What Is Robotic Process Automation?

Someone visits your website, looks around and fills out your lead generation form. Within minutes, the new lead receives a response to their inquiry and is provided with a clear call to action in the email they receive.

They choose their preferred time and date from the options given. In less than one hour, the lead has a for an inspection and converted into a strong prospect.

However, there's a twist to this lead-generation fairy tale.

Following the advice of a technology risk advisory firm, the company has implemented robotic process automation (RPA). Therefore, the lead is the only human in the above interaction. A robot did everything else, from responding to the lead to providing options and scheduling the lead for an inspection.

What Is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation is a technology or approach to business process automation. It involves using software robots to perform repetitive and routine digital business processes and tasks.

Have you seen Arnold Schwarzenegger's ‘Terminator’ or Will Smith's ‘I, Robot'? Don't worry. Robots in RPA do not refer to robots that can walk, talk and break your arm with a flick of their wrist. They're not mechanical or physical robots but software bots, much like Google’s search engine bots.

In other words, robots in RPA are programs. Their programming allows them to follow established sequences, rules and triggers to perform complicated, multi-step processes that human operators used to do. Thus, robots can automate — i.e., remove human intervention from — certain business processes.

Robots in RPA can interact with systems, productivity tools, and other software employees use to perform tasks. They can copy and paste information into documents, extract data from web-submitted forms, insert data into customer relationship management software, and perform low-level analysis to pick appropriate responses to prospects’ inquiries.

What Are the Benefits of Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation’s main and direct benefit is efficiency. Through RPA, high-volume and essential but highly tedious and repetitive tasks can get done quickly and with little to zero mistakes.

Robots perform the steps they have been programmed to follow. They do not make mistakes as long as the rules are clear and unambiguous. They do not need breaks and rest. Therefore, through RPA, data can be processed much quicker and results obtained much faster.

This means higher productivity, too. More leads can be processed, customer inquiries answered, and complaints managed and resolved per hour when a robot does the work.

Cost savings is another RPA benefit. When you can assign repetitive tasks to a software, you don’t need to pay employees for long hours doing routine, repetitive, mundane work.but paying them for doing value added activities and work which require intelligence.

RPA also helps ensure compliance. If specific processes need to be performed under exacting standards, RPA is a big help. Since robots do not commit mistakes —again, as long as there are no ambiguities in the steps and rules they follow — robots’ outputs will always be compliant.

Finally, RPA should help improve job satisfaction and engagement among employees. Robots can free your staff from work that requires no human input except to click, copy, sort, extract, and other such repetitive, mind-numbing progression of tasks. Thus, your employees can focus their energies on higher-level work.

Where Is Robotic Process Automation Used?

Robotic process automation can be applied in almost any industry. As long as a business has office processes and digital tasks, it can automate at significant cost savings and better efficiency using RPA.

The following are a few sectors where RPA can be pretty useful.

◍ Customer service

Robots can extract data from submitted forms and populate CRM software.

◍ Accounting

Robots can update a company’s financial data, perform account reconciliations, and record received payments. They can compute account receivables and payables, create and send out invoices, and document and classify expenses — and that's barely scratching the surface of what RPAs can do.

◍ Insurance

Robots can record underwriting form responses and automate claims processing.

◍ Healthcare

Robots can help onboard patients and maintain patients' records. They can also generate reports for doctors and monitor prescriptions.

◍ Human Resources

Recruitment agencies can use robots to extract data from resumes and index applicants into correct categories for easy and convenient access. They can also use software to rank applicants according to ‘fit’ or their suitability to open roles.

Is Robotic Process Automation for You?

Robotic process automation should work for most businesses. However, you will need to consult a technology consultant to help you identify specific processes that are suitable candidates for RPA.

Generally, RPA should work well for tasks or processes that:

• Follow a distinct set of rules
• Are performed regularly
• Have a clear trigger or set of triggers
• Have prescribed inputs
• Have clearly defined expected outputs
• Have ample volume

Your technology risk advisory consultants can tell you more about the specific characteristics of processes that will work well with robotic process automation. They can advise you, too, on whether the benefits of RPA outweigh automation costs in your case.

If you would like to implement robotic process automation in your business, contact us for a technology risk management assessment and consultation.