Using a specific example of a team dealing with external providers. As part of their duties they must interact with over 100 different external companies, often via web portals. Activities performed via these portals are stretching from retrieving information, creating new content and updating or modifying data. All portals have a different dynamic and use only for about 60% of the time the same information.
Daily interaction with these portals is supposed to be a few times per hour, making it a very costly process. But the SLA’s that are set for these activities are not met because it’s impossible for the size of the team to perform these activities as per the described process.
The result is delays up to 1 hour for any activity performed, ultimately causing end client dissatisfaction for not resolving their case quick enough and the lack of updates they get during the process. When trying to automate a process, you rely on integration with systems. But if the systems don’t have a native capability for integration, for example no API’s or database access, most companies rely on humans to do the job. The systems can be both internal and external, running as a web application or installed on a desktop. Often the process is interacting with outlook, excel or word type of applications as well.