Interactive Intelligence's focus on Communications Based Process Automation

As the economy has slowed down, companies have intensified their focus on cutting expenses, increasing efficiency, and maintaining quality. To achieve these goals, many companies are investigating ways to automate processes, and some companies have gone beyond simple automation exercises to focus on the broader picture of business process automation across an enterprise being tied to communication processes.

To find out more about the choices businesses have in this area I spoke with Gina Clarkin, a product manager at Interactive Intelligence working with their new product, Interaction Process Automation (IPA). which I believe demonstrates a fresh look at the way companies can automate their business processes.

Nancy: The term Business Process Management (BPM) has been around for a long time. Before we move onto Interactive’s take on a broader application of business process automation can you give our readers a quick overview of traditional BPM?

Gina: If you think about business processes, you quickly realize that they are the lifeblood of every organization. A business process is a set of activities or “work” an organization performs, designed to create value for the customer that enables the organization to achieve its objectives. Our CEO says, “Processes make organizations tick.” BPM emerged in the 1990s as an approach companies can employ to evaluate and improve their processes. BPM projects focus on how work gets done; evaluating and reviewing the processes, people, technology, management, and even the organization’s culture.

Nancy: One of the problems with traditional BPM is that existing solutions or projects often involve a high degree of cost, complexity and customization. How is Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA), your approach, making the BPM process faster and less expensive?

Gina: CBPA takes a different approach. Unlike traditional BPM solutions, CBPA has not evolved from an application development environment. CBPA has grown from the proven technologies and techniques of the contact center industry, an industry that has developed systematized processes to handle millions of interaction and transaction flows with great sophistication…an industry that optimizes people, technology and processes to serve the customer.

With CBPA, the all-in-one IP communications system becomes the process automation platform for the company. Instead of creating a dependency on complex programming, application development and customization, CBPA offers organizations a single system capable of providing everything needed to easily automate just about any common process.

Nancy:  To our readers this might sound like Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP), which is a recent term used within the communications industry. How does CBPA compare to CEBP?

Gina: CEBP could be characterized as evolutionary, an incremental improvement. It’s about embedding communications capabilities in existing applications or processes, enabling those applications or processes to automatically trigger a communication or notification based on a change in the business environment. For example, a customer’s database record indicates a balance due greater than a defined threshold. CEBP can generate a phone call using presence to connect to available personnel. CEBP is predominantly focused on communications events, not managing the overall business process.

In contrast, CBPA is revolutionary. CBPA focuses on how we automate processes in the first place. CBPA uses proven communications technology and management practices that have been in use for decades in the contact center (queuing, skills-based routing, presence, recording, real-time supervision) then applies these advanced technologies to process automation. For example, an insurance company could queue up insurance applications for the next available Processor, with the appropriate state license. The Processor receives a form “popped” on the screen and pre-filled with the correct information from the relevant back-office system. Alerts notify the processor and manager of approaching deadlines, so that work can be automatically re-assigned if necessary to ensure service levels are met.

Nancy: I like that - revolutionary instead of evolutionary. What other specific advantages does CBPA offer compared to other methods?

Gina: Since CBPA relies on the power of an all-in-one IP communications platform, it offers the ability to associate human interactions (phone calls, voice and screen recordings, emails, faxes, for example) with a business process. Imagine having a consistent way to capture customer dialog as part of a business process!

CBPA makes use of industry proven technology and techniques for the “work center” that are designed to remove human latency and optimize resource balancing. Organizations can use those same advanced technologies to optimize how work gets done in any “work center.” Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) technology is recognized as one of the most powerful in the world to handle distribution, management and reporting of work activity. Contact centers use it to distribute calls, email, web chat, and other communications. When this intelligent tool is used with work activities, managers receive insight into work flow and status. It can point out gaps to help management improve processes and reduce cycle time. Workforce Management can predict the headcount necessary to complete the anticipated amount of work. Historical data can be used to predict how much work there is to complete.

All these advanced technologies result in dynamic work “push” instead of static work “pull.” This reduces the human latency inherent in many other solutions where work simply sits waiting for an employee to pick it up and take action. Having these capabilities can help organizations automate business processes, respond faster, control costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Nancy: Is an all-in-one IP communication system needed, or could an enterprise use any type of communication system or IP system?
 
Gina: No, an all-in-one IP Communications system is not needed in order to make CBPA a reality in an organization. However, one very large hurdle is immediately overcome when deploying CBPA with an all-in-one IP communications system – integration. You see, there are many components that must work seamlessly together in order for business processes to flow from one group to another within workflow built upon a communications platform – presence, queuing, alerting, reporting, monitoring, communications (voice, IM, email, fax, SMS), etc. Plus, there are integrations to back-end systems (HR, ERP, CRM, databases, etc.) to pull all of the data elements together using web services. By using an all-in-one IP communications system for CBPA, you have most all of those components already working seamlessly together which drive down costs, speeds up deployment times, and dramatically improves the workflow.

My Take - Post Interview and Questions Left Unanswered

I’ve long said that unified communications sprang from the contact center, as for years the contact center has been implementing many functions that UC now promises to enterprises and individuals. Interactive Intelligence is looking at the broader picture of automation across an enterprise, using the same tools we have the contact center for not just communication capabilities, but other processes as well. It’s a subtle distinction that seems clear by example, such as Gina’s example of insurance applications, but can be lost if management doesn’t view process automation from the perspective of what they already do in the contact center – track and assign work end to end from inception to resolution.

I like the term Gina used – “work center,” as CBPA takes the contact center tools we’ve been using for years and expands them to the various types of work that take place in the enterprise. One question I have is, who will be the champion for this type of approach within the enterprise, and how will they be able to justify it in this challenging economy? It will be interesting to see which forward-thinking enterprises latch on to this new way of approaching work activities and the kinds of ROI and payback they receive from it.