Part 2 – Great Use Cases for RPA – #15

9 Great Use Cases for RPA - PART 2

In the second part of this 2-part episode, we will go through a couple more business use cases to see where RPA is especially useful.


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So you probably do if you have customers and lots of customers, there’s lots of information about your customers, you might want to store in your CRM system, and what sort of every kind of activity or event around your customer, you want to store and react to it. Because you can use the basic stuff we all aware of, from what we would store in in a customer information system. CRM system is a typical contact information. But you also would like to potentially store purchase history, any kind of preferences on product, type of servers, product category is an RPA product they interested in? Or are they more into case management, that kind of stuff. So for birthdays, and anniversaries, I think company anniversaries or personal universities, this kind of information is really important for businesses, because we always need new sort of touch points, more touch points with our businesses, and will really work on that client relationship. And to either sort of maybe reward your customers or really supporting a deal, which is currently in your pipeline to close it so that the customer information or customer prospective customer information is really, really important. And yeah, so there’s, there’s lots of that, that activity, what we do manually, and, again, with lots of data sources out there, I’m doing all that stuff manually, this will be very time consuming. And it wouldn’t be very accurate either, potentially. So we are humans, we make mistake, right? So with RPA, we can really get that information and the huge amount of information we have around our customers, we can really store it in all our systems. Easily and yeah, so that kind of repetitive tasks. We could really reduce that by 2%. This is what the research says and states.

 

Yes, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, a centralized customer information hub, or a client Knowledge Centre or customer Knowledge Centre is, is such a key capability for a business, to have really that know your customer, sort of mantra with inside the business. And I mean, you know, we’ve, we have built client knowledge centres before, very successfully using RPA low-code. And it is such a great tool to have for sales executives, top executives, so that they can actually see, you know, a 360 view on the customer, including business development, what’s in the pipeline, account management, you know, you talk about personal information, we call it 50 q. So 50 Q’s is 50 questions that you know, about a customer, you know, it’s not necessarily whose favourite football team, it could be things like that, that really gives a personal touch and really promote the fact that you do understand in and you know, your customer. You know, of course, if you don’t have the automation in place, what tends to happen. And what we see is every account manager does stuff differently. You know, you have account managers that uses a combination of spreadsheets, SharePoint, PDFs, different types of PowerPoints, that they want to create aggregated information of that particular customer. You know, different formats of organizational charts, because all charters are very key thing in a, you know, a customer information database, you know, you need to understand the organizational charter, you understand who’s the decision makers, who’s the influences, who reports to who so these are vital information for, for account managers, of course, was was something like this, where you automated using RPA, you can constantly go to Salesforce, scrape the chatter, you know, what’s the latest chatter on this account? surface this in your customer information database with a low code overlay that’s accessible using, you know, mobile, tablet, browser, offline capability. You know, we had something that’s called the taxi report and it was cheap. It was Literally something where salesperson go from one meeting to another meeting, they just want to sit in the taxi, have a quick report, because always running around they quite busy, but they just want to have that quick go to report to almost five minutes before the meeting to give them that insight, you know, where are we are we red, Amber green, you know what’s on the horizon for this customer?

How does this customer spend compared to other accounts, etc. So it’s a very key one as well. And I think that’s why we decided to put this at number six, no RPA use cases are very important now. So the next one that we’ll touch on, as a top use case for RPA is back in the realm of HR. And in this instance, what we’re looking at is, you know, processing and storing HR information. Now, what we mean by that is that it takes a lot of time to actually aggregate huge amounts of employee data, you know, from things like, you know, employee history, payroll reimbursements that training individual has, has received. So these are all data points that are associated with the employee. So to have that, that one sort of 360 view of employee can sometimes be a very challenging thing, because you have to source data from so many places, and it can take a lot of time, and it’s a very tedious process, and of course, error prone. Because there could be multiple sources. So this is a big headache for, you know, for HR departments, and, you know, if if you have a, you know, a need for a really deep insight into your employee records, you know, it is something that, that you would probably need to automate an RPA is a very, very good capability to do this, where RPA system can go and collect information from various systems, it can then organize all of that information, you know, bring that employee employees history, through from, from a place that payroll data can come from the payroll system, the level of training they’ve got, so you can aggregate all of that into, you know, into one place. And that really allows HR to have a sort of a one stop view of the employee. And, again, it’s, it’s back to the same org where, rather than HR executives actually doing the data capturing the sourcing of information, if that’s handled automatically, in what HR people do is what they do best. They focus on human aspects of HR. Right. And, and I think that’s, that’s the key here. And they can then work to improve employee productivity and work culture. And all of the rest can be handled by automation. Yeah, absolutely. I

