How Can RPA Help Organizations Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

How Can RPA Help Organizations
Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The COVID-19 outbreak has disrupted individuals, governments, societies, and businesses across the world. Enterprises are implementing necessary measures to prepare and respond to the crisis, from travel restrictions to enforcing work-from-home.

Despite the difficulties, enterprises are coming together to ensure business continuity and day-to-day operations. Leveraging technologies in these difficult and uncertain times helps enterprises address the concerns — whether it’s data security issues or making work-from-home a seamless experience for employees. One such RPA Technology seeing an unusual spike in adoption across industry verticals. From manufacturing and healthcare to retail and insurance, robots are being integrated into the economy more than ever before.

RPA technology essentially automates repetitive, rule-based tasks, freeing the human worker from mundane, clerical work. The benefits of implementing RPA are many – from reduced error rates to improved customer service.

Here are a few ways Robotic Process Automation helps respond to the COVID-19 crisis:

Managing the High Volume of Requests

With industries such as insurance and telecom seeing an unprecedented spike in the number of requests, Robotic Process Automation steps in, managing the workload. Claims processing, invoice collections, and processing order requests are seeing a sudden spur. Thanks to automation, the massive volume of requests can be handled, thus relieving the human worker to focus on tasks that require more judgment. It also eliminates paperwork and ensures increased accuracy and faster turnaround time.

Responding to Customer Queries 24/7

With the pandemic growing to unprecedented levels, businesses are inundated with customer calls — queries relating to claims, order status, or even HR/employee-related concerns on remote working. In such a scenario, robots take over and respond to queries 24/7, providing proactive communication, and offering solutions to customers. This also helps reduce the wait time, ensuring services are up and running at all times.

Implementing chatbots during these uncertain times has helped optimize call center experiences too. The chatbots interact with customers 24/7, thus addressing customer queries and issues. Call centers are quickly deploying chatbots to help resolve customer issues as quickly as possible.

Supporting IT Operations

The IT industry has had no time whatsoever to contemplate the COVID-19 outbreak as it spreads at a rapid pace. In order to ensure business continuity, businesses are enforcing IT ops programs to ensure seamless connectivity and security. Organizations are deploying digital bots to optimize operations in these times of uncertainty. Many organizations are leveraging the power of automation to scale across business units, standardize processes, reduce costs, and improve accuracy.

IT operations/activities RPA can help with include:

Supporting the HR Function with Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is a data-driven activity. It involves repetitive, time-consuming tasks that can be automated. From moving emails to the final onboarding process, RPA bots can handle all the digital work. This makes it easy for HR departments to onboard new employees without any delay.

Offering solutions to healthcare: As RPA takes over mundane, repetitive tasks, it helps in maintaining records of a patient, registering a patient, and performing COVID-19 related data analysis, thereby expediting the health process. Automation, without a doubt, is helping healthcare workers cope with the pandemic. RPA helps schedule not only remote patient consultations but also ensures social distancing guidelines are in place.

Conclusion

Automation vendors like UiPath, Blue Prism, and EdgeVerve are helping enterprises across industry verticals address the challenges in these times of uncertainty. Maintaining business-as-usual services is a top priority among business leaders, along with ensuring the health and safety of the employees.

Robot-led automation tools are assisting governments, businesses, institutes, and individuals respond to the ongoing crisis by alleviating the pressure on human workers. With widespread lockdowns across the world, RPA gaining significance is apparent and has led to a fundamental shift in how businesses operate, both front-end and back-end processes. Industries are deploying digital bots to ensure continuous business operations, thereby driving process efficiency and maintaining the bottom line. From scheduling remote patient consultations in the healthcare industry to managing large volumes of claims processing in banking, RPA tools are helping enterprises battle against the COVID-19 crisis.