Employing a Virtual Workforce with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Just ask your Customer Service Representatives, "What is the toughest or most annoying part of your daily tasks?" The answer may not surprise you. You may find that your workforce is spending a large amount of time on things that are necessary, but repetitive. Frankly, these items do not add significant value to the business and, in turn, they diminish employee satisfaction. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is built to handle tasks that are slowing down your employees, as well as ones that are just very boring for them to do. A trusted partner can help you figure out where automation can add to the efficiency and effectiveness of your Contact Center or Back Office.

Microsoft has issued an Exchange Server Security Update on April 13, 2021 for companies with an on-premises deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019. This affects both on-premises and hybrid deployments of Exchange Online. Exchange Hybrid users are less affected. However, the FBI’s recommendation is to patch this vulnerability as soon as possible.

Recently, I was asked to speak about Public Cloud Services, and specifically, CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) during a training call. It was actually really good timing, because this has been a hot topic with vendors, partners, and customers. In those discussions, I find that there’s a lot of misconceptions about what CPaaS actually is. As mentioned, CPaaS stands for Communication Platform as a Service, but even that term can mislead you into thinking that it’s a much broader and more inclusive thing than it actually is.

As companies look to modernize their IT systems to compete in today’s digital world, cloud is the vehicle of choice to accelerate digital transformation. Just a few years ago, there was an idea that just getting to the cloud would provide all the answers, and we observed a hastened rush to the cloud that didn’t always prove out. The takeaway is that organizations should be taking the time to develop a comprehensive cloud strategy that addresses their specific business needs and ensures they are receiving the greatest possible value from their cloud investments.

Harvard Business Review published an article on “Reinventing Customer Service,” and I believe they—and one of our customers—are onto something.

I consult with companies from many markets that are scattered across the United States, and most of them had to pivot last year when the COVID pandemic hit. Scrambling for answers for a remote workforce, some were better prepared than others. Almost universally, they took budgets they had for things like data center and sank those funds into remote workforce initiatives. With the change in our work standards, we must define what our new “normal” is and determine what investments we should make in the core, edge, and cloud.

The Cisco Meraki MX and Z3 have the native ability via presets to do Meraki AutoVPN or AWS/Azure-native IPSec VPN. Both your existing facilities and Public Cloud presence can also host and accept IPSec. AWS Cloud Hub or Azure vHub can host and accept and function as—you guessed it—an IPSec Hub.

When we think about the world of Contact Centers, the concept we’re describing is the ability to get someone’s request for something routed to the best person to handle that request. That “something” started out as phone calls, made by someone calling into a group of people (known as agents) who could answer that phone call and help the caller with their request.

On a global scale, there are about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. The data grows exponentially by ten times every five years, and as the data being created continues to grow, the need to store, clean, process, and analyze the data is becoming a growing concern for many organizations. We are now storing and analyzing data in a different class beyond CRM and ERP systems, and our data includes more social media, web analytics, and IoT data from various devices, as well as machine-generated log data.

This blog post was co-authored by Kathy Sobus (Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy, ConvergeOne) and LumenVox.