Companies that do not use RPA Support services to get on board the RPA automation bandwagon are at risk for low customer satisfaction scores, and attrition due to low employee satisfaction.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates routine and repetitive tasks using robots or “bots”. Automated bots take over tasks from humans to boost efficiency, productivity, and accuracy.
The first-generation RPA automated simple and repetitive rule-based tasks that did not require any decision-making capabilities. The basic RPA bots mimic human actions such as clicking buttons, typing text, and filling up forms. Businesses use these solutions to automate high-volume, labor-intensive, repetitive, rule-based tasks.
RPA soon becomes capable of undertaking more complex tasks such as data validation and exception handling. Advanced RPA bots read and interpret unstructured data and make decisions based on predefined rules.
The latest RPA bots automate tasks that need human-like decision-making, reasoning, and judgment. These bots apply Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentiment analysis, image recognition, and predictive analytics.
The RPA market was worth US$2.65 billion at the end of 2021 and is projected to reach US$23.9 billion with a CAGR of 27.7% by 2030. Partnering with an RPA Consulting Firm will help your business join the growth bandwagon and benefit from it.
How does RPA support services help?
RPA delivers considerable direct value-addition to businesses including:
Improved efficiency and cost savings
Businesses cannot miss efficiency improvement or cost-cutting opportunities in today’s competitive environment. With competition limiting price increases, they are forced to eliminate bottlenecks and economize.
An average employee in an enterprise wastes 40% of their time on repetitive, rule-based manual tasks. RPA Support Services offers ready-to-implement solutions for businesses to automate such low-level tasks.
Automating routine tasks improve accuracy, cuts inefficiencies, and streamlines workflows. RPA bots do more work in less time than humans, do not tire, and need no holidays. They work round the clock with consistent efficiency and output. And with bots taking over routine and mundane tasks, the workforce can focus on higher-value tasks that generate more profits.
The cost savings for the enterprise come in many ways.
- Reduced HR and payroll costs. The maintenance costs for bots are equivalent to only a fraction of the expenses incurred for human employees’ recruiting, training, and payroll.
- Reduced employee turnover. According to the UiPath 2021 Office Worker Survey, it is estimated that 67% of global workers feel crushed by repetitive tasks. Intelligent automation of repetitive tasks offers employees the opportunity to perform meaningful tasks. They become happier, more satisfied, and more motivated. Attrition rates reduce, offering companies great savings in today’s age of skill shortages.
Better quality products and services
Today’s competitive and fast-paced business environment leaves little room for errors. Any slip-up leaves the door open for competitors. Bots improve process accuracy and operational efficiency. It reduces operational risks and errors caused by human factors such as fatigue, distraction, or oversight. Customers get a high-quality, error-free product or service that matches their requirements to the dot.
RPA consulting service providers enable businesses to station bots in a way that optimizes product or service quality. Configured the right way, bots:
- Enhances the data management capabilities of the company.
- Ensures consistency. Standardizing work processes prevents duplicity and fallacious outputs. As an extra check, the bots may validate data against predefined rules.
- Enables systematic automation. Bots automate customer service across all touchpoints and omnichannel platforms, presenting a consistent, connected experience for the customers.
- Eliminates pain points. RPA eliminates pain points in business processes to improve service delivery. For instance, responding to insurance queries is a time-consuming and complicated task. Advanced bots with neural networking and Natural Language Processing capabilities gather the needed information from various sources and ease the process, leaving the customer support team free to handle only the exceptions.
- Enables easy scale-up and scale-down. RPA empowers businesses to scale resources up and down as per the requirements. For instance, instead of hiring temp workers, a company can use more order processing bots to handle their Black Friday onrush and shed them after the seasonal outburst ends.
Faster services
Removing manual processes through bots increases process velocity and speeds up time to market. RPAs complete tasks much faster than humans. A human employee may process a large dataset for hours, while bots can complete the same job in minutes.
