Intelligent Automation in BPOs with Process Orchestration

 

"BPO companies are realizing that a cheaper workforce and low-cost benefits cannot be their only USPs as in the past. Witnessing the deepened integration of automation in everyday processes, BPO is now transitioning from only human-led processes to BPA, automation frameworks and robotics." - Forbes

The outsourcing industry is one of the few in the world that uses a labour arbitrage model. BPOs, in particular, employ a massive workforce to tackle their front-office and back-office workload.

In recent years, there has been an increase in demand for business process outsourcing. The reason for this is that companies strive to increase profits and improve their efficiency while maintaining a clear focus on their core competencies.

As a general rule, BPOs scale their manpower to meet an increase in demand. However, the introduction of Intelligent Automation (a combination of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and technologies like AI, OCR, ML, NLP, etc.) has revolutionized the functioning of the BPO industry by increasing productivity while reducing manual labour and labour costs.

Robots approximately cost one-third of the price of offshore full-time employees and one-fifth of the price of an onshore full-time employee. - Institute for Robotic Process Automation

BPOs have started to predominantly employ intelligent automation for back-office tasks because robots can work with high accuracy on repetitive tasks without any breaks. However, most front-office tasks still require the cognitive skills of humans, which no AI can replicate as of now.

Thus, the BPO industry serves as an ideal environment to establish a well-balanced work ecosystem of digital and manual workers working together as a holistic unit.

So, how is Intelligent Automation being implemented in the BPO Industry?

Leading BPOs use intelligent automation to handle substantial amounts of data and provide optimal customer satisfaction by meeting SLAs. Further, intelligent automation assists BPOs with the significant reduction of AHTs and TATs.

Listed below are some of the use cases for intelligent automation (IA) in BPOs:

Increase Workforce Efficiency:  BPOs can relieve their employees from mundane back-office tasks and employ them far more effectively in areas that require cognitive and interpersonal skills, such as enhancing customer experience.

Data Entry & Validation: The process of manually updating and validating data is prone to errors, and inaccuracies, affecting operational efficiency. Nevertheless, by implementing IA in data handling, BPOs can enter, validate, and process data more rapidly with fewer resources and maintain consistency without making any errors.

File & Data Manipulation: BPOs exhaustively rely on data in the form of files, records, and reports which become increasingly difficult to store and locate. Using IA overcomes this challenge because it assists with pulling, analyzing, formatting, mining, copying, and deleting datum/data.

Reconciliations: Discrepancies in data, human error, and inconsistencies are commonplace in this process, whereby introducing IA reduces risk, ensures accuracy, and builds reliability within.

Factors Driving Intelligent Automation in the BPO Industry

1. Governance: From overseeing manual processes & bot activity, enforcing SLAs, and optimizing human & bot utilization, to maintaining compliance with standards, governance contributes to establishing trust in the automation ecosystem.

2. Process Discovery: Bottlenecks in complex BPO processes are identified by data-driven process discovery tools. These bottlenecks can be minimized with automation, thus increasing operational efficiency.

3. Scalability: Most automation implementations in the BPO industry struggle to scale up over a few bots due to insufficient human-bot governance, weak exception handling, incompatibility with multiple bot vendors, and other future-of-work technologies, leading to write-offs. But scalability is imperative for resilience and growth.

To reap these benefits to the fullest, organizations need Robotic Process Orchestration (RPO).

How can Robotic Process Orchestration (RPO) boost Intelligent Automation in BPO while addressing the above factors?

RPO increases RPA efficiencies through effective Governance: Roadblocks in the forms of weak governance, inferior exception handling, multiple bot vendor incompatibility, and human handoff lapses lead to delays, affecting automation implementation. But RPO makes human-RPA/bot handoffs effortless, streamlines human-bot governance, provides multi-vendor compatibility, and upgrades exception handling.

RPO also identifies high potential processes for automation: RPO displays business intelligence in determining potential activities for automation – proposes the suitable technology, supplies metadata on savings potential & propounds a plan for continuous automation evolution based on human-bot activity.

RPO delivers end-to-end process automation while facilitating scalability: With RPO, manage harmonious handoffs between humans and bots placed in any order any number of times. Bots can carry out menial tasks while humans take care of exceptions and complex tasks in the end-to-end service cycle. It guarantees scalability, especially in drawn-out, complicated processes like reconciliation and F&A.

Is RPO the right fit for you?

RPO has proven successful in increasing work efficiency by up to 10%, in addition to work allocation transparency and robust MIS reporting. RPO leads to clear data and delivers continuous improvement. Moreover, RPO reduces service delivery times and/or turnaround times by 10%, which demonstrates a successful vendor-customer partnership. From strategy to pilot to production through strong project ownership and a focus on the human side of processes, RPO provides the right inputs for efficient outputs.

Intelligent Automation in BPO – Powered by Enate’s Robotic Orchestration for better competitive advantage and operational agility than your peers in the industry, better customer experience, and improvement in bottom-line and workforce productivity.

What is Enate?

Enate is a UK-based enterprise software company. Its Robotic Process Orchestration technology combines lightweight Workflow, BPM & work management into a no-code quick SaaS offering. 

The technology delivers end-to-end process automation by connecting human workers & digital bots (RPA, OCR, AI/ML, etc.) into one hybrid workforce and managing operations across them. It enables organizations to save at least 20 to 30% on operating costs by scaling automation & streamlining operations to improve efficiency. 

The platform's customers include global brands like Infosys, Mizuho Bank, Capgemini, EY, Utmost (erstwhile Generali Link), and many more.