Hyperautomation: What it is and why your enterprise needs it
Today’s enterprises are finding new ways to automate business processes to expand operations, increase sales, and improve customer experience. Automating complex operations, however, requires a lot of data-dependent processing, integrated technology stacks, and orchestration. Hyperautomation solves these issues through a combination of reimagined business processes, enterprise data assets, and technology accelerators. Enterprises can use hyperautomation not only to process actions and data faster, but also to redefine customer journeys, provide quantifiable outcomes, and operate with agility and resiliency.
What is hyperautomation: EXL’s point of view
While hyperautomation might be a popular business buzzword, the concept is beyond a trend. Hyperautomation is a real and significant business approach— with varying definitions depending upon who you ask. The common factor about hyperautomation is the combination of technology solutions and business processes that allow a company to make decisions more quickly and with better information. Simply defined by Gartner, hyperautomation is a business-driven approach to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.1
The term hyperautomation was first used in 2019. Acceptance of this concept grew dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced enterprises to digitize and automate processes that allowed employees to work remotely and virtually. As the world comes out of the global shut-down of the pandemic, the shift to digital business models continues to grow. Gartner estimates that by 2025, the market for software that enables hyperautomation will reach nearly $860 billion, with a 12.3% compounded annual growth.2
Benefits of hyperautomation
Hyperautomation provides expanded visibility into business tasks and processes and arranges work across multiple systems, rule engines and workflows. A successful hyperautomation project allows an organization to improve their operations in the following ways: perform work faster; reduce manual and repetitive tasks; standardize business processes; improve the quality of the work produced; and increase capabilities to complete more transactions, grow the number of customers and/or expand its products or services.
These operational benefits translate into three significant business benefits. First, in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, faster is better—whether that is getting a new product to the market, or executing on a customer’s request, or settling an insurance claim. Hyperautomation increases speed to market for a product or service offering.
Second, enterprise technology spend is an enormous operational expense. To remain competitive with their peers, companies will continue to significantly invest in these core digital assets. Hyperautomation generates more impact from existing digital solutions, increasing the business value of these investments and improving a company’s bottom line.
Third, and possibly the most important, hyperautomation provides enhanced business insights that are more accurate and trustworthy. Business outcomes are more transparent. Better decisions can be made faster. Moreover, these insights can be scaled and applied to future decisions, creating a continuous cycle of improvement within an organization.
EXL digital solutions for hyperautomation
For EXL, hyperautomation is a way for clients to set up their enterprise to operationalize AI, analytics, automation, and the cloud to redesign the customer experience in an agile manner. EXL offers a collection of digital solutions to enable a hyperautomation initiative across an enterprise. These modular solutions are designed with reusable, scalable components that allow for rapid deployment, minimizing time to market and maximizing business impact:
Automated intelligent extraction from unstructured documents
EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ is content extraction solution powered by AI and NLP that eliminates the manual processing of unstructured text and images. EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ replaces the labor-intensive effort of searching for and keying in information. Instead, EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ relies on reusable ML engineering components that rapidly processes large volumes of multiple document types. This solution reduces costs, improves speed and accuracy, and provides new data for better decisions.
Enhanced customer interactions using conversational AI
EXL EXELIA.AI™ is a virtual customer experience assistant that offers humanlike interactions through voice and chat. EXL EXELIA.AI™ allows end users to be self-sufficient in solving their queries by accessing online information delivered through next-generation NLP and contextual understanding. This technologydriven customer experience provides speed and efficiency for the user and reduces mundane and repetitive tasks for the customer service agent.
Continuous event monitoring for proactive signals
EXL Smart Audit is an AI-based quality audit solution that enables agile decisionmaking through relevant customer data points and insights. EXL Smart Audit combines data, analytics, AI and ML, and technology and process expertise to produce actionable insights. The solution enhances a company’s regulatory compliance and reduces financial exposure.
Optimized receivables management using AI-led customer engagement
EXL Paymentor™ is an AI-powered collections and receivables management solution that covers collection operations and analytics. Utilizing automation and data enrichment, EXL Paymentor™ improves debt collections by increasing the liquidation rate.
EXL’s approach: Focus on the orchestration
To streamline and improve the customer experience, EXL engages with companies to optimize their operations with customerdriven interactions and transactions such as insurance, banking and financial services and healthcare. Even though EXL offers digital solutions to achieve hyperautomation, the company views hyperautomation “as-a-service” and focuses on the orchestration of technology and processes.
When implementing a hyperautomation solution, EXL first looks at the business problem a client needs to solve, and then applies its people, processes and technology to operationalize a hyperautomation project. The work often includes some combination of EXL digital solutions combined with a client’s existing technology assets. This approach is the heart of the EXL Hyperautomation Center of Excellence (CoE), a collection of EXL experts and resources whose sole purpose is to accelerate a client’s digital transformation.
