You have probably heard that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is great at automating the mundane, repetitive, rules-based tasks — typical back-office tasks in human resources, finance, and procurement departments.

You may also have heard that chatbots are good at automating basic conversational customer support in many industries. Are they though, being leveraged to their full potential or are they being under-utilized? Imagine the possibilities if you combined the power of RPA and chatbot and turned them into a cross-functional team. Over the course of this article, we will examine how these bots are a powerful team, what they can accomplish together and what you should be thinking about, should you consider them as an option for one of your problems.

stronger, better together

Let me walk you through a scenario. Let’s say you work as a scheduling assistant at a clinic that only books appointments over the phone. When a patient calls, you look at availability for the requested doctor in the appointment management system and give them options to choose from. The patient then selects and requests you to book the appointment that works best for them. However, when all the scheduling assistants are busy, the patients must stay on the line waiting for several minutes before being helped.

Now, imagine if the patient could engage with the clinic just by texting, “I need to book an appointment” using their mobile phone. At the other end is a chatbot ready to help! The chatbot texts the patient back to gather information required to book an appointment. It then activates RPA to schedule the appointment in the appointment management system. Once the appointment is booked, RPA sends a confirmation to the chatbot, which in turn sends the details of the appointment back to the patient. Note that neither RPA nor chatbot can fully automate this process individually. Chatbot can gather and send data back to the customer; RPA can automate application workflows.

When used together, the chatbot and RPA automate this complex process end to end — with no manual intervention.

one approach, many applications

This approach can be used to solve similar problems in different industries. The following examples highlight the fact that RPA and chatbot team’s applicability transcends to different industry verticals. My hope is that this list will serve as a reference for you as you think about unique problems whose solutions have so far eluded you and perhaps where RPA and chatbot technology may be relevant. A few examples include:

• Requesting and receiving an insurance quote via text
• A pharmacy sending reminders to the elderly to take their medications
• IT department servicing technical requests
• A shipping company providing package location on demand
• Logging customer issues/complaints and providing initial resolution

can’t we solve this another way?

By now, you may be wondering what makes these technologies so unique and why chatbot and RPA are needed to solve some of the problems described above. Why aren’t the underlying systems that serve these functions, designed or enhanced to address these problems? These questions are relevant, and the answers lie in the challenges today’s businesses are facing. Challenges such as:

• The need for faster time to market
• The need to scale fast to maximize profits
• Budgetary constraints — what business isn’t familiar with this one!
• Lack of engineering resource capacity that leads to prioritization of development of new products over system enchantments

These challenges limit an organization’s ability or willingness to make systemic changes, making chatbot and RPA particularly appealing as an alternative.

how do these two really work together?

When you engage with a company’s customer service over the phone, chat or via email, you are helped by a customer service agent. These agents fulfill your requests by gathering data, looking up information in the internal systems, potentially even making updates based on your request, and finally, communicating the outcome to you. When chatbot and RPA team up to provide customer service, this exact workflow is carried out by the bots. The chatbot acts as the customer service representative, interacting with the customer to gather input and communicate the outcome of their request, whereas the RPA bot takes on the responsibility of data entry and reading information from the internal systems. The communication between the two bots is seamless and near real-time with the use of APIs. In case you were wondering, the API feature for communication is available out-of-the-box for both chatbots and RPA, reducing the solution development time.

how can AI help?

I would be remiss to not mention the role that artificial intelligence (AI) can play in improving the customer experience related to interaction with these technologies. For example, the overall chat flow can be simplified with the usage of optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR can be used to extract relevant information from images uploaded by the customer to obtain customer input instead of engaging the customer in a lengthy series of question and answers. This not only reduces the request turn-around-time but also improves overall customer experience.

Another application of AI could be to perform sentiment analysis on customer responses to determine if human engagement is necessary. Some particularly distraught customers may be better serviced through human engagement with empathy. There may also be unique scenarios that require machine learning models to address a specific problem within a larger process. The key reason to mention AI is to bring attention to the fact that with every passing day AI is becoming highly accessible and that it can be easily be integrated with the awesome team of bots to make them even smarter.

Both chatbot and RPA are powerful technologies to automate tasks that can otherwise be mundane and uninspiring. However, combine the two and they truly are a case of one plus one equals six! Whether it’s for a proof of concept or an innovative solution to a problem that has eluded you, you should definitely hire this team of bots to help take your customer service to the next level.