As we continue to move forward in digital transformation, an increasing number of companies are discovering the promise of robotic process automation (RPA). In a nutshell, RPA allows companies to gain efficiencies and (hopefully) save money by automating routine tasks. RPA is what I’d call the low-hanging fruit of artificial intelligence. It’s governed by structured input. Its processes are mundane and rule-based. It doesn’t require the deep, complex system or infrastructure integration that other more substantial AI requires. Best yet, it frees up your employees to work on higher-value projects, rather than repetitive day-to-day tasks. And for that reason, it’s become a hot commodity. Forrester says RPA will be a $1.5 billion business by 2020. This spending is a boon for vendors like UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism that are at the forefront of this product offering.
But rather than more "philosophical" use cases for RPA, let's look at how businesses are using RPA in the real-world right now—and how your organization may benefit as well.
Technology like AI in marketing is nothing new, but companies are now turning to RPA to speed up the processes throughout the marketing funnel from lead generation to customer experience. Pega, another vendor in the RPA space, offers a full suite of marketing solutions from an advertising manager to a customer journey hub. Each solution allows companies the opportunity to personalize messages for each customer, blowing away the competition. Given the sometimes negative perceptions that consumers can have toward banking institutions, PNC Financial Services wanted to improve its customer experience and turned to Pega’s marketing technology. With data, analytics, and a 360-degree view of the customer journey, PNC was able to increase revenue, improve the customer experience, improve online marketing efforts and increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
Insurance company, American Fidelity, despite some initial reluctance, has found incredible time savings using RPA solutions from UiPath. Playfully using the project tagline “Drop the Drudgery” helped employees realize that they could use RPA to do the task they probably didn’t want to do anyways. They quickly automated a number of customer-facing tasks to improve business and didn’t stop there. They looked for a way to handle one of their biggest time sucks — classifying and routing incoming customer emails.
Employees used to have to read each email, tag it and reroute it to the proper channel, but by using RPA and machine learning it was able to decrease processing speeds from 45 hours to a mind-cracking 3 seconds. Again, the value isn’t just in saving time. It’s what your employees are doing in the remaining 44 hours and 57 seconds that will make American Fidelity successful. But the power of RPA in creating that time cannot be overestimated. This is a great example of how businesses use RPA.
Safe-Guard Products, a North American based insurance company, automated the claims submission process reducing the number of times a single employee had to handle a claim. The time it took to process a claim was reduced by 75%. The team’s overall productivity and capacity to handle claims was increased by 30% Using tools from UiPath, another company was similarly able to cut its claims processing times by 50 percent, again creating greater bandwidth for employees to better serve their clients.
We’ve all received those messages from our credit card company alerting us when something may or may not have been “off” with our retail activity. Imagine how difficult it would be for humans to track the millions of transactions happening online in real time. Again using tech from UiPath, a leading global investment bank was able to reduce the amount of time spent on fraud claims from 45 minutes to 20 minutes and eliminate human interaction completely.
Remember: the value derived from RPA isn’t just monetary.