Specifically, EXL offers three key features when engaging with clients on hyperautomation projects. First, EXL identifies and designs the right journeys or processes to be automated. Second, EXL offers domain-led solutions to be implemented to drive this transformation. These digital solutions include offerings for the cloud, customer experience, intelligent process automation (IPA) and workflow platforms, data and analytics, and AI and machine learning. Third, EXL supplies experienced professionals who can deliver the work including program managers, QA/testing, enterprise digital architects, business analysts and integration experts. Clients come to EXL usually with one of the following problems they are trying to solve: they have multiple siloed projects, their existing technology is not sufficient for what they are trying to achieve, or they have a multi-year project and they want to execute their roadmap faster.
For a multi-year project, EXL can work to accelerate a client’s existing automation or planned automation projects, such data analytics or AI, leveraging the cloud. Clients come with an existing road map for their hyperautomation project and EXL provides the professional expertise to help scale and accelerate the work.
EXL’s approach to hyperautomation combines automation, AI, and analytics capabilities, orchestrated into cloud-based solutions to deliver transformational benefits to clients. This approach focuses on shifting clients toward a future-ready, “thin-human AI operating system” architecture branded as EXL AI:OS™. The EXL AI:OS™ architecture embeds intelligence via data, analytics, and AI into all decisions within an enterprise. EXL uses its proprietary framework, EXLERATOR.AI™, to deliver intelligent automation services including data-led process discovery, upstream AI and process redesign by code, and agile execution.
Underpinning EXL’s service delivery are a variety of proprietary tools, platforms, and methodologies, such as EXL Nervehub™ for discovery and process mining, EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ for intelligent document processing, EXL Management Information Assistant to process business intelligence and data visualization, the low-code LDSSM 2.0 insurance platform for enhancing new business and underwriting, and the conversational AI EXL EXELIA.AI™.
EXL seamlessly integrates its domain expertise with hyperautomation capabilities to build pre-configured industry specific solutions such as the AI-led collections solution EXL Paymentor™, EXL’s point of sale lending solution for automated credit origination and servicing, and EXL SmartAudit.AI solution for automated control reviews and insights. Bringing these tools together with EXL’s domain expertise helps create value for clients.
The most common challenge that clients encounter is dealing with multiple siloed automation projects. Due to the spread of these varied projects and goals, it becomes difficult for a client to realize both the value and scale as needed. Similarly, siloed projects can lead to a siloed mindset. EXL works with clients to view their hyperautomation project from an enterprise capability rather than the siloed execution of multiple projects. By having an enterprise strategy, then the work can be done on individual projects that deliver to that vision. EXL clients have achieved tremendous success with their digital transformation through hyperautomation, often realizing 50-100% higher returns than traditional automation services.
How EXL’s hyperautomation approach generates results for clients
Client 1: A top insurance broker wanted to scale its transformation efforts to improve its customer service program across five geographies, the UK, EMEA, NAM, Latin America and APAC. The EXL team of experts in data science, solution architects, lean Six Sigma, and automation reviewed existing business processes to find activities to optimize and automate within the client’s contact center operations. They examined the customer journey model and agile delivery model. The EXL team revised processes for the client’s digital services receiving center by integrating automated workflows combined with using EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ throughout the enterprise to gather more and new data in a useful and efficient manner.
Using this combination of revised processes and digital technology, the client was able to extract two to five times more data out of its existing information streams. Using this data, the client implemented conversational AI within their contact centers that enabled more efficient interactions with their customers. The results were a 5-10% increase in customer satisfaction, a 15-20% reduction in cycle times, a 5x-10x return on investment for their digital initiatives, and a savings of $300M.
Client 2: To effectively service its growing client base, one of the leading insurance brokerage firms in the U.S. had to find a more efficient way of issuing Certificates of Insurance (COIs) to insurance requestors. The client’s process of providing COIs was painfully manual and capital intensive. They lacked the advanced analytics necessary to extract meaningful data from unstructured, semistructured and structured request data, and had no common platform for exchanging information between the stakeholders involved in requesting, sending and receiving COIs.
After an initial discovery and planning phase, EXL built its solution on the cloud and integrated it with the client’s technology ecosystem, providing training, business analysis and change management services to support ongoing efforts.
Central to the solution was EXL XTRAKTO.AI™. It effectively automated COI processing by leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision capabilities for extracting, classifying and templatizing information across the client’s integrated host systems. EXL XTRAKTO.AI™ AI-powered user interface facilitated quick user validation of data, freeing the company’s dedicated staff to focus on core business activities, while slashing COI processing time and cost.
The solution went live October 2021. At start up, the new system was reporting 50% accuracy reading disparate inputs for requests. Within three months, the client achieved outcomes including a 30% OPEX reduction, a 30-70% cycle time decrease, and enhanced customer experiences.