An Insider’s Guide to Robotic Process Automation – 10 Things to Expect from Robotic Process Automation in 2019

Series 7 – 10 Things to Expect from Robotic Process Automation
Welcome to Part 7, the last in the series of  – ‘An Insider’s Guide to Robotic Process Automation’.

Here are 10 things to expect from Robotic Process Automation in 2019:

1. Cost of Errors to Decline 

Humans make mistakes. And some of these mistakes can be costly. Mistakes can also be costly to customer satisfaction and the organisations reputation. Robots on the other hand, do not make the same mistakes human do.
Robots might get thrown off by an exception in one of your processes or be triggered by a slow connectivity problem, but exception handling (presents the exception to the human employee for handling, fixing or decision making) will help minimise the impact.

2. Robotic Process Automation is Catching On

Robotic Process Automation is on the rise. Your competitors might already be using it. You may already be using it. It’s already made a massive impact in multiple industries including financial services, health care and business process outsourcing. So better start taking notice of this now to gain a competitive edge.

3. Flexible Staffing

Keeping staffing levels at a happy medium can be a headache. Especially in an organisation where demand is unpredictable and turnover is high. Using robots, resource levels can be scaled up and down easily. Robots can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively, making it easier to have the right number of resources in the right place at the right time.

4. Fast Return on Investment

Many technology investments can take a while to realise a return on investment (ROI). However, with Robotic Process Automation, you can see the ROI in weeks. Your human workforce will be freed from routine, mundane tasks which they are overqualified for, allowing them to focus on strategic work. More work will be completed, creating capacity for even more tasks. Higher productivity will also reduce expenses and create room for rapid growth.

5. Operations will Change

RPA has the capacity to change many processes in a business. This can have an impact on the way businesses approach customers. The way businesses also approach data can change. Let’s take the example of an insurance organisation which processes hundreds of cases a day.
Processing these cases are complicated and require multiple steps navigating multiple systems. There’s a whole bunch of information gathered from the customer for each unique case. With RPA, all of this can be streamlined, meaning more cases can be processed with the capacity for growth within the organisation doubled.

6. Employee Experience will Improve

Think of your payroll department…  It’s a process that requires manual intervention month after month, every year.  RPA could be used to extract the details that are required from timesheets to calculate pay.  Or your Administrators have to process forms for specific processes, this can be automated so that forms can be read by an RPA solution and the manual data entry to the applications where these forms are processed can be done with RPA.  RPA can automate the mundane, ultimately improving the employee experience. By allowing employees to focus less on admin and more on strategic work to help advance their career, employee satisfaction will improve and turnover will decrease.

7. Customer Expectations will be met

Customers, particularly Millennials and Gen Z’s expect fast response times and advanced self-service options. Robotic Process Automation can address these growing customer needs. Automated processes for example, help customer representatives focus their full attention to these customers. Interactions will be more meaningful, and more ‘WOW’ moments will occur, resulting in higher customer satisfaction rather than a mediocre experience.

Businesses will also find new ways to meet customer’s needs, even before the customer knows they have a need. Machine learning through artificial intelligence for example, can notice patterns in a customer’s account activity that may suggest a problem. The bot can then alert the employee who proactively contacts the customer.

RPA will also allow for improvements across the organisation. These improvements can be made across the back office to shared services departments such as accounts. Employees will be happy when efficiency improves and processes are streamlined.

8. Digital Transformation will take place

With the ability of attended, unattended and cognitive automation capabilities achieving digital transformation and transforming service operations is possible.

Unattended:automates an entire routine process with no human intervention needed

Attended: used for complex scenarios where parts of the process are handled by the robot and other parts that require human decision-making are left to the employee

Cognitive automation: a subset of artificial intelligence technologies that mimic human behaviour

9. Job Roles will Changes

Automation of routine tasks will inevitably have an impact on certain roles, such as data-entry jobs. There might also be a negative effect on financial planners. But as some professions are affected, others will grow making room for improvement and advancement. Job titles which are less familiar now, those with automation in their title will be on the rise, paving the way for newer and better things.

10. Planning is Best to be Started Now

Automation will bring many benefits to an organisation including resolving staffing problems, increasing employee satisfaction, increasing efficiency, lowering costs and reducing errors to name a few. Your organisations top-level board will have heard the buzz, so use this time now to slowly prepare yourself for building a case for this technology.

Be ready to ask the questions that will determine whether RPA is right for your organisation. Think about which processes it could work for… Brainstorm the possible processes which could benefit largely from automation and streamlining. Will RPA be used as a driving force in your organisation for compliance? For customer satisfaction? For employee satisfaction?

We hope you’ve found our Insider’s Guide to Robotic Process Automation useful! Here’s a link to the full edition if you happened to miss one! – An Insider’s Guide to Robotic Process Automation – the full edition!

To find out more about RPA, then talk to our team. We’re independent technology consultants so we’re passionate about providing the right technology for your organisation to improve your customer service and operations.