Leveraging AI and robotic automation
Archived
3 Tasks
5 mins
Scenario
Front Stage competes with Bright Lights Booking Co. Jay Gerard, the VP of enterprise architecture, heard from a former employee that Bright Lights offers a self-service option on their website to schedule an appointment with a sales representative. Front Stage offers live chat on their website, but booking the appointment is a manual process. This process requires the service representative to search three separate legacy systems to gather the data needed to set up the appointment.
Bright Lights also uses an artificial intelligence (AI) solution (called the Bright Lights Buddy) to provide expert, yet completely automated, guidance to sales people in producing a quote for the event. Bright Lights' AI solution has predicted the actual cost of an event 80 percent of the time within a two percent margin of error. At Front Stage, producing an accurate quote requires heavy involvement from the sales executive. If the sales executive is not involved in the quote generation process, the actual cost of most events exceeds the quoted amount. The sales executive's time is precious and costly. Front Stage desires to use AI to provide a more accurate quote.
Finally, Bright Lights uses the same mainframe-based hotel reservation system that Front Stage uses. The reservation system is notoriously complicated, causing average call-handle times to be upwards of 10 minutes to make a simple change to a reservation. The average call-handle time for Bright Lights is three minutes. Front Stage is considering building a REST service to connect to the hotel reservation system. This project is time-consuming and costly, so Front Stage has put it off.
Jay is concerned that Bright Lights will start taking away Front Stage's market share because Bright Lights offers faster and higher-quality customer service. Your assignment is to propose a solution to Front Stage that leverages AI or robotic automation to provide an improved experience for Front Stage's customers and better use the time and expertise of Front Stage employees.
Detailed Tasks
1 Approach
Review each comment from Jay and research how automation and AI could be leveraged to allow Front Stage to compete with Bright Lights. In addition, present a recommendation to Jay on how he could use automation and AI to transform how Front Stage operates long term.
2 Solution Detail
The chat experience can be handled without human intervention at all. Leverage the Intelligent Virtual Assistant to handle the chat interaction. The process of booking an appointment could conceivably run unattended using RPA.
To create a similar self learning AI to help with quoting process, Front Stage can use predictive and adaptive analytics. Using the Adaptive Decision Manager, Front Stage can train the AI solution to produce a more accurate quote by loading sample quote data. Over time, the AI solution will drive more accurate outcomes, freeing the Sales Executive to focus on higher value tasks, like building relationships with prospective and existing customers.
For the hotel reservation process, Front Stage can use robotic desktop automation (RDA) to log into legacy systems and create an automation using RDA to mimic the actions of logging into the mainframe computer and booking the hotel reservation. Propose use of workflow intelligence (WFI) to identify where slow downs are occurring in the current process to find opportunities to streamline this process further.
3 Solution Alternatives
For the hotel reservation, you could have build the REST service anyway and not used AI or robotics at all. You could have also proposed the usage of an outsourcing model to help with quoting and take on chat interactions. Both of these options would not put Front Stage in a better position to complete with Bright Lights long term. Front Stage needs a very different approach to compete with Bright lights.