The ability to both rapidly innovate and adapt is the primary factor that will ensure your business succeeds in recovering from the COVID-19 crisis. RPA (Robotic Process Technology) is the essential toolset that you need for rehabilitating your business back to where it was and growing beyond.

COVID-19 introduced a number of new threats to companies’ risk teams:

• Disruptions in supply chain - either companies failing to produce, or failing to deliver
• Decline in productivity - employees off sick, isolated, home-working or quarantined
• Fixed overheads - whether operating at 30% or 100% capacity, rent costs the same
• Reduced efficiency - new precautions slow down the pace of work
• Employee burnout - constant remote working blurs the lines between work and leisure time

RPA is capable of helping you solve all these issues and emerge stronger from the crisis.

Your employees’ health and safety has always been your first priority. The work still needed to be done, so your company implemented the optimal work-from-home strategy. People’s perspective towards automation has, as a result, shifted.

Without the traditional office culture or any sort of fixed schedule, employees started to feel disengaged and demotivated.

Regardless, time-consuming and tedious back-office and administrative processes were still completed. Employees soon recognised that these tasks were thankless, and lacked a visible value-added contribution from their end. It is for this reason that many employees lost the motivation to adhere to a strict schedule whilst working from home.

5 ways the Robots can bring your business back to good health

This article could have been written during any crisis but COVID-19 really has been different. With homeworking technologies surging in usage, working from home has never been easier or more widespread. Organisations quickly started to investigate RPA tools and software once they realised that remote working would be a resounding success, if the employees were complemented by “Digital Workers” and automated services.

While back-office jobs exist, such as the processing of paperwork, many employees are required to visit the office. The on-boarding of a digital workforce using an RPA platform means your business can start “employing” a digital workforce that processes the tedious, repetitive back-office tasks without needing a single seat in your office.

1. Delegate dull tasks

RPA software enables your business to craft bots to automate rule- or formula-based tasks like copying data from forms into excel workbooks.

For those mundane but critical tasks, RPA services can eliminate the dullness of work by helping employees feel more engaged and valued while working from home.

2. Compensate for cost cutting measures

Your business may have been forced to let a few people go in order to cut costs. Tragic as this would have been, you are also faced with the dilemma as to who will actually do their jobs. RPA enables you to build bots that can replicate precise human actions while performing rule-based tasks. You don’t have to worry about work going stale or being missed entirely.

Robotic Process Automation is a one-time investment of your time that helps you to compensate for the cost cuts. Once a process is automated, you don’t have to teach a new employee your process.

On the contrary, a well-executed RPA implementation cuts costs rapidly and can provide full ROI in a time-span as short as six months. Your need to recruit people to fill forms, extract data, or process invoices simply vanishes. You can employ bots to do the same thing, faster and error-free using your existing processes.

3. Get your productivity back to normal

Productivity has also taken a hit while employees work from home. Time is now spent with the family, juggling the kids, mealtimes, playtime, distance learning and much more. People are overwhelmed.

RPA solution providers can bring your business back to good health and renew productivity levels, faster. Programmed RPA bots can assist your human workers to easily plough through banal and repetitive tasks, leading to a reduction in tedium and an increase in feeling valued.

In addition, process automation can dramatically increase productivity by transforming complex rule-based processes into automated task flows that deliver specific outcomes.

4. Provide better customer service

People are faced with more service challenges than before COVID-19, while stuck working at home. The first hurdle for you to overcome is to be able serve these customers in an improved manner. Your remote employees need to resolve customer queries whilst filling forms and accessing relevant information.

With RPA bots in action, employees deliver a higher quality human interaction while the bots fill forms, extract data points, and deliver contextual information to your team when it’s needed.

Introducing RPA and freeing up employee time will also enable and encourage them to innovate and bring new, creative ideas to better serve their customers. Bots can access terminals, applications and data stores to process information far more quickly and in a precise and accurate manner.

5. Get started with digital transformation

The single greatest advantage of introducing RPA in your business would be that you now have the tools to get started on your digital transformation journey.

Embracing the idea of becoming a digital organisation is no longer a choice – it’s a necessity. You need to work out how you can digitise your daily operations so that you can become more efficient, cut away your excess cost, and provide an enhanced customer experience.

On top of all that, you are going to need employees who can manage these “Digital Workers”. RPA is also an opportunity for your staff to quickly upskill during the time of crisis so that they remain relevant in your business and any others they may choose to move to.

Revive your lost revenue streams with RPA

Robotic Process Automation is not only a tool for digital transformation and helping you to emerge successful from your crisis mode – it is also a key method to recover revenues lost during the pandemic.

You don’t have to spend time and money recruiting replacement employees. You can re-build your own workforce of RPA bots who can easily deliver consistently better results than human personnel. They never get sick, they never complain and they never commit fraud.

Be conscious, however, that you always need to account for the human factor when it comes to an RPA implementation. You are going to need a skilled, adaptable workforce who can monitor and manage the performance and actions of your digital workforce.

While the demand for your products and services starts to rise again, you are going to need to focus more on your customers and their experience, rather than your processes. RPA is an essential toolset to help you to work seamlessly at the back-end so that you can serve customers amazingly at the front-end.