Pat Geary, Chief Marketing Officer is interviewed by the editor of sourcingfocus.com Paul Corrall during the NOA2th conference, discussing the rise of the virtual workforce.

Blue Prism specialises in automating customer service processes in financial services. Blue Prism software enables business operations to automate manual back office processes and reduce cost and waste whilst improving customer satisfaction through creating a "virtual workforce".

Your group has improvised a virtual workforce through software. Do you expect this to become the norm in coming months?

It’s an interesting idea that we’re promoting. There is a lot of manual repetitive work in the back office. A lot of what outsourcing has been built on is taking that work and doing it for a lower cost. What we’ve seen is a lot of that work moved offshore. Many millions of people in various countries are doing this manual repetitive work, the idea is that if you can automate this work then you can add value, with the potential to re-shore the work where you have highly trained workers who manage a virtual robotic workforce.

One of the examples we have is that one of our clients took a process that had 55 people offshore and they brought it back to the UK, with 10 people supporting 20 robots, which did the work of 55 offshore workers.

We see virtualisation of the workforce as the next big trend, which can be deployed from the cloud and is already being used by a UK bank for PPI claims processing, an classic example where you need a lot of people to work with a lot of cases, most of which are rule based decisions. Robots can be trained to do those processes while specialists can be used to train (the virtual workforce) and deal with exceptions.

The idea is to bring jobs back to the UK which can be made to be affordable through a mixture of human and virtual workforce. It’s a decent offering because robots make fewer mistakes. The car industry is already at the forefront of the virtual workforce, an industry which still employs many millions of workers, but the manual work has been replaced and improved which has seen the quality improve. The cars become cheaper and last longer. We are looking at applying this to the service industry which is largely un-automated.

You have already mentioned the trend of in-shoring, with the growing costs of offshoring do you see in-shoring as an increasing trend?

The problem with in-shoring is that the reason it went abroad in the first place was because we couldn’t afford to carry out the work efficiently in the UK. Technology costs in terms of provision of technology and infrastructure of technology have become very cheap, but the actual work using that technology still requires people, and without automation those people will remain as cost ineffective as before.

Here at the NOA 25th conference we’re celebrating best practice within the industry, can you give us some more examples of best practice at Blue Prism?

The virtual workforce is quite a new idea at Blue Prism and we’ve only started to work with BPO’s however within an enterprise space, there are quite a few banks in the UK and utilities who have used the same system. We provide the technology platform and we train the trainer to use the technology to the best of his ability.

We heard this morning about the NOA’s flagship campaign Outsourcing Works, challenging the misconceptions of outsourcing. What do you feel are the misconceptions of outsourcing and how do you think they can be tackled?

I think the main ones include the outsourcing of jobs out of the UK and placing them offshore. The rush to offshore call centres had a very negative impact as it was directly experienced by customers who used the service. If back office outsourcing isn’t done correctly it increases frustration which becomes tied to outsourcing. Automation can deliver value to the customer. Virtual workforces allow more staff to be employed in call centres because they’ve saved costs in the back office where they’ve improved efficiency.