Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become a game-changer in all sectors of the industry, being used to help businesses automate repetitive activities, minimize errors, and boost productivity. As organizations aim at automating and going digital with regard to processes, it is important to learn two key categories of RPA bots: attended bots and unattended bots. The decision between the two will largely be based on the nature of the processes you wish to automate, business goals, and the size of your operations. In this article, we will disaggregate the differences between attended and unattended bots, their areas of application, and how an RPA bot development company can assist you in realizing the potential of either bot.
What Is An Attended Bot?
An attended bot is used with human workers and must have some form of human involvement in order to operate. The main role of these bots is to help employees by automating repetitive, time-consuming, or error-prone tasks. Attended bots installed in the workstation of the employee are activated on demand.
The main characteristics of Attended Bots:
- Work with human beings.
- Respond to actions or commands by the user.
- Best suited to front-office functions.
- Offer on-the-job support to workers.
- Applicable in situations where human judgment must be made.
Example Use Cases:
- Call centers: Helping customer service representatives spend less time searching through multiple systems to find the needed information in real-time.
- Banking and finance: Assisting employees with checking customer identity and conducting compliance checks more effectively.
- Healthcare: Helping personnel with patient record management and being compliant with HIPAA and other data privacy policies.
- Store operations: Making available to store associates product information, customer history information, or loyalty program information on time.
- Insurance services: Assisting field agents in confirming the details of the claims immediately whenever a customer is interacting with them.
What Is An Unattended Bot?
An unattended bot is a robot that operates on its own. These bots can be deployed on servers or the cloud, and they can run 24/7 to automate high-volume tasks that are rule-based. They are developed in such a way that human input is totally eliminated so as to have faster and better running processes.
The Notable Characteristics of Unattended Bots:
- Be autonomous.
- Schedulable or automatic.
- Suited to the back office.
- Manage massive automation procedures.
- Provide scalability of enterprise operations.
Example Use Cases:
- Payroll processing: the calculation of payroll, taxes, and deductions to be made precisely on a scale of a thousand workers.
- Invoice management: Invoice processing and validation, reducing workloads on the manual financial operations.
- Data migration: The transfer of very large quantities of data between ERP and CRM, among other enterprise applications.
- Insurance claims processing: Processing routine activities, such as policy validation, fraud detection, and approvals.
- Supply chain management: Automation of order booking, shipment communication, and tracking.
- Telecom: SIMs: Automatic activation, service, and billing.
Attended vs Unattended Bots
The primary distinction between attended bots and unattended bots is the involvement of human beings. Attended bots are used together with human workers, activated by human action, and can be used in customer-facing or front office solutions. Unattended Bots, on the other hand, do not need human intervention and can be utilized in large-scale and back-office processes.
Unattended bots generally run on the workstations of workers and provide real-time help in comparison with attended bots that simply run a program on an automatic basis on a server or other virtual machine, even when the company is closed. Although attended bots are less scalable because of the reliance on human triggers, unattended bots offer a greater level of scalability, efficacy, and affordability. The two are usually used together by businesses to create end-to-end automation.
Benefits Of Attended Bots
- Improved Employee Productivity: Attended bots can be used to relieve employees of mundane work, allowing them to do the strategic and creative work.
- Better Customer Experience: Bots will help reduce wait times, provide better and faster customer responses, and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Reduction of error: Automation of repetitive work reduces errors of human beings and provides compliance in the front desk processes.
- Ease of Deployment: They are less complex to deploy since they do not replace the current systems or workers.
- On-demand Support: Workers will be given the freedom to enable bots whenever they want, which will bring flexibility to the processes.
Benefits of Unattended Bots
- 24/7 Operations: Bots are not dependent on human schedules and may operate 24/7 to guarantee quicker turnaround rates and service.
- Cost Savings: They cut down on operational costs in the long run since Human input is minimized.
- Scalability: They can handle a very large workload, and that is why they can be used for large-scale automation.
- End-to-end automation: Automate workflows, end to end, without any human participation.
