What is business automation?

Business automation helps organisations achieve better performance by improving customer experiences through automating the processes that often cause bottlenecks. In doing so, they unlock the ability to be competitive, simplify operations and make them more intelligent – improving their efficiencies and meeting challenges much more effectively.

Making things run better is at the heart of business automation. If two identical competitive businesses have the same strategy but one is operationally excellent, its cost-saving, risk-managing and revenue-making will see it outshine the other.

What are the benefits?

Ultimately, business automation makes an organisation more competitive, but the tangible differences are numerous.

• Business automation will help satisfy customers, increase efficiency and secure data.
• Organisations can speed up repetitive tasks and complete it the fewest steps or clicks possible.
• Staff are freed up to spend time on other, more profitable activities.
• Unnecessary customer contact is reduced/eradicated so that employees have the time to talk and add value to customer interactions when only a human can help, making customer experience more satisfying.

What sectors is it useful for?

Business automation can be applied to all work types across the enterprise; however, the biggest impact comes from its application to cross-enterprise work - work that involves multiple departments in order to start and finish it, e.g. approving loans, and expert work involving human judgement e.g personalised consultations.

It’s possible to increase the impact and productivity of experts with assistive automation and to deliver start to finish customer journeys with straight-through processing. These types of automation lend themselves perfectly to the following vertical industries.

Financial Services

The financial services industry has specifically used business automation to open new accounts, reducing new account processing time. That includes new margin and option trading accounts where errors have been virtually eliminated and new customers can open accounts quickly. Institutional money movement has also eliminated errors from multiple hand-offs by delivering system-generated rules-based decisioning along with automatic field validation.

Government

Defence claims in the US Government have specifically been cited as a business automation success. The framework implemented automates the entire indigent defence claims process, from initial submission, workflow and reporting to approval by the chief justice, and payment. Automation accelerated claims processing by at least 77% - reducing the process from 45 to 10 days per claim.

Green Energy

In the face of climbing operating costs, growing customer expectations for quality products and services, changing business requirements, and an ongoing need to keep employees satisfied, the sector has deployed intelligent virtual assistants. These span employee and customer self-service functions – to improve efficiency along with customer and employee satisfaction. Desktop AI assistants helped employees with technology when working from home in the pandemic. The industry also automated back-office ledger bookings, completing around 3000 tasks a day and resulting in millions of dollars of value and a 60% reduction in processing time.

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