RPA & Chatbots – the perfect love story

Companies worldwide are adopting robotic process automation (RPA in record numbers. According to Grand View Research, the global Robotic Process Automation market will reach $3.7 billion in 2028. This is a compound annual growth rate of 32.8%.

Businesses aren't far behind in deploying chatbots, a fast-growing technology. Since 2015, the global chatbot market has seen a tremendous increase. Looking ahead, IMARC Group anticipates that the market will grow at a remarkable CAGR of 25% through 2026. Chatbots are being used by two-thirds (or more) of European companies. This is a rapidly growing trend.

Is chatbot technology a good investment for businesses? Chatbots are used primarily to provide customer support and product advice. Most chatbots handle only the initial contact with customers. After that, the customer is transferred to a human representative.

Someone had the brilliant idea to combine the two technologies—RPA and chatbots. RPA chatbots can now automate many customer-facing processes in virtually every industry. Six out of 10 companies believe that all large businesses will eventually need chatbots to stay competitive.

RPA & chatbots

A chatbot uses artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with humans in a conversational, natural-sounding way. Chatbots can be used to cut down the time it takes customers to get support via an app or website. Chatbots can perform basic tasks such as tracking shipment status or checking account balances, can improve customer service at a fraction of the cost of human agents.

Robotic Processing Automation (RPA). Automates repetitive tasks in a business process that were previously performed manually by human workers. RPA was initially developed by businesses to lower the cost of human workers and increase productivity. RPA can be combined with AI to create intelligent automation to perform more complicated tasks.

What is the difference between RPA and chatbots?

Both automate vital business tasks. They offer similar benefits, including speed, consistency, lower costs, dependability, productivity, and better customer experience. They do differ at this stage in their respective technology developments.

RPA is used to automate business processes. These include data mining, data cleansing, and workflow automation.

Chatbots are used to communicate information with customers via chat. Chatbots can respond quickly to customer questions when human workers can't. This is an essential attribute of chatbots. They can communicate with humans in human terms and understand them. There are also limitations.

Chatbots cannot provide answers beyond the data they are connected. The relevant information is scattered across multiple systems that chatbots cannot access in most cases. Chatbots are limited in providing basic answers, but they cannot execute tasks that result from interactions.

Chatbots can inform customers about their credit limits, but they cannot process credit limit increases requests without human intervention. RPA can overcome these limitations.

This is what makes RPA and chatbot technology such a compelling combination. When you combine the RPA process automation capabilities with the communication capabilities of chatbots, you get experiences that go far beyond simply answering questions. These technologies are more complex and exciting when AI is integrated.

These capabilities all work together remarkably. An example: A chatbot that is externally accessible could chat with customers. However, an RPA bot could gather information from various internal systems and make it available to the chatbot.

An internal chatbot would also be helpful for employees. It would allow them not to learn how different systems work and provide them with a simplified way to communicate with them. Instead, they could ask the chatbots to do a task for them or collect information.