 

think that’s, um, it’s key to see where, where, where you employees isn’t in in, in the organization, if you have a small team, I think that’s, that’s easy. But as soon as you have a couple of hierarchy levels in there, yeah, absolutely key to have that.

 

So the next one, coming nearly to an end, processing of fast refunds. So again, when it comes to customer satisfaction, and company, your company’s reputation. I think when we think about an insurance company, for example, or like a big retailer, if you can’t handle your refunds efficiently, your customers will become quite upset. Or if you claim UK claim processing, that kind of stuff is very slow. You had an accident and all that kind of stuff, and it takes ages and you become very, very unhappy. So was RPA. You can make this process to be to be really quick and seamless. And yeah, so I think by just having this sort of this, this mechanism of RPA you can tap into all sorts of different systems to come up with a with a specific answer. You can use AI combined with AP RPA. to come up with a was the right answer for that specific complaint or that specific transaction which was wrong So you can collect all that information automatically pull that all in, and, and then do the steps does next logical steps which are, again, very rules based activities very often, you can really just sort of do them semi automatic or nearly 100% automatic, if there’s no, no real exception coming up. And everything is sort of ticked and fine in general RPA come can process this, this whole refund automatically. And then within a couple of minutes, you might have already your money back in your account. So I think if you if you have a huge work, you have that in your in your organization and customer services, and you have to go through every kind of request and case and matter manually, then, yeah, yeah, it will be very, very likely, the refund processing will be very, very delayed. So I think it’s very key in customer service to deal with those kind of requests.

 

Yeah, and I mean, just on refunds, I think, for me, it’s putting the right type of process for the refund against the value of the refund in the right place. And, you know, and it’s back to that sort of 7030 rule, or 8020. You know, depending how sophisticated you are, if it’s a refund on a low value item, you want that to go through almost instantaneous, because the cost of actually doing that manually is probably more than what the item is worth. So what you want to do is you want to create a scenario where you’ve got the different levels of refunds, all with various types of automation, you know, on the one side of the spectrum, fully automated, it’s a very clean cut case, the customer’s got a fault on a product, maybe they engage with a chatbot, the chatbot actually uses RPA, to do some inquiries in the background. Five minutes later, the customers refund is processed, happy customer, you know, very, very good boon for the reputation of the company, satisfied customer, I’ll probably stay with you. On the other end of the spectrum, you might have a very complicated refund or can be Insurance Claim where you could do some of the initial data gathering, using a robot, the robot could actually engage the customer through let’s say, a chat bot, very popular channel. And then once all of that information is aggregated, that can then be handed over to a human in a very convenient format, where the robots done all of the initial checking security checks, it’s laid out what the refund is about, it could perhaps be a high value items.

