 Hey everyone, good afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, day two of UiPath Forward Six. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. One of the things we noted yesterday when this event kicked off was the voice of the customer was so, not only impactful, it was dramatically impactful. We're going to be talking about that with one of UiPath's customers next. Two guests joined Dave and me. Zainab Abbas is here, Operational Excellence and Intelligent Process Automation Specialist at Finastra. And Brad Bimer is here as well. He's Senior Director of CX and Contact Center Automation Lead at UiPath. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. I always love talking about customer stories and really the impact that the technology is making. But Zainab, give the audience an overview of Finastra. What kind of business is it, what do you guys do? Yeah, definitely, it's great being here as well. So Finastra is a leading technology, financial technology company. It provides financial technology services and software solutions to financial institutions globally. And amongst many other, many elements that it's part of, one of the key areas it focuses on is lending as well, treasury, credit unions. So several financial institutions to provide services. And I'm an operational excellence lead there. So my focus is on finding operational efficiencies at both within the contact center as well as within the back office, trying to find what kind of mundane tasks we can take away and then allow time for our employees to focus on the value added items. That's what they want, they want to focus on the value add. Give us a little bit of the back stories Zainab, in terms of some of the challenges with Ross's efficiencies, with mundane tasks before you found UIPath. What were some of those challenges that the organization said, we got to knock these off our plate? So great question. So one thing that I wanted to share with everyone is we came from a culture of just being all paper and call us for 20 plus years. To go away from calling us and sending us papers to driving customers to self-serve online was a huge transformation journey. We've done amazing work in the last several years and been able to reduce our manual workload by over 50%, our calls have dropped by over 50%. Now, the reason we wanted to work with UIPath and look at automation solutions is the work that's left now, the calls that continue to come into the contact center after everyone is self-serving is are the complex scenarios. The scenarios where our call handling or our average handling time continues to increase zero every year because we're left with the more difficult calls where customers are not able to self-serve. So that's where we realize, okay, great transformation journey. Now we need to focus on what we can do with the calls. We anticipate to continue coming in. So Brad, we've all been on the other side of the contact center. I don't know if you could take us inside the contact center. What's the environment like? What are the professionals that are on the other end of the line doing and how can you improve their experience which then trickles out, I guess, to the customer? Yeah, it's a challenging and complex environment for contact center agents. Typically, we see a lot of systems that they have to know and learn while at the same time they're trying to service the customer. They're trying to provide the empathy, they're trying to provide the soft skills that are needed to really give that exceptional customer experience. This is one of the areas where AI and automation can really help in taking a lot of that work off of the agent's plate by automating into those systems, creating that single view, giving them alerts and updates on a nice fresh screen that gives them everything that they need to know about that customer. And again, it's a little bit of a great customer experience. So, I mean, a free sort of AI, I mean, it's been around for a long time, I know, but you would have contact center agents like on chat managing multiple customers. As a customer, you could kind of tell this poor soul. There were metrics, right? How many you could handle at once? Now, that's dramatically changed now. Can you describe just sort of the maturity model and where we are today in terms of that capability? Yeah, a lot of the customers that I used to talk to when I first started in this space were really just interested in cost savings. How can we take cost out of the business by reducing average handling time and then some other key metrics that we tend to impact. I would say that's shifted to where those metrics are still important, but really customer satisfaction metrics like net promoter score, customer effort score, really getting to how we can, I keep going back to this, but providing that great customer experience and measuring that we're providing a great customer experience. Speaking of customer experiences, and I'm talk about that because Dave brought up a real world example of when we're all dealing with this. You talked about what Financer was able to do to get a lot of tasks into the hands of the customers to be able to self serve, but those challenging projects that need still human intervention, how have you improved the customer experience? Because to Brad's point, that is so, from a brand reputation perspective, it's so important. It is extremely important, you're right. And so the way that our voice continues to transform now is the customers are having a quicker call experience, a lot of seamless experience. And it's not just helping the customers, it's also helping the employees because now our employees are more empowered to actually focus on the complex cases and not worry about the transactional items and the transactional elements that now our bots and automation are taking care of. So the experience is more seamless now. Customers are leaving happier over the phone calls. The accuracy has increased tremendously because now we have streamlined our work and standardized a lot of work that the agents are doing thanks to the automation. So because of the streamlining, the accuracy is accurate. Everyone's doing the work the same way they would have done otherwise because of the streamlining and standardizations. So our accuracy has improved, customers are happier because they don't have to call back again for any kind of concerns that they have due to accuracy and our call handling experience has overall been very enhanced. I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience because I always see, and I want to get your take too Brad, employee experience, customer experience are like this. They are inextricably lengthy. Employee experience has to be really stellar for them to deliver to the customers. It's not a nice to have. Yeah, absolutely. And that is one of our core principles is that you do not just for contact center but really UI path as a whole because at the employee experience, great employee experience will lead to great customer experiences. There are a lot of great quotes out there on that. So I won't rehash those, but this