The benefits to the company include improved productivity and precision, better asset utilization ratios, and quicker time to market. Further, customer wait times reduce, leading to a lesser risk of customer drift and improved customer satisfaction scores.
In customer support, RPA bots powered by AI algorithms handle user queries fast. Automation cuts the time human agents take to complete a user request from hours or even days to a few minutes without error. The need for active supervision also gets eliminated.
Many businesses configure bots to process invoices and reconcile accounts in real-time. The company gets real-time updates on financial transactions and positions. Such insights enable them to take timely actions to improve cash flow and profitability. For instance, a company low on cash to meet obligations can offer a spot discount instead of taking expensive short-term loans. Alternatively, they can deny credit to a customer with low credit scores or have a history of defaulting on payments.
Supply chain operators configure bots to track shipments and deliveries in real-time. Managers can make timely interventions in case of any hold-ups.
Better personalization and customization
Technology and knowledge are level playing fields in today’s digital age. Successful businesses attain competitive differentiation through personalization. Salesforce estimates that 63% of customers expect customer service agents to be aware of their needs and expectations.
An RPA Consulting Service Provider makes customization easy for companies. Configuring RPA solutions to fetch customer data enables support teams to engage with customers better. Advanced bots can even customize contracts depending on the audience profile. For instance, a financial institution bot can distinguish customers based on their credit history. It displays the predefined loan contract with clauses and interest rates appropriate for the group.
Better customer support
The quality and efficacy of customer support and service can make or break a brand. Good customer support creates a positive spiral. Increase in sales, more loyal customers, and word-of-mouth brings new customers. The cycle repeats itself.
Many enterprises, however, struggle to keep up when customer support tasks increase in volume. Customers do not get the expected level of services or face delays.
RPA helps enterprises create rewarding customer experiences. Bots customized to the specific enterprise requirements streamline workflows with a customer focus.
Enterprises often remain blinded to meeting productivity goals and oblivious to customer conveniences. The best example is making the customer undergo several processes before accessing the information. Bots understand user action at the interface level and provide solutions.
Most enterprises use APIs to integrate data from multiple databases. APIs enable faster, more efficient, and more personalized interactions with customers. But APIs with poor design cause delays and performance issues, leading to customer frustration. Also, integration often goes wrong when working with multiple APIs with different protocols. Configuring bots for API design and integration tasks eliminates complexities and ensures frictionless customer experiences.
Better incident management
Customer disputes, loss of packages in transit, or other issues are inevitable in even the best-run enterprises. At times, it may be an internal issue with the enterprise. Success depends on the resiliency with which they solve such problems to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.
RPA can configure a ticketing system to create incident tickets when a user or customer reports an issue. The system may identify the root cause and nature of the issue and assign the tickets to the appropriate personnel empowered to solve it.
RPA automates the initial triage and identification of incidents and triggers responses.
The bots:
- Gather everything connected with the incident, including the root cause. For instance, when a customer complains about non-delivery, the bots scour through databases. It analyzes log files, network traffic, and user activity to identify the crux of the issue. Decisions based on inaccurate data may worsen the incident instead of solving it.
- Run validation checks to ensure adherence to due process and minimize the risk of any errors in the data or process.
In customer service, RPA solutions can extract and update customer data from the CRM. The support team can focus on helping customers, instead of wasting time entering data and making cold calls.
Better analytical insights
Analytical insights are critical in today’s age of Big Data. Relevant insights help businesses identify customer expectations, improve processes, and become more competitive. RPA enables the enterprise to capture the latest and most relevant data, store it in data lakes or other repositories, and analyze it. Configuring bots to identify data patterns and trends improves decision-making.
Businesses can:
- Provide customers with live up-to-date information.
- Get actionable information on key performance indicators, to act quickly. For instance, retailers can configure a system to track inventory in real-time. Such live insights help managers devise strategies to, say, clear non-moving perishable stock.
