NICE Robotic Automation Reviews

We use unattended automation for the bulk of our contact center processes and our financial shared-service center. We don't have attended robots, although they're on our roadmap for the next three months.

We use it on-premise, currently, but we are moving, over the next two or three months, to Amazon AWS.

A good example of an unattended bot is for what we call the "three two two two error," It has saved us £450,000 almost overnight. We allow customers to book seats on our flights so that a family of four can all sit together. We charge our customers for that privilege and it should work fine. However, if the original aircraft assigned to that flight is replaced, as far as the customer's concerned the plane is there and everything seems fine, until they get on board. They find that their seat booking hasn't transferred across to the new aircraft. They end up sitting in various parts of the plane, which causes complaints. We end up issuing refunds and compensation to customers. By having an unattended robot move the seat booking from one flight to another, we saved, overnight, £450,000. It's a great story to be able to tell.

Another process we've automated in the contact center is called our "Disney Calendar." Disney manages all of its hotel rooms on a big spreadsheet, effectively. They send that out to every tour operator which then manually updates its systems to show which rooms are available and which ones are booked. We previously outsourced that to a company called WNS, where they had a team of 18 people processing the spreadsheet. They came in three times a week. But because of the volume of rooms and the amount of manual work, we were constantly behind. From our customers' perspective, we were selling them rooms for the holiday of a lifetime — so it's a big, expensive thing — that had already been booked elsewhere. Then we were having to manually call them back up and tell them that the room had been double-booked and that we could put them in this hotel or that room. We were starting off on the wrong foot and providing an awful customer experience. We automated that process.

Now, we have saved the cost of those 18 people that we were dependent on from an outsourcing partner. And processing the calendar, instead of taking three or four days to do one iteration of it, takes three hours and runs overnight. The customer experience is fantastic because everything is quick to market. Everything is absolutely correct because the robot is 100 percent accurate every time. We've seen an increase in our sales to Disney and a drop in complaints about Disney holidays, as a result of the automation going in.

The solution has improved employee productivity, but not directly. We've taken a process that a contact center agent, or somebody in the financial shared center, was doing, which was taking some 50 percent of their time. We've now freed them up to do other more interesting work, to be more productive and more innovative. We don't have any metrics that we can share to show what they've done with that time yet. We're not quite that mature yet. But if I were to approximate the increase in productivity in the contact center, I would say it's about 30 percent.

In terms of the solution improving customer experience by helping employees stay focused on the customer rather than on desktop complexities, that's not happening at the moment. We don't have attended automation. But by removing things like the Disney Calendar issue, where our contact center agents would be dealing with complaints, and the finance guys would be processing refunds and compensation, the impact of that automation has meant that those calls aren't coming in, so our agents are able to focus better on the customer experience than they would have previously been able to do.

We use it for agent guidance. This is a system that pops up throughout the call and helps them guide the conversation with the customer and makes sure they say what they need to say, in terms of regulatory stuff. That's especially true when they're selling product. It is used all the time by all the agents who are on the phone.

We use the RTI software for other parts of the business as well. That's in development at the moment. We're working on the functionality to do things like auto notes or to mute the call when they're taking card details.

In terms of results, we tracked it when we first launched it. We had a pilot team using it and we tracked customer satisfaction through NPS. There was an increase in customer satisfaction. We increased our NPS overall by four percent within the first four weeks, and it's been going up.

And we did tracking around employee engagement, in terms of their sense of how they felt they were being supported by the system, and they felt better. It did have a positive impact.

Overall, with the RTI client, it improved our average call-handling time on every type of call that came through. With the new agent-guidance running, over the course of four weeks, we dropped it by 60 seconds overall. That was massive. It resulted in over £1,000,000 in savings within that first month. And we're doing more little things to tweak the journeys, making it slicker, giving them more abilities and building in other journeys to help them. It has increased employee productivity massively.

In terms of employee accuracy, we have a complaint-monitoring team that quality-marks random calls. They look at compliance quality as well as whether it was a good outcome for the customer. Was it a good conversation? They give the call a score and that is one of the agents' metrics. The quality has gotten better. Employees aren't getting mixed up on what they have to say. As a company, in the contact center, we've gone from a 49 percent "good" rate to 59 percent.

We use this solution for our customer representatives and also for robotic automation. We primarily use this NICE product for making automation processes. I'm the Chief Information Officer and we are customers of NICE. 

Robotic Automation has saved us time and money by moving our processes away from manual work. 

I used the software in conjunction with ServiceNow, a ticketing system. For example, the tickets contain user information and requests and then, NICE Robotic Automation software navigates relevant applications and extracts the necessary information. The majority of the information consists of statements from the user, which are then sent to the printer for a printout.

There are multiple processes involved in updating the tickets, such as extracting information onto an Excel sheet. These are the types of use cases for me.

NICE is advertised as having low-code development, but it is not very user-friendly. An IT professional with no coding experience cannot create a bot using NICE; instead, they have to depend on C# or .NET to develop RPA and then push it to NICE RPA. 

The development process is complex. I used to take screenshots and extract valuable information from them when I worked with NICE Robotics Automation over three years ago. Since then, I am not sure whether they have made any changes to the platform. However, it appears that not many people are using it anymore.

By nature, I use automation everywhere, from business processes to governance and user support.

The most interesting project included 60 robotic processes worked by only four unattended agents, intelligently orchestrated by a specific process, which was also responsible for monitoring and managing the infrastructure, switching resources on or off as needed.

This approach has not only saved a lot of working time but also economically in managing the infrastructure.

Combining automation technology with human work is certainly an invaluable advantage, yet on the condition that high-performing tools such as NICE are used in the best possible way, exploiting, as in this case, the ability to interact (NEVA), which many others lack. This type of interaction allows real-time control of what happens. On the development side, it allows us to exploit human adaptability in case the bot finds an unexpected situation. In doing so, the robotic flow benefits by learning how to behave at the subsequent appearance of the same anomaly.
Over time, this type of use of interaction allows the user to have more time available and, at the same time, transfer greater independence to the robotic flow without ever excluding the user from punctual and exhaustive monitoring.

We used NICE for the back office. Our company has now integrated UiPath, and currently, we are using UiPath.

It is easy to deploy. To do the automation in NICE, you really need to use your programming expertise. There are no inbuilt features in it, and you have to create all the required features, which can be very interesting for a programmer.

It is a kind of desktop automation. It is for user-initiated and very specific automation, almost like macros. We have its latest version.

It is a kind of desktop automation. Its licensing model is a little bit different. It tends to be individual automation specific to a role. It excels at that.