Efficient customer service is becoming increasingly important these days, it is used by companies as a point of differentiation from their competition. They serve customer needs to be able to raise their issues with a company at any time, from any location, using different communication channels. These issues can relate to orders or complaints or they are simply product or service inquiries. In order to meet these customer requirements without driving up personnel costs, the use of hyperautomation in customer service is worthwhile. In this blog article, we highlight a solution for hyperautomation based on Cognigy and the SAP CX Service Cloud.

What is hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation is the integrative and interactive combination of automation technologies and software products to enable end-to-end business process automation. This involves combining robotic process automation, document understanding, process mining and virtual assistants, among other things, to create automation solutions that would not be possible using the individual technologies in a siloed manner.

How does hyperautomation help in customer service?

We use Cognigy’s solutions for customer service automation and virtual assistants. The text and speech-based products use industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for understanding and processing human language (natural language understanding and natural language processing). The end user can interact with a virtual assistant across multiple communication channels and address their issues via self-service – and even in multiple languages thanks to real-time language translation. As Cognigy is a German provider, the solutions are compliant with EU law.

The possible conversation scenarios that the virtual assistant can cover are defined via conversation design. This defines the course of conversations as well as user intentions and example sentences, which are used by the AI to understand and respond to user input. Third-party systems such as the SAP CX Service Cloud can be connected via an interface to access, add or change data and information.

Practical example

As a premium car manufacturer, you want to give your end customers the automated option of making a service and maintenance appointment with your workshop for their vehicle. Let’s go through the example for a fleet owner with 20 registered vehicles.

All customer-related data is already located in the SAP CX Service Cloud: The master data of the customers and contact persons are available, and the vehicles belonging to the respective customer are also clearly stored as registered products (e.g. via the chassis number).

If the customer wants to make a maintenance appointment for one of the cars assigned to him, he calls the service hotline (see video below). This call is routed to a virtual assistant workflow defined on Cognigy. Afterward, the customer deals exclusively with the virtual assistant by telephone. Your customer will be asked what their issue or request is (in this case, booking a maintenance appointment) and asked to identify themselves accordingly. To do this, he provides his customer number verbally or via telephone keypad.

The customer is now sent a link via SMS; thus ending the verbal interaction. After opening the link, all vehicles registered to the customer are listed. (Note: The change of interaction channel, from a telephone call to SMS/link, takes place at this point only for demonstration purposes, in order to highlight the omnichannel communication ability. There is no process or technical reason for this switch).

The customer now simply selects the vehicle for which he would like to make a maintenance appointment. He is then offered the opportunity to select a specific day and time and add a remark or comment.

After entering all necessary information, a service ticket and the corresponding appointment, which is needed for further processing, are created in the SAP CX Service Cloud. At the same time, the customer receives the booking confirmation as an e-mail.

The entire process is automated by means of virtual assistants and requires no interaction from a service employee. The customer is guided through the procedure by the developed “Conversational Design” process to provide all the required data and information. For this purpose, the virtual assistant is connected to the SAP CX Service Cloud via an open data interface, it posts necessary transactions that were previously entered by the customer to the system. The customer can also go back to the virtual assistant in the event of queries, as application-related FAQs and other components are also implemented.

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Summary and conclusion

Hyperautomation offers you the possibility to automate business processes cost-effectively across different channels and systems. Increases in efficiency of up to 50 per cent can be achieved in comparison to traditional customer contact via a service center. The 24-hour availability of services also increases customer satisfaction, which in turn can secure long-term competitive advantages. In addition to this, virtual assistants only have to be developed and implemented just once. They can be executed from there and translated into more than 100 target languages on demand.

In the practical example above, it was shown how customers can access customer service at any time via several communication channels – in this case telephone, SMS and web portal.

What’s more, the practical example shows how several systems – in this case Cognigy and SAP CX Service Cloud – can be integrated using standard SAP interfaces. Far more complex business processes can also be covered. This means the cost structure remains manageable while, at the same time, expanding customer service.

If you are interested in a system demo or have any other questions on the subject of hyperautomation, please feel free to contact us.

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