- Make proactive marketing outreach. Using RPA to automate lead generation and segmentation offers real-time updates. Businesses can make instant data-driven decisions to woo customers and close deals.
Improved security and compliance
Digitization has led to an alarming increase in the volume and depth of fraud and security risks. All enterprises operating in a digital environment remain vulnerable to cyber threats. These threats include financial fraud, impersonation, data theft, ransomware attacks, and more.
The worsening threat instances lead to a greater compliance burden on companies. Enterprises that slip up on onerous compliance face heavy fines and loss of reputation.
RPA bots can enable the workforce to operate securely and reduce non-compliance risks. RPA helps enterprises assemble bots that:
- Configure access controls and validations to ensure data privacy and compliance. Reducing the risk of unauthorized access mitigates the risk of data breaches, fraud, and other cyber-attacks.
- Automate compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
- Generate detailed audit trails and compliance reports that document the end-to-end process. The accurate record of all activities ensures transparency and improves traceability.
- Ensure alignment of automation with cybersecurity protocols. Experienced RPA Support Service providers help the enterprise set up CX (Customer Experience) private cloud to handle sensitive data, implement change control and review for RPA technology scripts, enable privileged session management to avoid fraud, and rotate bot credentials to ensure accountability.
Overcoming potential pitfalls of an RPA Implementation
While RPA offers many benefits and unimaginable use cases, it is not always smooth sailing. Implementation is complex and requires overcoming several challenges. Partnering with an experienced RPA Consulting Firm helps businesses implement and manage RPA solutions successfully.
Lack of know-how – Implementing RPA requires in-depth knowledge of coding, process mapping, and automation design. Such skills are not always easy to find.
Not having clear business objectives – RPA implementation succeeds only if the business is clear on objectives. Automating a non-beneficial function fritters away the investment.
There is also a risk of over-automation. Despite the benefits of automation, some processes are better off if not automated. In fact, over-automation can decrease efficiency and cause unintended consequences. For instance, providing only automated answers leads to a lack of empathy and an inability to address the customer’s issue. Such instances lead to customer frustration and churn.
RPA Support Service Providers work with businesses to understand the existing processes. They help companies to identify the most profitable and pressing use cases for RPA and prioritize investments in the right area. Companies can use the provider’s expertise and experience to define automation goals.
Inadequate Process Analysis – Even when there is clarity on business objectives, many enterprises fail to conduct a thorough process analysis before RPA implementation. Understanding the existing process and pinpointing areas in the workflow for RPA implementation is crucial. Without applying RPA in the right spots, automation may not deliver the expected benefits. RPA developers build and configure RPA bots and workflows to automate the identified processes. They integrate these automated solutions with existing applications to streamline end-to-end processes.
Lack of effective IT governance – Successful RPA implementation requires effective IT governance. If RPA is not part of the enterprise IT strategy, it creates silos of automation. The RPA implementation may cause data discrepancies and security risks in such situations. It is crucial to place human validations at critical points in the RPA process.
Insufficient testing – Testing is critical to ensure proper implementation and working of RPA solutions. Insufficient testing leads to errors or inefficiencies in the automation process. RPA testers fix bugs and errors and ensure the solution works as intended. Periodic tests identify and resolve issues. Regression testing ensures the RPA solution works as expected, even when new changes are introduced.
Neglecting ongoing maintenance – RPA is not a one-time project activity. Implementation is the initial phase of a process that involves monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades. Your RPA implementation partner can
- Monitor bots and workflows to ensure that the RPA solution runs smoothly and efficiently.
- Perform regular maintenance tasks such as software updates and security patches.
- Make tweaks to the automation algorithms to cater to evolving business needs.
Blind RPA adoption may not yield the desired results and may become counterproductive. Working with an experienced RPA Support Services Provider like Suyati Technologies enables businesses to optimize RPA solutions. We can help tailor automation to your unique business needs and get the maximum ROI from their RPA investment. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at services@suyati.com.