So perhaps needs to be additional inquiries, it could be a bit of a workflow. But are you deploying the technology in the right way, and you’re deploying it, and engaging the right type of stakeholders at the right time. Because of course, if I’m going to return my Tesla, because I don’t like it anymore, it’s a $80,000 car. Now, it’s not going to be 24 hours or, you know, eight hours later refund in my account, you know, it’s going to the expectation is that there is going to be somebody that you know, on the refund side from the business that would look at it. And for me as a customer, you know that that is an expectation I would have because you know, it’s high value item, not that I’m saying you can return your Tesla, you know, obviously other electric car brands are also available. But I think if if you use the same type of process to return a very low value item in that city, that’s I think where the cost to your business then increases. And I think RPA could do you a massive favour here by automating those, those sort of high, high, low value, high sort of volume type refunds. So the next one we’ll look at is recruitment. And RBA can be a absolute godsend within the recruitment space. Of course, recruitment processes themselves can be quite complicated and long running an RPA can really streamline this process considerably, you know, from initial, you know, placing a job role to the whole HR process and beyond into the onboarding process. Now, of course, you know, with recruitment, you know, you will have resumes from a lot of platforms and different forces, and you have to sort through spam, then you have to discount, obviously, on undesirable applicants. And there’s loads of other factors, you know, where you want to, you want to take a lot of stuff, and you want to discount a lot of things. And you want to just deal with the things that’s important to you. So, by deploying RPA, you could have that capability with inside your business, and you could really streamline your recruitment process considerably, even as a first step by just automating that initial noisy part of it, where you have to go through a lot of information just to get to the things that you want to pay attention to.

 

And, of course, you know, if you’re a recruiter, I noticed quite a stressful job, I can imagine, you know, you want to be able to spend time finding the right candidate, and being that candidate for the right sort of interviews, you don’t want to actually, you know, spend a lot of your time sifting through things that you don’t want to pay attention to. So, you know, all of the screening, assessing, you know, I mentioned onboarding as well, and administration beyond that, all of that can be automated with RPA. And I think recruitment is, and this is why we put it on the list. It’s one of those processes as well with inside a business that’s got high degrees of automation abilities. You know, we look about what we sort of in that 90% range, because the process is so predictable, and that’s extremely high. So, you know, and that’s, that’s one of the key reasons why we think it’s a very, very good use case for RPA.

 

You mentioned onboarding there, I think, I think not just for finding the right candidates. onboarding is such an important thing these days to, especially you know, was being virtual a lot. I think getting better experience for new employees, right, is very key. And if, if your process you automation is already making sure things are happening, 14 days before someone is starting the job, getting the right information out requesting the right information, I think it feels like a really nice, very well organized onboarding process, the experience is much better, you have people turning up for your first day of work very excited, instead of hearing nothing on the first day, they are bombarded with massive amount of forms, maybe not even well structured. I think that’s such an important thing, because retaining your recruits, while we’re going through all that stuff, finding how to recruit, I think the onboarding experience is one of the key things to actually set off with the right sort of mindset and energy into your new job. So I think it would be quite pointless if you get those things wrong as well, after going through a very brilliantly automated recruitment finding process, and then mess, mess, mess that part up. So the very key focus has to be on the onboarding out. Yeah.

 

So it just falls off the cliff, then. So you’ve got a really good. And to be honest, you could have a recruitment process where if you don’t deploy a lot of RPA, you would potentially, you know, have the recruiters doing a very good job at making sure that the process is very streamlined. The experience from the prospective employee could be really good. Then, of course, they hand over to onboarding. That’s where the problem starts. And then the employee might think, wow, that this went so well. Now, the onboarding is, is really messy and not very consistent. And you know, they forgot to do certain things. I don’t have all my system access and what I need for day one, you know, there’s so many examples of things that would really start things off on the wrong foot.

 

Absolutely. I think another interesting aspect about recruiting is and the automation element is you can find candidates, very unbiased. I think this is what we hear a lot as well. So if you do the manual sifting, so there is there is some bias in going through CVS, somebody if you now let an AI looking through a huge amount of data. Sure, it really depends a bit on the AI and how it might have been processed, programmed. But in general, you would look at CBS differently because you’re not going in with you subjective view on things. So you would effectively find candidates you might have not seen before or sort of rejected before. So that helps you as well to, to be more diverse company. And because you use purely looking at the level of talent and qualification, and that kind of stuff and not any other factors play a very, very, very good point there as well. So, yeah, so that was number nine. So as we said, we will have nine, nine really good use cases. Should we over deliver one more? Oh, no, I think there’s a there’s a good one.

