How do you Spell ROI with UC? CBPA
Life, particularly in the business world, used to seem easier. If you called someone on their analog desk phone and no one answered, you left a message with the called party’s “secretary” who put a pick slip on their chair. Back then, expectations were lower. Today we have all manner of devices and communication methods to reach someone, anywhere at any time of the day. From the now less-used pager, to complex PDAs, these communication devices have become essentially main stream in the survival of any business. These devices make possible multiple modes of communication – voice, e-mail, SMS, instant messaging, and fax. Plus, they often provide, multi-modal communications – combining two modes on one device, such as a visual display with voice input to an application. Due to the explosion of communication variety and end-user preference, businesses are facing the challenge of how to effectively manage daily communications.
While Unified Communications (UC) as a concept is relatively new, much of the technology used in UC solutions has been around for years, if not decades (e.g., email and voicemail). The core concept of controlling communications processes in business has been around even longer in the contact center. However, in the enterprise, the concept of controlling communications, other than basic routing or transferring of calls or reporting on usage statistics is relatively new. Thus, the integration effort involved in combining communication applications within UC is new, along with technologies such as presence to help tie it all together. When you begin to apply integration of UC applications with control this integration can provide businesses significant benefits related to simplified management and administration, along with increased employee productivity.
UC users have been finding great value from UC. In fact, an end user survey that UCStrategies conducted in 2008, entitled UC End User Productivity – How End Users are Finding Value from Unified Communications, found that once end users have UC functionality, they don’t want to give it up. End users appreciate the productivity gains of UC, as well as the fact that UC saves them time and allows them to reach people in the manner of their choice, quickly and effectively. In addition, UC knocks down geographic walls, enabling users to communicate and work more effectively with colleagues and customers around the globe, without worrying about time zone difference.
Despite these benefits, many businesses have been reluctant to deploy UC, in part because it’s relatively new, has a perceived high cost of deployment (which isn’t helped by a recession), and the lack of good, hard ROI studies. To address these concerns, some technology vendors are taking a different approach to assuage customer doubts about UC by incorporating business process automation (BPA) along with UC to deliver hard ROI.
One such approach employed by Interactive Intelligence is called communications-based process automation (CBPA). CBPA builds on the concept of a unified communications platform running some of the more critical components of UC, such as VoIP, enterprise-wide presence, multichannel queuing and routing, along with call and screen recording, to automate critical business processes.
Think of this as a way of extending many of the concepts used in the contact center out to the enterprise, such as prioritizing, routing, escalating and tracking interactions. It’s this concept that can now be used to automate and move work through each step of a business process.
Interactive Intelligence notes that the CBPA approach differs from traditional BPA applications, which are typically expensive and complex, historically requiring professional services engagements to implement, modify and maintain them. Interactive Intelligence’s CBPA uses a process-flow definition and graphical interface to enable quick design, deployment and modification of business processes, resulting in lower overall costs.
By automating processes from beginning to end, CBPA can reduce latency and human error in business processes to deliver measurable cost savings This lets IT professionals and business managers automate an existing manual process, streamlining the business process and in many cases cutting down on the process time.
The key to this is tracking and monitoring an action from end to end, adding automated processes, communications and people where needed. Here is an example of how CBPA would work. A patient at a hospital clinic sets up an appointment over the phone for a podiatry appointment. From there the CBPA process begins. The patient sees their podiatrist and has x-rays of their Achilles done. The doctor checks the x-rays and tells the patient that they need a closer look and that they need to have an MRI done.
Once home, the patient calls to schedule the MRI for the next week. Two days prior the system makes an outcall to remind the patient of the call, sends an email reminder to the doctor that the patient is scheduled, and sends a confirmation email to the patient, along with directions to the MRI facility. The patient goes to their appointment and has the MRI done. As soon as the MRI is finished and processed, the results are sent to the doctor, who takes a look, sends a message to the nurse, who calls the patient to schedule a follow-up appointment.
This process is followed through on the follow-up appointment, by reminding the patient when the appointment is, and so forth. When each appointment is done, procedure codes are sent to the billing department for billing, medical reports and x-ray information is sent to doctors and nurses, and appointments are tracked. Since this patient ended up requiring outpatient surgery, the outpatient clinic also became involved with notices for scheduling appointments sent to nursing staff and reminders emailed to the patient along with automated voice messages. Two days before surgery, instructions for pre and post-op care were also sent via email to the patient as back up for the documentation that was sent home with them. Included in those instructions were links to more information on the web about the procedure in case the patient wanted more detailed information about the procedure.
Post-op, the patient received calls from the nursing staff that were prompted by the system to the nursing staff at regular intervals. Because of the use of presence, the system knew which nurse was supposed to take care of that patient, and if they weren’t available, the task of calling the patient was then sent by the system to the next available nurse familiar with the case. Lastly, all the necessary information for insurance and billing was tracked along with the patient’s records.
Prior to CBPA the patient would not have received multiple reminders of appointments, the links to additional information on the web, nor back up material for the procedures. This automation alleviated time spent by the nursing staff and eliminated any oversights that might have occurred in both providing the patient with material or reminding them of appointments. Forwarding of x-rays, and MRIs to the doctors eliminated both the human latency in requesting and receiving them, and information entered by the doctors flowed to the billing department, improving accuracy and speeding up the collection of money from the patient and insurance company. By automating the entire process, the patient was kept in the loop, paperwork was not lost, calls were made on time, and no appointments were missed.
The key to this is tracking and monitoring an action from end to end, adding automated processes, communications and people where needed. This is just one example of how CBPA would work. But CBPA can be applied to almost any business process – from sales to insurance claims to order processing – and by automating, managing, and tracking each step of a business’s process, companies will see the ROI promised by UC.