particular hospital.

I'm going to lay out the business case because there's this a very key things that are kind of important, hospitals being challenged with an influx of covert patients.

It's cupboards everywhere, but it has some, has some new changes because a hospital's revenue is really coming from surgeries, repetitive processes. You know, people come in for physical therapy, chemo treatments.

That's that's. You know, that's kinda what the revenue is. So when you have something like co vetted, it's kind of a disrupter.

And so hospitals have to work, or have to work through that.

They're also addressing staff shortages, you know, covered, of course, but there's a lot of different reasons pick one.

People are retiring, and people are suffering from burnout, cov.

It is, is having people work, tons of different hours, there's competition for skills, are competition for nurses.

And so, they needed a way to kind of address some of those shortages.

Standardization of process, um, with covidien telemedicine last year, it really, really blew up, and so, we had to do what we could as quickly as possible.

And when you're in that kind of mode, you develop processes that, and maybe they're not the best.

And you have these little, these little pockets.

I should say, a clinic will do something in one way, and another clinic will do something a little different.

And so, you're not really standardized in the process.

The patient doesn't have the same experience going from one clinic to another.

And, you know, there might be some compliance issues because things get done in a hurry.

Um, we had so many people to address that language and cultural barriers became an issue.

And so we had to address some of that competition and ranking Here in the States, you kind of have a choice to where you can go for treatment surgery, So hospitals are really keen on making sure that that they're ranked as high as possible because they're the average consumer will do.

Especially if it's A elective surgery.

Or a process that they have several options available.

I live in Houston, we have the medical center, and we have tons of hospitals, and they can all treat you.

But you want to go with the best experience. You want to make sure your insurance company takes it.

Um, and with, with everything, whenever there's a crisis, there's an opportunity.

two, to do some re engineering to do some innovation.

It kinda improve the customer. Or the patient experience.

Next slide, please.

All right. So not really here to sell your software.

But I will tell you from our decision process why we went with UI path and and druid.

So, UI path is easy.

They have a wide suite of tools that are available, easy management and deployment of automations. If you work in and out of healthcare, you know that it's very stringent.

We have committees that manage the deployment, the life cycle, when things get moved down to production, because, you know, security is a huge, huge deal.

And UI path has wonderful set of tools that help us kinda with, with, with that process.

Performance and metric tracking.

Huge, it's a huge winner for, for us in healthcare, because we are measuring our effectivity.

We have several measurements, kinda youth that are kind of unique to healthcare, in terms of, we measure, when patients come in and when they go out, how quick we can turn to beds, average time, people come back for follow ups.

Um, there's, there's just a ton of measurement to go there.

Of course, we needed to be scalable. We started small.

Now, we've, at this point in time, we will probably be about 40 different automations and we've got a lot more on the white on the whiteboard.

And I could say, last year, at this time, we were trying to, to sell the message about automation, and and now we have a line out the door. So that's, that's exciting.

They are for us, because we have to interact with so many different healthcare records and systems and portals, we needed access to powerful AI and machine language capabilities.

And, of course, by any measure, UI path is the leader in RPA technology.

Now a bit about Druid.

So we've, we've, we've kind of been going through this evolution process.

And now, we're into giving a voice to the patient given a voice to the automations. And that's why we started going with Druid.

It's seamless ability to trigger the automations in UI path.

Was, was a big thing for us?

The ability to interact with humans in a conversational mode and in different languages, is a big thing for us.

A lot of our customers are a lot of our patients or English, It may not be their primary language, um, the ability to go multichannel.

Today, we're on the web.

The tomorrow, we may be in social, social networking.

The ability to put a chatbot Internet, and put it in whatsapp or Facebook are any of those social pages.

And voice, voice is going to be our holy grail because we are health care. And we tried to keep people's hands off the keyboard.

And the Deployment strategies was also a big one for us.

... has three capabilities, Cloud, on premise and hybrid.

We chose to go on premise because of HIPAA compliance.

But there is a move to go into the cloud.

And so it's, It's great to know, that we'll be able to move that transition. pretty simply.

Next slide, OK.

our roadmap, or, more accurately, kind of our, our process development cycle, We started with the discovery and the interviews.

We go out and we have a one-on-one conversation with our teams.

What do they are doing? How they're doing with the processes.

And it's the same whether we're doing UI path or druid.

If we're doing a Jewish conversation, we will talk to the agents and, you know, what does that process look like?

For a patient? What do you talk to them about?

What is the process we're trying to automate?

