In brief:
- Digital communication channels are creating an overwhelming number of messages for employees to field – impacting productivity and response times.
- Communications Mining is an AI-powered automation solution that extracts valuable insights from unstructured data like emails, chats, social media, and more – transforming business communications into actionable information.
- Communications Mining creates an unprecedented opportunity for businesses to enhance the customer experience across multiple channels, create operational efficiencies, and minimize tedious manual tasks.
- UiPath’s Communication Mining tool offers benefits others don’t – helping companies achieve true end-to-end process automation.
With remote and hybrid work firmly entrenched in business models, digital communication has become the lifeblood of workplace communication and productivity. But while digital channels make it easy for employees to interact internally and externally with customers, they also are creating an overwhelming number of messages to field that impact productivity and response times – spanning emails, instant messages, online chats, notes in enterprise systems, social media, support tickets, and more.
Fortunately, AI-powered automation has enabled a new solution, Communications Mining – streamlining operations and improving customer experiences by identifying and extracting insights and opportunities across communication sources at speed and scale.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of Communications Mining technology from the #1 AI-powered automation platform, UiPath. And learn how an experienced intelligent automation partner can help you leverage the power of communication data to gain a competitive advantage for your business.
Business communication increased by 78% over the past 12 months
In today’s data-driven world, effective communication is fundamental to successful services and business operations. Yet despite its importance, most business communication remains unstructured and largely siloed, hindering the potential value it could offer. Exchanging messages or words is not enough – businesses must effectively mine the valuable insights that exist within their communication data.
Here’s the challenge: the State of Business Communication 2024 report by Harris Poll and Grammarly found that workplace communication is increasing dramatically, with 78% of professionals saying they experienced greater frequency in the past year. More than 70% also report a wider range of communication channels.
This surge translates to knowledge workers now dedicating an astonishing 88% of their workweek to cross-channel communication, the poll found.
Managing this deluge of messages is a daunting task. The constant switching between apps, coupled with the overwhelming volume of information, distracts employees from actual work and leaves room for costly inefficiencies to creep in.
It also leads to longer response times, impacting service quality and customer satisfaction in an era where customers increasingly expect instant responses to questions or concerns.
What is Communications Mining?
Communication Mining utilizes the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to convert digital communication into a structured data format. This machine-readable data is then systematically analyzed to generate actionable insights – helping organizations not only understand what people are saying, but how frequently they are saying it, and in what context.
This information can also be used to automate business conversations and requests.
Here’s how Communications Mining works:
Step 1: Data ingestion and analysis
UiPath’s Communication Mining solution connects to various communication channels and data sources, ingesting large volumes of unstructured text data. Advanced NLP algorithms analyze the text – identifying patterns, sentiment, emotion, and intent of the communication.
Step 2: AI-powered categorization
UiPath’s platform utilizes CommPath – a specialized, proprietary large language model (LLM) trained for communications understanding – for automated message labeling and categorization. The system groups similar themes and intents together to provide a clear overview of communication patterns.
Step 3: Actionable insights and automation
Extracted insights are visualized in dashboards and can trigger automated actions through the UiPath Business Automation Platform.
Model training is fast and easy with zero coding – enabling rapid scaling as business users can analyze and automate their communications work regardless of technical ability. With complete visibility into communications channels, users gain a deeper understanding of their business and customers, and the ability to spot opportunities for business improvement and transformation.
Popular Communications Mining use cases include:
5 key benefits of Communications Mining for your business
1. Visibility into trends and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed
Ineffective communication can have concrete and significant consequences, with misalignment, disengagement, and waste leading to lost productivity.
Communications Mining provides businesses with a comprehensive, unified view of their communication landscape – uncovering hidden trends, issues, and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
By analyzing unstructured communications data from emails, tickets, instant messages, and more, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of the root causes behind internal and customer communications. The reasons behind customer churn become more visible, for example, when you can process what people are saying across all communication channels in real-time.
2. Greater efficiency and productivity
Communications Mining significantly boosts efficiency, uncovering process issues and opportunities to apply automation to streamline operations and reduce tedious manual work. It also increases productivity and employee happiness – with less time spent combing through messages, investigating customer issues, and validating opportunities, employees gain bandwidth to focus on more interesting and value-adding tasks.
For example, Communications Mining can identify bottlenecks and areas for process improvement, ultimately leading to faster turnaround times. Communications Mining further enables businesses to automate transactional requests and workflows.
