Leveraging RPA during the COVID-19 era

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are working towards balancing the health and safety of their employees while keeping the “lights on” digitally to serve customers & partners. A large number of organizations have urged representatives to work remotely as these are the trying times for each business to balance employee safety & customer needs.

Most companies had enabled different digital capabilities/assets over the years. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of these tools manifold. Innovative tools such as bots, WhatsApp & RPA have helped push the man-machine combo to effectively service customers. In the process, while serving the purpose currently, they are also on the cusp of being trend-setters for the future. The impact will be visibly known in the post-lockdown phase. In the current situation, there are several ways Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help companies keep their businesses up and running.

1. Achieve more with less - RPA empowers organizations to diminish worker time by performing stable, rule-based business processes so that employees can be centred on activities higher up the value chain, requiring the deployment of classic human skills such as creativity & decision-making.
2. Service more customers - Organizations can build their online presence, get new clients and serve existing clients without adding to the workforce. The group can take a shot at high-end activities that need human mediation while robots can pull together significant data from different sources and put it in the database or web form to process the same, be it on boarding of the client or handle a client transaction.
3. Accuracy – The ‘human-factor’ is certainly necessary to be considered in daily work life and thus cannot be overlooked. However, a few assignments need to be done fast without any errors and here RPA helps businesses by bringing in that speed and adaptability.
4. Reduce operational expenses – The cost side of the equation comes to the forefront when revenue is under pressure & Robotic Process Automation is an incredible tool to keep cost under control even as the serving base grows.
5. Usage of RPA in Insurance - RPA can add value across the entire insurance value chain. Some of the use cases are outlined as below:

New Business and Underwriting: RPA’s role in underwriting can lie in amalgamating data from various sources to accurately assess the risk associated with any insurance. Underwriting requires evaluation of risk and exposures of clients, which can be a lengthy process, especially for medium and large risks with data dispersed over numerous sources and reports. RPA can read this data, organise it and accumulate it in one place for the underwriter’s convenience. By using a set of rules, it can go one step further and make recommendations about accepting the risk by assigning an acceptability score, which can be used for decision making and pricing.

Policy Administration and Servicing: Policy issuance frameworks, old and new, provide comparable functionalities wherein a lot of clients ask for varied strategies. Hence, scalability becomes an issue. Also, many firms have multiple systems a policy punching employee must go through, which hampers productivity, leading to inefficiencies and mistakes. RPA can permit the issuance framework to understand information and process it from different frameworks. It essentially automates transactional and managerial pieces of exercises, for example, bookkeeping, settlements, risk capture, and so on. RPA can also minimise time for policy servicing requests such as modifications and cancellations. Additionally, it can not only help keep track of proposals, but also track delivery status by reading/ interacting with external mediums such as courier companies and postal authorities.

The gains of economies of scale to be derived are massively enormous and that too with no operational hazard in essence. Freed from mundane and routine tasks, back-office staff can be redeployed into higher-value roles where they can concentrate on complex client requests and increase business effectiveness.

The organisation design of today, as well as that of tomorrow, is one wherein a manager can rightfully say that he has X humans and Y RPA bots reporting to him / her! Also, since bots do not attrite or have mood swings etc., they also add to productivity / effectiveness by taking away supervisory layers! An exciting future beckons!