And then we'll go into a build phase, where we're starting to really build the workflows. And start training the bot, as we say.

Then, we transition into testing.

We have testers that we run through for making sure that the conversations test the way they should.

We have testers that if we're doing the automation, that we're checking the data on a continual basis, Then we also have an infrastructure test to make sure that the platform can support traffic.

Then, we kind of go into deployment, Of course.

Today, we're dropping chatbots onto Hosting hosted pages inside the hospital.

We have integrations, with my chart, on the Epic side, And then, one thing I can't stress enough, is to make sure that you monitor.

We monitor, dropped messages, statistics, workflows, which ones are being used. Conversation flows, which when they're being used.

We look at the profiles that people are using, or are chatbots, wouldn't connecting from what kind of equipment they're using.

Then, we make sure that we expand, we add two other groups, and there's a new concept that we do, is we start federating everything, so that they leverage and work off one another.

Next slide, right.

All right, a little bit of our architecture, and this is going to be a high level architecture.

We have 3 3 main phases we started with the unattended bots.

And, if you can kind of look to the right, we have scaling what we established with automated internal processes.

Then we did the unintended bots, which are really our digital workers.

And if you've been in RPA quite a bit, this is what we're talking about.

Did we transition in our second phase to our chatbots, which is what we're talking about, leveraging, what we've learned, and the processes that we built.

And we have our, our chatbots that talk to one another.

We didn't want to build a, lot, kind of, give you guys some advice, make sure that you, when you designed, it, you're not building a super bot, Not one big chatbot that does it for everything.

Here, at the hospital, we have a chatbot that works for finance.

one that works for appointments.

Another one who works on the clinical side, and we have one that's that's called our Ambassador Bot that sits upfront.

And all it's doing is, it's being a traffic cop.

You know, having a conversation with patients that are coming in, trying to understand what they want to do. If they say, Well, you know, I want to do an appointment. Great.

We'll hand the conversation over to the appointment desk and that chatbot will take them through the, through the journey.

That's important for us, because that body of knowledge is owned by that department.

They're going to be the closest to the patient.

They're going to understand the processes a little better and so we we worked with them to build that blow the department and then turnover maintenance for them.

Um, And then we're we're adding live agents So the chatbots the first ones we've talked about very simple. How do I do this? Where do I do this I need a form to do this?

But sometimes chatbots are going to be enough and so we introduce live agents.

The live agents scan Strike up the conversation with the patient maybe do a little bit more of trying to understand what they need and they also have access to Unattended bots as well.

So, you know, sometimes simple, as that, you know, I need another copy of my statement, I need a letter of understanding something, so the agents can drop something in the queue, and the unattended bot will process it just like anything else.

Let me go next.

So, the third phase that we're in now is kind of our task bots. And these are working with the end attended by working with the live agents.

And so these are very specific, very quick hitting.

Bots that are focused more on the human side.

So, I need a quick letter, I need a quick form letter.

I've got somebody in my chat window, I'm chatting with them, and I need to send a return to work authorization letter, or return to school.

Some other kind of forms in hospitals have tons of forms, so these, these test bots are very oriented to the agent, They know exactly the context.

So, if I would run the letter, I can go out, that can pull the information that the agents from the agent, that the patient they're talking to. So, the form has already pretty much filled out. It might be a couple of things that the agent needs to do.

And then send it.

Um, so, that's, that's what we're working on now.

Can you go to the next slide a little bit?

Oh, yes.

And, I remember talking earlier about having a voice to our chatbot.

So, everything we do with the chatbots are designed with voice in mind.

We are going to be integrating with Siri will be integrating with Google, with Alexa.

So if you, if you're a patient, you want to access and talk to someone at the hospital, you should be able to, from your device, or from your car, and make an appointment.

OK, next, all right, on through this slide together and I was looking at the benefits.

I think this, these these ones are about the telemetry bots and what they're doing.

But there's there's some more numbers here, but let's say patient calls to support jumped over 20% even in the first month.

These are people that are calling, I can't hear myself, know everything's choppy, the bot is going does help them with that.

Every month, we're reaching more and more patients that are doing things after hours.

So, today, a patient would normally call between the hours 8 and 5, wait in a queue, wait for an agent, and pick up the phone, and start helping them.

And they call it can take anywhere 15 to 20 minutes, depending on what's needed to be done.

But now, as the patients, as a role in this thing, our patients are able to to handle some of the business after hours, our hospitals primarily our our pediatric, so mom, busy moms, busy dads, but the kids can handle their stuff at night.

