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Top 3 Task Mining Benefits You Must Know in '24

Top 3 Task Mining Benefits You Must Know in '24Top 3 Task Mining Benefits You Must Know in '24

Over the last five years, task mining has received a gradual interest from the business circles since it provides a deeper view of the business operations. However, late-adopters of the technology might miss out on the benefits that task mining technology can offer them.

Therefore, in this article we explain the top 3 benefits of task mining solutions that can help business leaders improve their operations and achieve efficiency. 

1. Understand how you handle business tasks 

Business leaders need to gain a full picture of their business operations and the way they handle their tasks to ensure digital transformation and continuous process improvement. 

Task mining is a useful tool that mines user interaction data, such as screenshots, and recordings. This feature allows businesses to discover unrecognized actions that employees do while performing their tasks, and they might want to take them into account during process planning. 

For example, a process analyst can determine implications for each method used in customer enquiry responding tasks. The analyst can categorize and compare the ways the customer reps answer these enquiries and assess the most efficient method with highest customer satisfaction. 

2. Improve task efficiency

There can be various reasons why a process or task is inefficient such as variations from standard ways of executing tasks, manual tasks, repetitive tasks or tasks with unnecessary steps. Task mining tools help identify the reasons where inefficiency originates so that analysts can start implementing the required change.

Some of the ways business leaders can leverage task mining to improve processes and task management: 

Improving user experience for employees:

Employees might have a hard time while performing their tasks due to poor user interface, such as distracting background, unaligned elements or lack of text hierarchy. Task mining can detect lower performance related to the interface to avoid such situations. 

Identifying and eliminating unnecessary actions:

Some actions might be unnecessary while doing tasks, or employees might take unnecessary steps that don’t affect the process. Task mining software can identify those actions and save the time of employees.

Discovering automation opportunities:

Businesses can observe that some tasks are too straightforward and don’t require high-level skills. Automating those tasks would accelerate processes and reduce human-made errors.

Reducing process deviations:

Task mining can identify the reasons behind the deviations in business processes. Businesses can change the way they handle those processes to reduce these deviations.

For instance, in a purchase order process, employees check invoices by matching units and invoice amount information against the order. Task mining enables users to analyze this task and identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. As a result, the end user can make improvements in the software or process.

3. Ensure compliance

Process design and planning defines tasks and substeps that are necessary to complete a process or comply with rules and regulations. Yet, employees might end up following different paths while executing the tasks because of circumstance. For instance, hospitals suffer from such lack of consistency due to the high number of emergency management cases. 

Even under such conditions, it is possible to comply with rules, regulations and procedures with the help of task mining. As task mining monitors user actions, it identifies such non-compliant issues. Based on the insights, these businesses processes can be modified to reduce non-compliance. 

For a bank, non-compliance might refer to fraudulent cases which can be identified and prevented once the employee allows task mining to monitor tasks executed in an external transaction. 

Combine task mining with process mining

Process mining benefits and task mining benefits seem to share similarities. However, they differ in several aspects as we discussed before. Therefore, we recommend combining task mining with process mining tool in order to harness the full power of them. 

Using both software together allows users to 

  • Leverage more comprehensive data (e.g, user task data, system logs and business data)
  • Gain task level insights as well as information about end to end processes
  • Include more capabilities that can help reduce variations, enhance customer satisfaction and accelerate process transformation. 

What is task mining?

Task mining refers to a process intelligence technology that can record and analyze user interaction in a task execution. It can deliver deeper insights about:
1. Time allocated to tasks
2. Usage of tools and resources
3. Points where bottlenecks occur
4. Different practices among employees.

How does task mining work?

Task mining typically works by:

1. Observing computer activities (e.g. uploading/downloading the documents or mouse clicks)
2. Capturing user interaction data for analysis
3. Employing diverse algorithms and methods (e.g OCR and NLP) to identify patterns and trends in user interaction data.
4. Providing business intelligence toolkit, such as key performance indicators (KPIs), multiple dashboards and other trackable metrics.

What are task mining use cases?

Task mining serves various business purposes so it finds widespread application in business operations, such as:
1. Enable Automation: Task mining accelerates automation efforts by pinpointing tasks and workflows suitable for automation.
2. Streamline customer service: In customer service, task mining identifies bottlenecks through agent interactions and tool usage analysis. By recognizing patterns, organizations can optimize workflows, provide additional training, and implement new technologies for more efficient customer interactions, leading to quicker onboarding and enhanced satisfaction.
3. Improve IT support: Task mining enhances incident resolution by detecting patterns in support ticket data, aiding in resolving issues efficiently. It also offers insights into addressing common customer complaints proactively, contributing to knowledge base enrichment and effective customer service.
4. Quality control and assurance: In manufacturing and quality control, task mining identifies patterns in production workflows, helping to spot defects early, reduce waste, and improve overall product quality.
5. Employee training and skill enhancement: Task mining assists in identifying skill gaps among employees by analyzing their interactions with different tasks. This informs targeted training programs for skill development.

What are top task mining tools?

Major process mining vendors provide task mining software as an additional capability. Also, some robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation platforms offer task mining capabilities to discover automation opportunities and implement them. Check out our objective and comprehensive vendor list to explore top tools in the market.

Check out our comprehensive guide for task mining if you have more questions.

Further reading

Discover more on other process intelligence tools by reading:

If you believe task mining and process mining can benefit your business, feel free to check our data-driven comprehensive vendor lists.

Assess different vendors with a transparent methodology yourself by downloading our checklist: 

Get Process Mining Vendor Selection Guide

And, if you still have some question, we are happy to help:

Find the Right Vendors

Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Hazal Şimşek
Hazal is an industry analyst in AIMultiple. She is experienced in market research, quantitative research and data analytics. She received her master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Carlos III of Madrid and her bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Bilkent University.

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