Big Shift – BPO Readiness for Automation Gaining Momentum

The concept of outsourcing was introduced to help businesses make a better profit. Since its early adoption, it has revolutionized the way enterprises do business. Now, one more thing has arrived to transform this ‘Outsourcing’ business to the next level. It is called ‘Robotic Process Automation (RPA)’. This fascinating technology is helping enterprises to become more competitive and efficient in global markets.

BPO leaders, no matter in which industry they serve, can meet customers’ expectations with ease by adopting RPA and help businesses grow faster than before. This is why RPA has become a buzzword in the BPO sector.

This blog will help you understand why RPA is good for BPO. But before we dive into the core subject, let’s understand the basics first.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a popular business practice where an enterprise hires external vendors to execute some of its tasks. Mostly, non-core business functions that are well-understood and documented. For example IT Services, Customer Relations, Product/Service Support, Human Resources (HR), Quality Assurance, Payment Processing, Marketing & Sales, Accounting, Research, Shipping & Logistics, etc.

The objectives of outsourcing work to BPO companies are:

• Cost Saving
• Competitive Edge
• Quality Improvement
• Better Flexibility
• Improved Customer Experience

Moreover, using the BPO workforce, enterprises can work on their core business functionalities with a greater focus to boost innovation and profitability.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is growing at a rapid pace but equally growing the number of complexities around it. Some of its core challenges are:

• Huge requirement of people for manual processes
• High labor costs
• Lack of automation
• Increased competition
• Matching customer expectations

The adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) powered with Artificial Intelligence (AI) can solve many of the complexities surrounding the BPO industry.

Automation of all rule-based business processes that are high-in-volume, time-consuming, and mundane is called robotic process automation. It is a revolutionary technology that is enabling digital revolution across industries including BPO.

RPA in BPO is the application of this technology to automate BPO processes to gain better efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can further enhance the automation capabilities and drive greater productivity and accuracy.

AI-based BPO automation solutions add decision-making capabilities to automation solutions and offer great benefits like:

• Simplified business processes
• Greater process visibility
• Enhanced processing speed
• Better exception handling
• Greater scalability & flexibility
• Improved customer experience
• Enhanced employee engagement
• Better cost-savings
• Greater accuracy
• Better data security & privacy
• Boosts innovation

You can manage all types of data – structured, semi-structured, and unstructured using AI-powered automated BPO solutions. It helps in automating more business processes than usual to gain remarkable outcomes as stated above.

• Employees spend 10%-25% of their time on doing repetitive tasks.
• 50% of companies spend between $5- $25 dollars for manual invoice processing.
• Any typical rules-based process can be 70% – 80% automated using RPA.
• IT personnel spend up to 30% of their time doing low-level tasks.

According to one prominent research, the RPA sector is expected to grow at a stellar CAGR of 25% between 2021 to 2028 and will become a USD 7.64 billion industry by 2028. BPO is considered as one of the leading sectors that will play a crucial role in the success of RPA. BPO service providers are expected to embrace RPA software to a great extent to maximize business gains.

Automation has enabled large-scale transformation across the industries. BPO service providers can also expand the scope of digitalization by automating business processes to attain maximum ROI. There are several business functions/processes that are repetitive and rule-based in nature. By implementing business process outsourcing (BPO) automation, you can optimize BPO services for better business gains. Some of those BPO services/functions are:

1. Data Entry: Back-office executives at BPOs need to do a lot of data entry work. Automation can help them ease this task very efficiently. RPA bots empowered with artificial intelligence can read data from files or fetch required data from different applications and feed necessary information into the concerned application/system. When humans carry out this job, it leads to inaccuracies. RPA ensures 100% accuracy. That too while consuming just a fraction of time as compared to when done by humans.

2. Payroll Processing: Payroll professionals at BPOs take a lot of effort to calculate a final payment to employees. It is a highly time-consuming, error-prone, and herculean process that can be managed greatly using RPA software. An automation system can be integrated with various different applications and can auto-check attendance, leave, timesheet, holidays, etc. After fetching the required data, it analyzes and processes final pay based on the enterprise’s policies. Automated BPO software eliminates paperwork and sends salary slips to employees without any human intervention.

3. Data Analysis: BPO industry today serves almost every business sector. Many verticals like telecom, manufacturing, healthcare, FMCG, etc., deal in a lot of data. This huge pile of data is used for business analysis. But doing it manually is a challenging task. RPA enables BPO employees to process tons of disparate data and find meaningful patterns. It helps in providing deeper business insights and assists in better business decision-making. Also, automated BPO software enables top executives to prepare crucial reports in a very quick time and saves time further. According to The American Payroll Association (APA), automation reduces payroll processing costs by as much as 80 percent.

4. Customer Relationship: Implementation of RPA in BPO helps organizations maintain healthier, trustworthy, meaningful, and long-lasting relationships in various ways.

A. AI-powered chatbots, an automated email reply system, and advanced IVR provide immediate answers to some of the popular concerns. Faster response that too round the clock, all 365 days a year makes customers feel valuable.

B. Much of the time BPO executives, who directly face customers over a call, chat, or email find various challenges – digging customers’ information, making notes, finding the right information concerning their queries, etc. With RPA, employees can easily manage these tasks and save a considerable amount of time. It helps in reducing average handling time (AHT) and assists in closing tickets faster than usual.

C. You can auto-schedule email and send emails to countless people in one go. At the time of new product launch, new update, festive season, etc. It not just saves time but helps boost engagement with customers as well.

5. Data Management: Whether it is about data mining, data processing, data backup, or data migration, you can manage all tasks with ease. You can also clean data by using a business suitable logic so that only proper data can be entered into the system. Precise data management is the need of time as all valuable information is contained in data. Its proper maintenance and efficient management are very important for business sustainability.

6. Compliance Management: BPO industry needs to follow numerous rules and regulations to deliver quality end results on time. There are several legislations that BPO service providers have to follow as per the rule of the land, apart from executing processes as per the enterprise’s policies. Manually checking compliances is a tricky and mundane task. A small error at this work can lead you into trouble and make you pay hefty fines. Sometimes, inaccuracies in compliances bring a bad reputation as well and severely damage brand image. RPA bots audit the work at a granular level and ensure smooth execution of all compliances. When they find any discrepancy, they send an auto-notification to senior executives to look into the matter. Better visibility at loopholes and regular updates help manage compliances efficiently, without fail.

7. Invoice Creation: According to one prominent research, it takes up to 16 days for companies to get payments approved, after passing through all stages. Almost 76% of the work is being done manually, out of which majorly can be automated to boost the pace and efficiency of invoice processing. AI-powered RPA bots empower enterprises to read data using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. And using AI, the RPA system provides certain decision-making capabilities as well to reduce the dependence on humans. As a result, invoices are processed, analyzed, and approved too fast that too while maintaining superb accuracy.

The global BPO market is highly competitive. Cost along with efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction plays a very crucial role in the survival of any organization. RPA is undoubtedly the most cost-effective solution that can help businesses to deliver better services meeting all quality standards.

So, let bots handle repetitive tasks with accuracy and make your employees focus better on core services. It is the need of the hour.