Patient satisfaction is is starting to really go up and It's it's keon what they are, What their experiences and what they're expecting.

And as we add more functionality or we're gonna CRS fan or satisfaction go up Even off the bat, we already save it 2.5 FTEs were repurposed as him.

So, You know, at the hospitals were short on staff, and so people get shuffled around to do more tasks.

So these first ones has kind of been what we're cutting our teeth on.

Next one, that we've got patient, Rumi's patient encounter and post encounters.

Those should be up here in the next few months.

The patient rooming in the in the physical world in the real-world.

You go in and No, you check in.

You let the front desk know you're maybe ring that little bell you let people know you're there, somebody calls their name, says, mister Nyet, do you come with me?

And you sit in that room and somebody in front a clipboard starts asking those questions.

You know, why you're here today? What's your pain level?

We see you're taking these prescriptions.

Are you still taking these prescriptions, you know, you're not, you know, so there's some question and answer that goes on.

And so, the person doing that is going to be the MA.

And the chatbot that we're testing out now, it's in our lab, we're testing it, is running the patients through that process, so that the MA can just focus on looking at really quickly, and then getting them into the encounter.

And the counter is, would actually meet with the provider, have the conversation, what's wrong, And in the post encounter is, all right, we're done with our meeting, or our visit.

I want to see you back in two weeks, and maybe I've got, I want to change a prescription, so want to get those over to the pharmacy, and then we follow up with the quality check.

All right, so, next slide, please.

All right, this is kinda key. Lessons learned.

Um, this has always administered from my perspective, and I want to share that with you, because that's the whole point, Right?

So, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

There's a lot of great functionality out there from the functions.

I encourage people when they, when they start off and they're chatbots, and they're laying this out, that you keep it simple.

You find your happy path, and then you can build down when you start adding functionality, because, it's, it's important that you get things in your first iteration, all the way through, and then you go to second iteration in the next phase, and you start adding on.

Because you don't want to try to boil the ocean. If that's another way to say it.

Next thing is, you kinda want to align your people with your strategy.

You want to make sure that they get it, You know, they need to understand that, the, the what's been improved. You want to get them to own it.

Lot of my, A lot of my people that I work with, they name things, they, they named the bots than in the chat bots. And, so, it becomes another person who becomes an other personality. They're working alongside them.

And, like I said, they're going to be your biggest advocates.

They're going to be, your biggest supporters are going to be your biggest advocates.

The third point I want to make sure is you harden your infrastructure, when you get into chatbot, and you get into bots that are exposed to the, to the outside the firewall, you want to, you're going to meet a lot of actors and, and folks that don't, aren't going to have your best interests are going to try to break your system.

I infiltrate.

So make sure you do some planning upfront.

Make sure that you're working with your infill security team, hand in hand, that they know what you're doing, and you know what they're doing, and what the challenges are.

Why things are like they, are you? You wish some functionality that you could do, but.

No, you have to work with that.

Also, encourage you to start slow and resist big bang.

You know, you're introducing automation.

You're introducing chatbots, and it's a, it's a big shock to the system.

It honestly is so, start slow, get those successes under your belt.

And then start to ramp up and I guarantee you people will be knocking on your door.

Monitor everything, everything that you do, Measure it, if you care about it and measure it.

Monitor your traffic, monitor messages that are being dropped out so that you know if you need to go tweak the conversation flows.

Look at Tier your automations.

Do the Timing's on it, are you getting performance that you want?

Um, And there's, there's opportunities to kind of prove these things.

And of course, the last one is learn from every failure.

It's only a failure of you.

Don't learn anything.

I wish we could say we're about 1000% on rolling out automations and chatbots.

The truth of the matter is, it's not always going to be like that, but you need to learn why.

Understand, maybe maybe the automation payback isn't there. Maybe the complication was a little bit more than we thought it would be. So go back and learn from that.

I think that's it for my slide deck.

All right. Thanks, Chad. Thank you.

Thanks, Gerald.

Thanks, Brad.

We're pretty much out of time, but if you have any closing comments, please go ahead.

Jim, are there any questions that came through? the questions. No questions that I saw that we are past our time.

We went over a bit understands the last of the day I'm not seeing any questions that I?

Had a couple of questions I'll ask your question So My question is when you guys are deploying at the bots you know on top of the ERP and so forth every time the ERP changes What is it?

What is your program to or to address the IT changes, and how how's that working?

Um, so we actually have a committee, So when hospitals are taking six months ahead, So we have an environment set up.

So we have our production bots, then we point our our bots at the new environment and we start looking for the changes that that may or may not impact our bots.

