I would say look for a better tool. If you don't have any other option, then go with NICE. If you have another option, you could invest in Power Automate or UiPath because it has more proper functionality and more proper support.

Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten.

Listen to people who have the experience, guys that have gone through it; guys like us at Thomas Cook who didn't know on day one how to do this, at all. Also, do research online, read all the horror stories of things that have gone wrong and believe them. Take your time at the beginning and make sure you do a proof of concept on something small or a series of small initiatives, rather than going in for the big fish on day one. Find your footings, get the foundations there, and then build on that. Think big but start small and scale fast.

In terms of lessons learned, it's been such a big journey, at such a fast pace of learning, that almost everything is a big lesson. The biggest thing we've learned from the mistakes we made back on day one was that we picked the wrong processes. If I were to go back and speak to myself in 2017, when this all started in Thomas Cook, I wouldn't go for the biggest, most complex process. I would take smaller, more intricate ones as a proof of concept to show that it works, and then scale up quickly. We did the reverse. We went for the benefits of automating huge processes and then went straight into trying to tackle them. That's why it took six months to get the first one over the line.

We haven't used the NICE Employee Virtual Assistant to help our employees with onscreen guidance or in-context recommendations. It's on our roadmap for the first quarter of the next financial year. Similarly, regarding automating employees' routine processes, it is on the roadmap for the first quarter as we move into attended solutions. It will include things like password resets and the like. We're using the Automation Finder to identify processes best suited for automation, but only as a proof of concept. It will be running for the next couple of weeks. We haven't had the results yet, but we're excited find out what we don't know.

Since we don't have any attended users, there's nobody within the business itself using the toolset. But we have a team of 11 that includes me. I have a gentleman called Jit Patel who heads up our RPA development group, and Kay Ellis who looks after a team of business analysts. Beneath them, we have four developers reporting directly to Jit, and four BAs reporting directly to Kay. I manage the center of excellence.

Deployment requires a BA and a developer working with the business unit itself. But as far as the NICE toolset and the automation side of things go, it's actually very quick for the business analyst. That person makes sure we've got the process nailed down and then translated into a technical document so that a process of, say, 50 business steps is actually 12 features. They work on building those features in the document that the developer then brings to life.

As for increased usage of NICE, we started off with just two business areas in mind, the UK contact center and our financial shared service center which is in Palma, Mallorca. At the point that we got the first two robots live, we realized that we needed to build an internal function to manage these things. That's when the center of excellence was formed, and that's allowed us to then move out to lots of other areas. We have automations live for human resources, IT, costing and yield areas, finance contact center, and we have plans over the next six months to move across into our other source markets. That includes Germany, the Nordics, and everywhere else that we essentially have a Thomas Cook footprint. We're starting to expand out into a group for attended solutions. When we move to the Amazon infrastructure in AWS, we'll look to deploy attended automation from that central infrastructure as well. We have big plans to expand.

Overall, I would give NICE a solid ten out of ten. I can't fault them. It has been fantastic.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

For me, personally, the biggest lesson I've learned from using NICE is about how having certain IT software can really enhance performance, and I had never really thought of it that way. We can use the system to get through to making a sale, but I never really thought that it could actually enhance the agents' thought process, their journey, and how they speak to customers. That's been a big lesson for me.

In terms of advice, be open-minded. We just told them what we would like it to do, and went out there with a bit of a blue-sky thought process: If we could have anything, what would it do? And it turned out that it could do that, and we were quite amazed. I would tell people to think outside the box, think of something else that you would want it to be like in a few years' time and you may actually get close to that, or even achieve it, without realizing, at first, that you could. Sometimes we're so constrained by what we're used to doing, by doing things a certain way, using the same systems, we don't realize that a system has more capabilities than we realized.

The employees have loved it. We haven't gotten the statistics on employee satisfaction yet, they're due soon. But we've received a lot of feedback and we engaged them very early on. We held a naming competition for the guidance system. They all put in suggestions. The top-five were picked and then they voted on them. They chose the name. And every time we did a journey, we had agents from the floor in a room and they went through the journey and looked at. They built it with me in that sense. They were all engaged at the time. And we have a pilot team on the floor using it. When we went live and launched across the business, they were all involved in floor-walking, helping other agents with the system. There has been a lot of involvement of the front line, which helps employee engagement because they feel part of it. It's their system that way.

They named their guidance "Winston." No other companies use it the way we've used it, as far as I'm aware; I was looking at other companies which use NICE.

I'm more an end-user. I've worked with the development guys to make it user-friendly, for the people in our company who are on the phones.

I'd like to know the common places that the agents are going within the system. I'd like to see if they are spending a lot of time in a certain section because we could then look at whether that section is clear. What is it from that section that they need more support in? That's what we're doing now in the second half of the year: What they use it for. But the automation stuff in the background is also a big, key thing that is being done.

We have attended and unattended bots. We have quite a lot of on unattended robots. We've got a lot of processes where a transaction is done and it will send off the results. That is automatically done in another system. We send customers a yearly invite and that is done by unattended. That goes off and does everything in the background and produces it on the system.

We are looking at things within our other departments at the moment, where they're doing a lot of manual processes. We're working with NICE at the moment, their Automation Finder, which looks at what our people actually do, all these manual processes and the same things being tracked by them. We'll look at putting unattended robotics in the background so then they don't have to do those actions. If it's always the same action at the end of a certain task, we can get the system to do it instead, and free up our people. Obviously, we do have to do a full analysis afterward. From a human perspective, I will look into what they're doing. We're going to have a look at what the Automation Finder brings up and then look at it in context. We will look at it from both sides to make sure. There are times when there needs to be a bit of human interaction or a checkpoint and there are other times when that's not needed. It all depends on what it finds for us. We've not gotten the data back yet.

I would rate NICE at nine out of ten, from my experience. A ten would mean I am able to view what people do on the system as well, rather than just listen. I know NICE has the capabilities, it's just that we haven't purchased that. We are looking into it.

I would recommend UiPath over NICE. I would rate NICE Robotic Automation a six out of ten.

I would not recommend this solution. I would advise others to look at a different solution. It is far behind other competitors in terms of a true RPA and lacks a lot of enterprise features. It does not have autonomous automation.

I would rate NICE Robotic Automation a five out of ten. It has a purpose, and it has a place. It is fine for what it does.