Attended versus unattended RPA bots
RPA bots can work in both “attended” and “unattended” modes. Typically targeted toward front-office activities, attended bots are useful when the entire end-to-end process can’t be automated. RPA bots can work alongside humans to deliver attended automation. In such cases, the actions of RPA bots can still be triggered by system-level events that can give and take data to and from human workers.
Unattended RPA bots execute tasks and interact with applications independent of human involvement. Unattended bots can be triggered by events and they can be scheduled.
A call center agent can get help from an attended RPA bot in near real time during a live customer call. For example, the attended bot can find customer data from one application and automatically type it into a second application. This way, the call center agent spends less time switching between applications and can focus on high-value tasks such as solving the customer’s problem.
Unattended bots typically perform batch operations that do not require user intervention. For example, a batch of new client information is received in a spreadsheet and needs to be entered into multiple applications.