Just add on to that, we also I didn't cover it in my presentation, but we have a tool called Test Manager Test Suite. That also helps protect, proactively, detect update, when the robot to when the system changes are. Great, great.

And are there any lessons learned on, I'm just the onboarding of folks, you know, to the program. Any, any key messages?

I know you, you know, you, because you're generally you're bringing out a few SMEs and everybody else is kinda hidden.

Do you have any best practices around making sure everybody to be formed and so forth?

I'm sure, we have a, we have to, we have and RPA 101 that we do, it's probably about 10 slides.

And we give it to every department we'll go into, and we answer the, we answer the questions, nobody's asking, is this going to take my job away?

How does it's going to help me, you know, do I have to worry about anything?

So, we address those kinds of things.

And, we give them a high level, what a bot is and what it isn't.

And, we did the same thing for the chatbots.

we have a chatbot orientation meeting for new agents as they come on.

We talked about what the differences between world world and, and having a conversation and a chatbot, we talk about etiquette.

We talk about handling difficult, difficult patience.

We talked about how to escalate, how to move things in and out.

Can I ask one last question on intelligent process automation versus RPA, in the handoff between the two? Where do you see that, and how does that come about in your deployments?

You always start, I'll start without. So, RPA, to me, when I first started out, RPA, was just a robot.

That could do basically the hands on the keyboard and mouse, clicks, et cetera. But then, intelligent process automation, or intelligent RPA, start to incorporate AI. So you start at brain district, at some, some thinking, and some logic to what, to what RPA can do. So.

I think there's, I think, for us in the contact center and customer experience faces that we see the what we do with the agents as being really just just traditional RPA, but a lot of what we do to really incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities around software analysis, text, memorization categorizing, e-mails, all sorts of things that we can do with with AI, OK.

Excellent. Well, thank you both for a fantastic presentation.

Very informative.

We went over, but you.

The last ones are today, so no worries, all right.

We're presenting, if you have any closing words, please.

The only thing I'll close off with is that we do if you'd like to learn more about UI path, our partner, blue, or anyone else, or anything else that we do. And in UI path, we do have our big conference are begging. They call it forward, coming up in Las Vegas. And that's October fourth and six. We do a Google search for UI Path forward. You should find the event registration.

Probably, best friends.

I'll take it.

All right, thank you so much, everyone.

And, as he said, we're a resource for you, let us know.

OK, hi, thank you. Thank you.

Amber Bella.

All right. We're going to close out today and thanks to Brad and Joe for an excellent presentation.

Very informative.

I want to put a big thank you to Brian is Jane, the beto's team, making this possible making it possible to be free for you.

And a big thank you to our sponsors scenario, Abbey, and of course UI Path to close us out today. Without their support we cannot deliver this experience on a global basis at no cost to you.

And thank you so much for making this possible.

So, just as a recap, this week, these last three days today, we of course started kicked it off with Teresa, growing from NCC Group.

And all these webinars are all of these talks, will be available on vetos Insights.

I gave a talk on discovery and growth through your customer needs and priorities, and then, of course, we had our discussion here, not, not, not, too.

Just talked about today, but on Monday, we kicked it off with Scenario, Institute, and Healthcare excellence. Shift Happens, and Abby, some from tastic Presentations there.

I urge you to reach out to those presenters.

There are very great, great folks, and many, many good insights there.

And then yesterday, we had Abby flutter ask in Tandem Health, and as any, so truly a global list of providers giving you insights.

In customer experience, we hope that you found this informative and and interesting to you that you can take back to your company to start making a bigger impact on customer experience.

And I'm being the host on behalf of myself.

I really thank each and every one of you, for your participation.

Your questions, your feedback, your ideas.

Fantastic. I really enjoyed it, and look forward to seeing you at a conference in the future. All the best.

About the Author

Brad Beumer,
Customer Experience Automation Leader,
UiPath.

Brad Beumer is the Customer Experience Automation (Cx-A) lead at UiPath. Brad helps UiPath's clients and partners envision the role of automation in their end-to-end customer experience and contact center journeys. Brad has been delivering customer experience automation and contact center solutions for over 20 years.

About the Author

Joe Nieto,
Director, Customer Engagement, Health Sciences,
Element Blue.

Joe Nieto is director of customer engagement for healthcare at Element Blue, located minutes from the renowned Texas Medical Center in Houston. Joe’s clients include Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston Methodist, Baylor College of Medicine, Memorial Hermann Health System, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.