 

Yes. space for one more. So you want to tackle it?

 

Yeah, I think we touched on something of structured information and unstructured information, and extracting data from lots of different formats. I think that’s a very, very important one. As I mentioned, yeah, where you we purely, we build the product based on this the intelligent capture cloud, to just really extract that data from unstructured data sources. So I think data is really coming through in your business in all sorts of different formats. invoice obviously is a is an easy one. But sometimes you have this lots of different price lists coming in, you have quotes coming in, you have reports coming in from different suppliers, and vendors and employees and all your stakeholders might send you all sorts of weird stuff. And, and it’s important for the process for your business process to continue. And yeah, I think with going through all that stuff is again, very, very time consuming to find that maybe key information from these different formats is that it’s time consuming elements, but with OCR, optical character recognition, combined with RPA, you can let the system really work through all these different things, different types of documents, and written nodes, emails, contract documents, all sorts of type of documents, and find the relevant information you need. And, and then you can store depending on what information it is classification. You mentioned that earlier, I think that that comes in here as well, I think was the power of RPA, you can just have the bot 20 473 65 days a year, or what really work on on all sorts of documents and extract that valuable information from the document and populate the systems which need that information. And yeah, that will definitely free up a lot of man hours. To Yeah, and I think even the claims processes, what you mentioned, I think, I think that that capability in general, unstructured data to structured data, I think that will help all of these RPA use cases in some way. And so it’s a very, very important use case, an important area to look at, to be really, really more productive.

 

Yeah, and they say what they call this is recited of tasks is where you take information and you have to rekey it in or interpreted and kenning a different system. And it’s interesting that around 10 to 20% of employees, tired of time is spent on tasks, you know, like this. So that that’s a huge saving that you can immediately bring into your business, when you need to extract data from different formats. And it’s very easy to do that using robotic process automation. And that’s why I thought this is a very, very good one as well. Very good use case. That’s, that’s worth putting on the list.

 

Yeah, that’s great. So, now we have we have shared 10 really good use cases with you and as you can see RPA can be implemented in really in several interesting ways. It requires some practice of course and getting used to it. But I think once it is implemented in pieces, I think yeah, I think your employees will easily adopted his new way of working because you freeing up your employees from these repetitive mundane tasks and most of them will be very happy so they can not do copy and paste and systems anymore and extract information. So they should be far more satisfied and then really put the capacity in something which is really value added and maybe speaking to customers more often. And that kind of stuff. So yeah, Hello, and I am you know, we as the automation guys, which was lots of businesses. And we encourage all of them really to get started with RPA. And I think we agree here starting small and automate one process at a time. And just to see if there is a really good choice for the company. I think that’s a good way to really get started. And yeah, so yeah, we have covered I think, yeah, probably more than six or seven episodes on, we covered RPA on the six episodes already. And the really good one in detail is the nine steps to RPA success. So if you haven’t listened to this episode so far, yeah, recommend to have a listen. And, of course, I will add this link and we have this link into the into the show notes. And yeah, there are 10 use cases. But there are for sure, hundreds more use cases. And I’m sure we will cover a few more here in the future.

 

Yep, absolutely. Like I say it’s hard to pick your top 10. But this episode actually gives you a bit of an insight into why we chose this, these 10. But of course, like I mentioned, there are hundreds if not 1000s. And the best way to get going is to get started small and to really explore the art of the possible. You will be surprised how many other ones will become visible once you understand what this can do for your business. You will go into your business with a different pair of lenses on and see potential opportunities everywhere. When you start with automation.

 

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. That was, uh, let us know what you what do you like to hear from us more? Visit our website, the automation, guys. And, of course, leave us some feedback and suggestions for more of these topics. Yeah, thank you all very much for listening to our episode today and see you all very soon. Unfortunately, that’s it again, was this episode of the process and automation podcast. If you liked this episode, please give us a five-star rating. And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast, so you don’t miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time. And until then, let’s automate!

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