5 Business Operations Leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to Improve Employee Productivity
Radhika Madhavan
Director of Marketing
Table of Contents
Automated processes and robots have been around for a decade now with every year bringing more advances in the field of process automation. Contrary to what is in believe about machines taking over human jobs, automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have the potential to lower labor costs and improve overall efficiency.
Companies adopting the technology have increased their revenues and gained a competitive edge in the market. In this article we will explore the sectors that can benefit by integrating RPA in their business process.
Five Business Operations That Need Robotic Process Automation
1. Human Resources
To be able to understand the impact of RPA in the HR sector, let’s first look at pivotal HR processes that entail a day’s work.
Screening candidate résumés, recruitment, onboarding, attendance tracking, payroll management, and employee data management are some of the rule based tasks in HR. It is evident that these constitute a high volume of paperwork and manual data processing.
However, all of these can be automated end-to-end by RPA softwares with little or no human intervention.
With respect to expansion of organizations by mergers and acquisitions, the HR department ideally has to manage increasing number of employees across different locations and carry out integration of departments through platforms. This can be a very challenging process especially if the software platforms of the two companies involved are incompatible. An RPA software can solve this issue by integrating and restructuring the systems without drastically changing the existing set-up.
2. Customer Service
Companies today, are aiming at creating more strategies to provide the best possible customer service.
Existing customer service technologies are implicative of the fact that customer service needs improvement and automation. For instance, while solving a customer query or registering a complaint, information needs to be entered into the system. And this, sometimes means long waiting periods for the customer causing dissatisfaction and distrust. Incorporating RPA can alleviate some of the prevailing issues, such as providing and processing information to customers. So, if a customer needs information regarding a recent purchase online, it is essential that relevant and useful information is provided to them and that is exactly what an RPA will do.
Another technology that is in use for automating the customer service is chatbots. A chatbot is an AI-powered or rule-based software that can converse with humans mimicking human-like nuances in language patterns via an interface. Also, it can be handy to solve queries, make purchases, obtain information or schedule events. For example, if you want to send flowers to your friend, you can direct the chatbot on the website to assist you. The chatbot can select which flower to send, make the purchase and schedule delivery of the flowers for you.
3. IT Operations
IT operations comprise tasks like data entry and data migration which are highly repetitive. Although skilled staff can perform these tasks, they are repetitive and time consuming. RPA can be used to fully automate these processes which increases speed and reliability. An RPA can perform testing and updation of application softwares, database management and network support. Also, it can also be used for backup and recovery management, conducting daily automated system checks and to monitor user experience.
4. Data Management & Security
For any enterprise, data is an indispensable asset that must be protected invariably. Ideally, data comes in large volumes from various sources and in various formats scattered across different departments of the organization. Also, this can be unstructured data in the form of PDFs, text documents, images and so on. Organizations face challenges in terms of structuring and processing this huge amount of data.
Robotic Process Automation provides sophisticated data handling solutions such as data inputting, data deduplication and data extraction. It can also perform cleansing and screening of data to remove irregularities and improve data quality.
Another area where RPA is beneficial is data security. Data breaches can cause havoc and result in loss of sensitive information and compromise consumer privacy. RPA prevents data theft and fraud by reviewing current and previous transactions to identify any illegal activities. It can intercept unauthorized use of organization data or property such as brand logos and trademarks.
5. Sales & Marketing
Traditional marketing automation technologies have been in use for quite some time now. They are useful in performing repetitive tasks that reduce manual labor. But when it comes to marketing and sales, understanding consumer behaviour and reliability gives an extra edge.
Let’s suppose a cell phone manufacturing company wants to launch a new product in the market. They need to identify the target audience and figure out pricing and marketing strategies. In order to do this properly, they need to collect data and analyze that data to decide the future course of action. An RPA can be used in analyzing past and current data and generate demand reports. Based on this, it analyses consumer behavior and provides strategies to introduce and promote new products. RPA can also be used for digital lead quality analysis.
In terms of driving sales, RPA can be used for automated communication between client and customer via chat, emails and calls. It is also useful to incorporate RPA to perform market/consumer research to improve sales cycles, increase revenue and maintain client information.
Final Words
Implementing process automation is becoming somewhat of an industry standard nowadays. Companies are progressively integrating this software into their business process. RPA is one such automation software, the ease and benefits of which are many.
From a business point of view, organizations want to reduce labor costs and improve performance. One of the prime factors that make Robotic Process Automation so effective is that it is cost effective. RPA technology is extremely effective in creating a virtual workforce by integrating into the regular workforce with ease.
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