Attended Automation ≠ RPA! It’s As Simple As That

Many organizations and automation specialists ask or even assume that attended automation or robotic desktop automation (RDA) is as straightforward as RPA or unattended automation. My response? An emphatic NO! Simply put, attended and unattended automations are worlds apart in terms of purpose and functionality.

Let’s start by clarifying the key differences: attended automation is the real-time, professional collaboration between robots and human employees in the workplace. Here, the robots are dedicated to helping employees augment their performance and deliver great customer service, in the contact center and beyond. In today's turbulent times where many employees are working remotely, attended automation enables an agile workforce, providing real-time guidance, next-best action advice and more. Unattended automation, on the other hand, is typically dedicated to automating processes in the back office and does not require any human intervention. Unattended automations are based on a chronological schedule that is triggered by a human or are pre-defined and run in a cyclical and controlled manner.

Here are the unique capabilities that distinguish attended automation from unattended automation in both physical and remote call center environments.

Robust Connectivity to Desktop Applications Is A Must Have

The very dynamic and challenging desktop environment is owned by call center agents, since they perform actions such as move the mouse, configure screen resolution, minimize, maximize and close applications, to name a few. Since all of these desktop actions are completed spontaneously and during live customer interactions, it is essential to ensure that the robots do not cause any interference with these daily tasks performed by the agents. So how can a robot keep up with such complex and unpredictable desktop actions? The only way is via state-of-the-art object-based connectivity.

Computer vision, or OCR (Optical Character Recognition)-based connectivity may suffice for unattended automation when the robots are dedicated to the automated process itself, but it is drastically insufficient for the dynamic world of call center agent desktops. The robust nature of the desktop necessitates the use of Object-Based Connectivity for Attended Automations.

Real-Time Agent Assist Leads to Higher Relevance and Engagement

A core strength and differentiator of Attended Automation is assisting employees at precisely the right time in both the back office or during a live customer interaction. To support this complex need, attended bots need to be able to track all of the employee’s desktop actions such as mouse clicks and keyboard strokes. In addition, the attended bot needs to identify events or changes from both the target applications and the operating system. These ‘desktop events’ proactively trigger the attended bot to act in real-time and bring up the relevant assistance to the agent.

As RPA is programmed and scheduled, this type of connectivity awareness in real time is not needed; a timer is widely used to trigger RPA solutions.

Overcoming the Complexity of Multiple Desktop Applications Used in the Automated Process

When agents have several instances of the same application open simultaneously, attended robots need to know which instance they should interface with to avoid getting confused between different instances. This means that attended automation must support multi-instances of an application being open at once. As such, agents can perform their tasks at will, while the attended bot resides in the desktop waiting to assist the agent, as and when needed at exactly the precise moment within a live customer interaction.

In contrast, a traditional RPA implementation is much simpler and does not need to address the issue of multi-instance support, as unattended bots will only work on one instance at a time. 

Low CPU Footprint So Daily Work Continues Uninterrupted

Having an astute awareness of the desktop environment with object-based connectivity together with event driven logic requires a great deal of the robotic resources. As such, when using attended automation, these engines need to be optimized to consume less than 1% of CPU during automation spikes to avoid slowing down day-to-day activities.

Rich, Customizable and Interactive Callouts Increase Usability

A modern and easy to use UI is a must-have for both the organization and end-user. Highly personalized and interactive UIs are essential for attended automation where input is often required from the employee and collated information (from various backend applications) is displayed to the employee. A rich and highly informative and interactive guidance callout, will usually achieve higher engagement from the agent and will more likely be used. 

No UI is needed for RPA

Centralized Monitoring and Control is Key for Flawless Execution with Large Scale Attended Automation Implementation

Imagine monitoring and controlling an attended automation deployment on ten employee desktops? Now imagine it on hundreds or thousands of desktops.

An effective control room is an absolute must, one that enables the admin to confirm which version of a solution is running on each employee’s desktop. This allows the admin to troubleshoot errors remotely, and to alert the admin to the specific location of any connectivity breaks. These are just a few capabilities required to manage a fleet of attended bots and to report against the organization’s KPIs.

Attended and Unattended Robots Work Seamlessly Together

As business process complexity rises, there may be a need for attended bots to delegate certain tasks to the unattended robots residing in the backend. In other instances, there may be a complication or a process error or exception, where the issue needs to be routed to a human employee for real-time input or authorization.

Attended bots are designed to handle this level of process complexity by immediately routing any exception to a human for input, after which the unattended bots can complete executing the process. It is therefore imperative for an automation platform to support the seamless communication between attended and unattended bots to optimize complex processes more effectively.  

Attended Automation Embraces AI for Supporting More Complex Use Cases

We are seeing a surge in the availability of a large variety of AI. It is imperative that attended robots be ready and able to integrate with third party APIs to provide the real time data collection from the attended robots to the organization’s AI and analytics tools.

While all eight of the capabilities highlighted must be mastered for successful, effective, enterprise-grade attended automation deployment, only half are of importance in unattended or traditional RPA implementations. Expertise and experience in deploying attended automation is of paramount importance and will reduce the learning curve. What’s more, attended automation has proven to support multiple value drivers such as upselling, reduction in training time, compliance adherence, and enhancing both the agent and end customer experiences. 

Still think that attended automation = RPA? Think again.

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