- Consistency: Bots provide the same degree of performance consistently, without variation and human exhaustion.
- Cost-Benefit: Unattended bots will most likely expend larger amounts of money in the short term, but most of them will produce higher ROI in the long term.
Choosing Between Attended And Unattended Bots
- Personality of the Process: Attended bots work better when the tasks require human judgment or partial human automation. The repetitive and rule-based duties of unattended bots are the most effective jobs.
- Business Objectives: Attended bots shine when attention is paid to customer responsiveness and concerns. The most useful type of unattended bots is with regard to the efficiency of the back office and the reduction of costs.
- Operational Scale: In businesses that process high amounts of data, unattended bots provide scale. Smaller groups may have a better time with attended bots.
- Cost-Benefit: Unattended bots will cost the companies more money in the short run, but most of them will have better ROI in the long run. Attended bots win fast and in small steps.
How Will Bots Work With Your Current IT Solutions, CRM’s, And ERPs?
RPA Bot Development Company Roles
By collaborating with a dedicated RPA bot designing firm, you are guaranteed an easy and effective automation process. These organizations come with experience in workflow analysis, identifying the appropriate approach to automation, and tailoring bots to meet your specific organizational demands.
How They Help:
- Process Assessment: Assessing your processes to understand which type of bots attended or unattended is more appropriate.
- Custom Development: Developing bots that best suit your business processes and are the most efficient.
- Integration: Bots must ensure that they are integrated with your IT infrastructure.
- Training and Enablement: Assistance in enabling the employees to know how to work with bots.
- Support & Maintenance: It provides continuous assistance in the optimization, monitoring, and upgrades to the bot.
Through intelligent automation services, companies could gain greater efficiency, better compliance, and increased customer satisfaction.
Beyond RPA Automation
Although attended and unattended bots are the essential elements of RPA, their integration with other technologies can lead to more possibilities.
Smart Automation Services
Smart automation is a mixture of RPA, AI, and natural language processing. This is used to process cognitive and complex tasks like sentiment analysis, document classification, fraud detection, and predictive analytics with bots.
QA Automation Solutions
Automation of quality assurance guarantees rapid, more efficient software testing. Through the RPA bots, businesses can test the applications regularly, minimize human error, and enhance the quality of the products before their launch. A QA-oriented strategy can also enable a business to realize quicker time-to-market.
AI Chatbot Development
When combined with attended bots, AI-powered chatbots can help improve customer service, responding to questions immediately and directing more complicated problems to human operators. In conjunction with unattended bots, they can also automate follow-up processes like report sending, appointment scheduling, or database updating. The result of this incorporation creates a powerful customer service environment.
Synergy With A Website Development Company
An organization that deals with RPA solutions can have an intelligent website developed by a website development company that will develop automated websites that are easy to deal with. RPA promotes user interaction and decreases the workload of the operation, increasing the customization of content and supporting automated chat.
Unattended Bots vs Attended Bots: The Future Of RPA.
The future of automation is combining attended and unattended bots to produce a hybrid workforce. This method is the most efficient one, because it combines the advantages of both types:
- Attended bots are used to complete customer-facing and real-time tasks requiring human decisions.
- Unattended bots are bots that handle high-volume processes that work in the back-end and do not require any human intervention.
The combination enables businesses to achieve end-to-end automation, without limiting flexibility or human control where it counts. Another advantage of hybrid deployments is that organizations achieve the ability to trade off customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Conclusion
Both attended and unattended bots represent an essential part of the current RPA. Unattended bots may be used to increase the efficiency of employees in the work process as they perform high volumes of repetitive tasks (Soo 2017), and attended bots may be used to increase the productivity of employees through real-time assistance. It depends on what is the best decision based on your business needs, although combining both can be the most successful.
Collaboration with an established RPA bot development company and the use of intelligent automation services, QA automation solutions, AI chatbot development, and a website development firm can assist you in developing a balanced automation approach. With the combination of the human brain with the accuracy of robots, companies will be more efficient, scaled to larger heights, with more customer satisfaction in the digital-first world.
