At every business’s core, there is a set of processes designed to transform resources into products or customer offerings. As efficiency is key for businesses to succeed and grow, optimising business processes can help to improve performance by allocating resources efficiently.
The easiest way to improve process performance across your company is to leverage technology and invest in automation. One technology that’s made a tangible impact on business performance is robotic process automation (RPA).
Why you should incorporate RPA in your processes
Research shows that companies with highly automated processes are six times more likely to see revenue growth of more than 15 per cent compared to companies with low or no automation.[1] Therefore, RPA is critical to growing your business alongside causing your employees to become more engaged in core tasks, and providing customers with a richer company experience.
Here’s how RPA can benefit your business:
1. Improve productivity
Employees today struggle to perform under the weight of mundane, repetitive work. Influenced by their own customer experiences, employees want similar experiences in their jobs, but too much back-office work prevents them from engaging in higher value activities.
Investing in RPA as an effective co-worker to streamline repetitive, rule-based, information-processing tasks empowers your employees to focus on core activities that require more creativity and innovation. Likewise, RPA does not require new IT systems to be implemented so productivity levels are not interrupted during the introductory phase.
Employees will be the first to appreciate the benefits from RPA as it can alleviate the demand from non-value-added activities, allow them to engage in richer interactions with other employees and customers, and perform tasks that require more brain power. Instead of feeling like robots themselves, your employees become the architects that drive the core innovations and efficiencies of your company.
Research from Deloitte shows that 86 per cent of companies that have integrated RPA into their processes increased organisational efficiency and productivity, proving RPA to be a valuable tool for your business.[2]
2. Improve employee job satisfaction
Employees require much more than a salary to be satisfied with their jobs. Increasingly, companies have been focusing on improving employee wellbeing to positively benefit productivity and performance.
Altering the workplace to create environments where staff feel engaged and valued does more for job satisfaction than any other kind of initiative. These conditions mean that individual capabilities can flourish.However, it’s not easy to maintain this environment if your employees are working long hours on mundane tasks. It’s exactly this type of situation where RPA can help you to improve employee engagement and job satisfaction.
RPA creates opportunities for individuals and teams to restructure work processes that change the dynamics of your organisation. You can re-focus your employees’ efforts towards both the team and overall company mission, giving them the tools to deliver tasks on time with greater accuracy through the use of bots. This will result in a far more engaged workforce who will be free to collaborate frequently, share knowledge between functional units, and discuss new ideas openly.
3. Improve customer experience
RPA can be a gamechanger not just for internal organisational processes, but also for your customers.
With improved confidence in your employees’ abilities, you’ll have more time to focus on customer-centred activities, such as:
- analysing and investigating customer pain points
- leveraging cross-functional optimisation
- improving turnaround times for customers
These activities will let you deliver continuous process improvement to significantly enhance customer experiences.
By pairing robotics with a human-centred design, RPA can streamline underlying processes and reduce friction to create a sense of seamlessness for customers. On top of this, the benefits to employee productivity and satisfaction will cascade down to benefit your customers. Employees will have quicker access to reporting, leaving them more time to focus on meeting customer needs. Your business will therefore benefit from gaining deeper customer insights through spending more time on direct customer interactions, enhancing the overall customer experience.
With the rise of automation tools, many fear a dystopian view that solutions like RPA will replace jobs and human workers will be left behind. However, in practice, RPA has already proven to be a valuable tool that lets you re-focus your activities within your organisation to improve productivity, employee satisfaction, and your customer experience. Far from sacrificing human jobs, RPA creates an environment where people can derive vastly improved satisfaction from focusing on more interesting and challenging work.
