Elevating Citizen and Employee Experiences in the Public Sector with Intelligent Automation

People expect more from public sector organizations than ever before, benchmarking their experiences with government departments and agencies against the best digital experiences offered by the private sector. Yet many public sector organizations around the world are tied up in reams of paper and constrained by manual business processes, leading to inefficiencies and frustrated citizens. 

With many organizations fast-tracking their digital transformation programs to build resilience and improve productivity following the pandemic, intelligent automation technologies are becoming a necessity. These technologies deliver cost reductions of up to 90%, process paperwork up to 10 times faster and deliver 67% more accuracy across paper-intensive processes. 

One of these intelligent automation technologies is artificial intelligence (AI)-based Task Mining. Its key strength is that it doesn’t require changes to existing applications and platforms. Organizations can use AI-based Task Mining to identify opportunities for improving processes within a matter of weeks and start reaping Return on Investment (ROI) within a matter of months. Attended Automation solutions, another subset of intelligent automation, can glue different systems together rapidly to support citizen interactions. This enables public sector organizations to respond to today’s uncertain environment with resilience and agility. 

What is intelligent automation? 

In simple terms, intelligent automation is the application of technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) to support robotic process automation (RPA). Intelligent automation makes software robots even smarter and more useful. It harnesses data from structured databases and from unstructured sources, such as hand-written forms, to create actionable insights and take automation to new levels. 

An example of a powerful application of intelligent automation, that NICE’s RPA software supports, is using AI for task mining.  Task mining is a low-effort way to discover massive opportunities to streamline and automate processes in order to vastly improve citizen and employee experiences. Many organizations are missing out in this benefit. 

Task mining with NICE’s Automation Finder uses millions of data points about how employees execute tasks on their desktop to identify and recommend processes an organization should automate to maximize savings and efficiencies. This includes data about process sequences and variations that are not obvious to the human eye. 

Automating manual processes and augmenting employees 

Intelligent automation has numerous front-office and back-office use cases for the public sector. Because NICE’s RPA platform is open, it can integrate both attended and unattended robots with powerful AI and ML capabilities from partners like Hyperscience to automate diverse and complex processes, including citizen-facing interactions. 

Consider the challenge of managing paper, and reading, extracting and processing data from millions of forms like benefits applications and tax returns. These documents come in a wide variety of formats, many of them with messy handwriting and scanned in low resolution. Hyperscience’s Intelligent Document Processing solution can work hand-in-hand with NICE robots to digitize these records. 

The solution accurately classifies, extracts, validates and enriches information from incoming or archived data such as handwritten or machine-typed documents, turning it into structured data that can be mined for business insights or used to drive automated processes. This frees up public sector employees’ time, so they can focus on service delivery. 

By combining Hyperscience with NICE robotic automation in a recent public sector project, we were able to read over 400 hand-written fields on scanned forms of over 16 pages each with a 99.4% accuracy. We were able to extract 100% of the data and perform the necessary work across multiple systems automatically. Imagine the impact of doing this across thousands of incoming forms each day. 

Augmentation, not replacement 

Many public sector organizations are mindful of public concerns about loss of jobs to automation. It’s thus important to stress that NICE’s solutions are there to help people as they work, enabling them to enjoy a better work experience while offering faster and more personalized citizen services. We focus on augmentation of the human workforce, rather than replacing people with automated systems. 

NEVA, the NICE Employee Virtual Attendant, helps people to achieve results they couldn’t attain on their own. This AI-infused software takes care of complex calculations, sourcing data from multiple apps, copying-and-pasting, and other tasks that machines can do faster and that humans find tedious or repetitive. It can also guide people on complex rules and regulations in real-time, helping them with compliance and their KPIs. A public sector organization working with NEVA is much more resilient in addressing crises and work peaks. 

This new breed of automation tools isn’t going to replace humans, but instead allows people to focus their time and efforts on the things that really matter. They use AI and machine learning to intelligently process and understand data and are smart enough to know when a human needs to be involved in the decision-making process. 

Driving better citizen outcomes 

Public sector organizations are looking to deliver improved citizen experiences and to achieve significant ROI on their technology investments. This can be done by using intelligent automation to free up staff time, optimize service delivery, and achieve cost savings. NICE and Hyperscience have an end-to-end automation solution that enables organizations to scale their automation initiatives and achieve their digital transformation goals. Register to watch a recording of our recent joint webinar for more insight.