IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
Story image
Blue Prism launches Service Assist to empower contact centres
Fri, 9th Oct 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Blue Prism has announced a new solution for businesses wanting to up their game when it comes to customer service and contact centre operations.

Blue Prism Service Assist is designed to improve customer contact centres and call centre agent productivity, by delivering real-time 360-degree view of all customer interactions.

Service Assist automates system tasks including searching databases, scheduling callbacks, and updating customer records.

With a business-led front end and an IT-governed backend, Service Assist offers contact centre teams increased functionality and security while significantly reducing Average Handling Times (AHT) and improving First Call Resolution (FCR), Blue Prism states.

Service Assist gives agents an efficiency boost by supporting end-to-end digital workflows, and integrating and embedding Service Assist screens directly into the customer's choice of web-based agent interfaces or broader CRM, ERP and BPM platforms.

There is no coding required. If there is a change in the business process that a digital worker is performing, the change can quickly and easily be configured with minimal downtime, Blue Prism states.

Furthermore, the solution provides flexible architecture deployment options including on-premises, cloud or hybrid. It also includes drag and drop simplicity with Blue Prism's Digital Exchange (DX), with the add-in of intelligent automation and AI capabilities to automate processes.

According to Blue Prism, the result of these capabilities streamlined contact centre operations, increased agent satisfaction, and higher customer satisfaction.

By providing a secure, scalable and centrally managed digital workforce (robots that act as a digital assistant to contact centre agents), Blue Prism states it is aiming to empower the contact centre ecosystem by offering a complete end-to-end automation solution.

Blue Prism chief partner strategy officer Linda Dotts says, "Contact centres are the frontline of the customer experience.

“Consumers today are demanding that all modes of interaction are seamless between virtual channels and live agents, but all customer support teams face challenges, including legacy systems, high staff attrition, at home agents and cost minimisation. This is where Service Assist comes into play."

Saddletree Research chief analyst Paul Stockford commented on the need for such a solution in our current digital landscape.

He says, “2020 continues to be the perfect storm for change and disruption in the global contact centre industry.

“Our January 2020 survey of customer service professionals revealed that 12% of the industry was already focused on introducing AI-enabled automation solutions such as Blue Prism in 2020, joining the 16% of contact centres that have already deployed automation.

“The pandemic, however, has caused a dramatic spike in demand for automated solutions, which now represent a market segment that is expected to reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.2% from 2020 to 2024.