What makes a good co-worker?
According to stories on job and professional websites, qualities like promptly returning emails and phone calls, being on time for meetings, and working at least as hard as everyone else are key to making yourself popular in the workplace.
In other words, other people like you when you’re valuable. Which is exactly why your organization should be leveraging robotic process automation, aka tiny software robots that have all those ideal co-worker qualities.
We’ve heard stories from customers about how initially they worried that robots would replace good people from doing good work. What they found was the exact opposite: Robots are like that one hard-working employee who always raises his hand for the most boring, time-consuming, mind-numbing jobs…and then gets them done in record time, accurately, with a big smile on his face.
Here are five reasons robots make the best coworkers.
1. Performing repetitive tasks is a drag.
Many work processes revolve around gathering data, compiling the data into a single document, making a decision around that information, and then inputting parts or all of the data and the decision into another system.
This monotonous work is quite simply a drag, not only on your team, but on the entire department and even the business. It’s boring, error-prone, and tedious, which creates a negative customer experience.
Robots to the rescue: RPA automates these expensive, error-prone manual tasks and helps organizations increase capacity by 35-50%, slash processing times by 30-50%, eliminate costly errors, and deliver 100% data accuracy…all with a 6-12 month ROI. And now your human team can leverage their knowledge and skills for more critical tasks or exceptions, resulting in better customer service.
2. Mitigating risk is…well, risky.
One of the biggest struggles we see in business is in creating reliable, accurate, efficient and traceable procedures that reduce or remove risk. Manually performing compliance tasks simply takes too much time, so many organizations and employees do the minimum required, creating a financial risk if anything is overlooked.
Robots to the rescue: RPA automates time-consuming compliance tasks like verifications, regulatory updates, reporting and notifications to be 100% correct every time. By performing more exhaustive checks than humans can in near-real time, robots make the risk assessment process much more comprehensive.
When there is an issue or exception, robots engage their human coworkers to do what they do best: Apply experience, skill, judgement and discretion to mitigate risk even further.
That’s exactly how one European bank saved thousands of person-hours a week on Know Your Customer checks. Instead of paying highly-skilled analysts to spend hours a day gathering information on customers for CDD and KYC compliance, they deployed Kofax Kapow™ to automate investigations. The robots work the night shift, so when analysts arrive in the morning, the data is waiting for them.
3. Creating a great customer experience that scales is hard to do by hand
An incredible customer experience begins with easy self-service, lightning-fast responses, and instant access to information—and companies like Apple and Amazon continue to raise customer expectations sky-high. How can your organization, saddled with legacy technology, siloed processes and reduced headcount, compete?
Robots to the rescue: RPA contributes to the customer experience in three ways. First, by streamlining those manual tasks and verifications noted above, processes impacting customers are significantly faster and less prone to error.
Second, robots are collaborators, creating communication pathways between systems and portals and people that didn’t exist before. They eliminate “Sorry you have to provide the information again, but your data is housed in another department” and “I’ll have to call you back after I look up your records.”
Third, robots can do the heavy lifting on routine customer requests, which eliminates the wait and frees your staff to focus on the more complex problems. Hear how Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities companies in the U.S., leveraged robots for routine stop-start electricity service requests in this on-demand webinar.
4. Prioritizing “important” work over “urgent” work is a challenge.
You’re probably familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps you prioritize important and urgent work into a grid.
Big, long-term, company-wide priorities fall squarely into the “Important but Less Urgent” box. After all, you’re busy keeping the ship afloat; you don’t have time to innovate.
Robots to the rescue: Driving innovation and growing profits begins with the nuts-and-bolts of discovering and eliminating inefficiencies, then finding opportunities to disrupt the prevailing business model in a staid or commoditized market.
RPA is an ideal technology to “eliminate and innovate” because it’s incredibly fast to get up and running, and it connects to and works alongside your current technologies without the need for complex programming.
Disrupting the prevailing business model is exactly what Spotcap did in the business lending environment. Its proprietary credit platform, powered by robotic process automation, is entirely online and completely automated, delivering loan decisions to small businesses within minutes.
5. It’s fun to give your robots names.
The best co-workers aren’t just the people who show up on time and do a good job; they’re also great communicators and fun to hang out with. That’s why we highly encourage you to personalize your robots with names, like many of our customers do.
For example, one of our customers sent us a birth announcement announcing the “arrival” of their latest robotic process automation robot, which they named “PippaBot.”
We even created a robot of our own. Kapow is our “Original Bot” that’s been powering automation innovation rel="noopener noreferrer" for 20 years now. See the Kapow robot in action.
And in the Institute of Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPAAI) webinar, you’ll hear from one company that names all of their bots, including a repair estimates robot named “Ratchet.”
The future of work
There will always be talk about robots replacing humans, but in the near future, you can count on humans and robots working together as a more intelligent workforce. Bots excel at the critical but repetitive grunt work, humans excel at jobs that require emotional intelligence and discernment, and together, they amplify each other’s value.
Robotic Process Automation in the Real World: How 3 Companies are Innovating with RPA
Listen to the Institute of Robotic Process Automation webinar featuring insights from panelists in manufacturing, government, banking and transportation & logistics. Get the on-demand webinar now.