3. Enhanced customer service
Poor communication can have high costs for businesses. About 20% of business leaders report losing out on deals due to ineffective communication, according to the State of Business Communication report.
Conversely, 43% of business leaders credit effective communication for driving new business.
Communications Mining offers enterprises an unprecedented opportunity to enhance the customer experience across multiple channels – speeding response times, enabling more consistent service, helping to personalize interactions, and providing deeper insights into customer needs and challenges. Alerts also notify organizations of changes to service quality so they can get ahead of emerging issues.
Ultimately, these benefits translate into better service metrics and revenue opportunities. Bain & Company analysis shows that companies excelling in customer experience outperform the market by 4-8% (“The Five Disciplines of Customer Experience Leaders”).
4. Data-driven decision making
Unstructured data like emails, documents, chat logs, and social media posts lack a predefined format. So, while this vast repository holds critical business information like customer preferences, requirements, and interactions, most organizations fail to capitalize on this untapped goldmine.
A Foundry research report revealed that 61% of IT leaders struggle with unstructured data management, while 24% neglect it entirely in their data and analytics strategies.
By harnessing the power of data-driven insights from communication data, organizations can gain a better understanding of their customers – making informed decisions that enhance customer experience and drive bottom-line growth. Organizations that are data-driven are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result, according to a Forbes report.
5. Lower costs
Instead of implementing custom AI software for each communication platform at a high cost, Communications Mining can be applied across all channels, in one go. It provides complete visibility into business interactions, helping companies better understand their customers and where improvements will have the biggest impact – thus, reducing overall costs.
Why organizations are choosing UiPath’s Communications Mining platform
In 2022, UiPath expanded its business automation platform by acquiring Re:infer, a leader in NLP and conversational intelligence, and integrated its AI technology as UiPath Communications Mining.
In a 2023 ISG Provider Lens, global technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group (ISG) concluded that adding Communications Mining to the UiPath platform “bolsters its already burgeoning position as one of the world’s leading providers of intelligent automation solutions for enterprises.” As the #1 intelligent automation platform, UiPath’s tools are consistently ranked by independent research firms like Gartner, Everest Group, and ISG as leaders across automation categories.
Much of the beauty of UiPath Communications Mining lies in its accessibility. With no-code technology that is easily trained, it empowers employees at any level to analyze and automate their communication tasks.
But ISG notes it is the synergies created between Communications Mining and the rest of UiPath’s platform that create exceptional benefits for organizations. With the addition of Communications Mining, companies can achieve true end-to-end automation of business processes. “It starts to unify the communications, process discovery, and task mining spheres, and opens up vast new unexplored territory in the areas of unstructured data such as contact center interactions and social media,” ISG writes.
UiPath robotic process automation (RPA) can then take action based on extracted data and requests. ISG also praised UiPath’s solution for its greater scalability, powerful analytics capabilities, and wider range of integrations with major technology platforms compared to competitor solutions.
Performance-wise, this 2024 tool analysis explains why UiPath Communications Mining consistently outperformed other tools like Google AutoML in accuracy and efficiency, particularly in data-scarce environments.
UiPath summarizes the business impact of its Communications Mining technology as follows:
With enterprise-grade security and multiple language support, UiPath offers a strong and adaptable solution for businesses seeking to extract value from their communications data.
Why Auxis: Delivering maximum value through automated communications solutions
While UiPath Communications Mining offers powerful capabilities, successful implementation of AI-powered automation requires expertise and strategic planning. As a UiPath Platinum Partner, Auxis comes to the table with the certified talent, best practices, and experience to translate cutting-edge AI technology like Communication Mining into innovative automation solutions.
That includes:
- Assessing your current communication landscape and identifying the most impactful areas for implementation.
- Developing tailored communication strategies that aligns Communications Mining with your broader business objectives.
- Providing expert guidance on customizing and training AI models to your specific industry and use cases.
- Ensuring seamless integration with your existing systems and workflows.
Partner with Auxis to unlock the power of automated communication today!
Want to learn more about how Auxis can help you get AI-powered insights by leveraging UiPath Communications Mining and other automation technologies? Schedule a consultation with our intelligent automation experts today! To read a detailed comparison of the best RPA tools in 2024, click here. Or, visit our resource center for intelligent automation tips, strategies, and success stories.