is where automation really helps with taking a lot of those things that the agent has to do those tasks that the customer goes on hold. Maybe there's awkward silence time while they're shifting and going between one system or another. Well, for robots doing that, what can the agent do? If the agent can talk to the customer, maybe they're more rapidly responding to that live chat request. And that ultimately leads to not only a better employee experience but also the better customer experience. I mean, you are seeing it. It reminds me of fraud detection. You remember what used to be, well, you got to check your bank statement because six months later, something can happen, right? And now fraud detection happens in an instant. And as a consumer, you're definitely seeing an improvement in customer service from contact centers. Not always. You could tell who's not using automation and those who are. So my question is, so how are you using automation specifically UI path? Are you bundling it into your service? And yeah. So with UI path, we leverage their RPN apps capabilities and what we're doing is taking, it's a six to one ratio. So for every six applications that the agents were currently using on two separate monitors and screens has now been pushed into this one UI path tool or sidebar application we call, which allows the agent to just use the one application and perform the same actions and features they would have done on six different applications. So they actually no longer may need two separate screens anymore or two monitors because it simplified the whole desktop experience for them at this point. You mentioned the culture of the organization was so paper based. It's hard. Change is hard if it's also constant, right? We all know that. I always say, get comfortably uncomfortable, whether it's your personal life or business life, but talk about how the culture of the organization as Finaster has changed. How UI path has been an accelerant of that. Adoption going from so paper based and call based to automated. No, big change. It's a huge change. And embracing change is the second nature to Finaster. So a huge part of embracing change is change management. It's a huge element. Resistance to change is always there at some point or the other, but if you have to, if you involve the employees at every action that you're taking, value their feedback, get surveys, ensure that they're part of the journey. One thing we did with at least the context center project is delivered as a digital assistant for the agents. We didn't actually introduce it as an automation piece. We introduced it as it's your digital assistant to help you out with your task. And change management is played a key role in ensuring that everyone's able to embrace that and there's no resistance. So constant feedback, working with them, check-ins, ensuring that they're actually using it well and value their feedback. Whatever you could come back to the metrics a little bit. Brad, you mentioned NPS. The problem I have with NPS is it's like every time I fly first class, I get a survey. That's like, how do we do? And then every time we're delayed by an hour and a half, two hours, three hours, you never get the survey. So there are metrics, though. The time on the phone, mean time to resolution, callbacks, things like that that you don't have to take a survey, you can't really game those. So how prominent are those in the industry and what are you seeing in terms of, even anecdotally, in terms of progress? Well, maybe answer your question with a question. When you get those surveys, does it necessarily, and you give them a high mark, that airline a high mark? Does it mean that you're going to fly with that airline the next time? Maybe, maybe, or maybe not. So one of the challenges with NPS, and I'll talk about how we can address those with metrics, is that it doesn't necessarily mean that a customer isn't going to churn to one of your competitors. But this is where other metrics, especially the newer metrics that AI can help measure, like sentiment analysis, like churn prediction, can come into play so that way a customer can be more proactive about preventing that customer from maybe going to a competitor or to another customer. In that sentiment analysis might be, so you take a look at the transcript and analyze the transcript, or maybe even voice tension. Yeah, voice analytics. Voice analytics is happening now, right? And it could be, I'm talking a lot about phone, or speaking a lot about phone calls now, but this also applies to emails, it applies to chat, and then what happens when you bring all those together? You get this holistic view of the tone, how your quality of service, what your quality of service is for that particular customer across all your channels, across all your interactions, and then that gives you that better churn prediction, that better idea of how you're doing with your customers. Then what's next for Finaster, going beyond RPA? What do you see in that future vision? So we're really excited, and I know you just touched on it right now. We are looking to go beyond RPA, and RPA was just the foundations, like the building block to build upon what else is to come. So we're looking into voice analytics, speech analytics to understand what real-time trends are for our customers when they're calling in, what customer sentiments, how that plays a role, and then of course personalization. How do you personalize the customer's experience and tailor and cater to that specific customer that's calling in? So we're really excited about what else is to come, especially when you have complex scenarios like the ones we have, to tailor that experience, we'll just take our customer satisfaction that top notch up. Oh, that's huge, because you know, I mentioned getting comfortably uncomfortable, whether it's personal or business, and another thing is that that personalized experience, we want it, whatever we're transacting with. Definitely. Whether it's getting a ride share or getting a laundry service or getting information about our financials, we expect these days that it is a tailored experience to me, and you're going to be able to solve my problem fast. You're right, and I think you nailed it. It's an expectation now. It's not something that's good to have, and I think as long as companies are jumping on the bag in and continuing with that progress, and knowing that this is going to be an expectation going forward, and you work on your agenda and your next long-term goals based on that expectation, you will only be delivering excellence going forward. That's what we all demand, is that excellence. Saina, Brad, thank you so much for joining, David and Anna. Thank you guys so much. You're really sharing how Finaster is really driving forward culturally with automation and what's next. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us. All right, our pleasure. For our Gaston for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We have more voice of the customer conversations coming up next. Let's stick around. We'll see you in just a few minutes. Great, thank you.