Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a term used for outsourcing business processes to third-party service providers. Many business processes can be outsourced in this way, including HR, finance and accounting, customer support, and supply chain management…
Lately, there’s been a growing trend of using AI to handle these outsourced processes, which increases efficiency and accuracy, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction. Here are 5 ways automation can be used to handle outsourced business processes.
What are the best automation strategies in the BPO industry?
Automate your processes
AI can help automate your company's daily processes, which are essential to its functioning. Whether it is scheduled tasks that happen at a certain hour or alarms that trigger based on certain conditions and trigger a chain of events, the possibilities are endless.
Automate your customer service
Customer service has huge potential for automatization. An artificial intelligence tool can help your agents in many ways, such as creating contracts or creating automated responses. Their work life will become more meaningful and exciting as the AI system takes over all the manual and boring tasks.
Automate your data entry
Manual data entry processes are one of the manual tasks where most human errors happen, as entering data manually can be boring, difficult, and tedious for any of your team members. OCR technology can automate tasks like this, freeing up your employees from having to do them.
Automate your reporting
Your managers sometimes have trouble extracting, processing, and creating reporting dashboards for your contractors on everything from first call resolution (FCR) to average handling time (AHT).
With automation, you can rest easy knowing that AI can produce meaningful and logical business reports, along with any graphical components you might need (charts, etc.)
So, instead of wasting time in report generation, invest more time into thinking about how to solve actual problems with these reports and improve your business.
Automate your workflows
For every type of task, for example, resetting a password for a customer, there is a list of jobs that need to be completed. With automation, you can create a list of these jobs that should happen, customize and let AI and or robots do the job.
They can be triggered in real-time when you receive a request by email. These automated workflows significantly improve the customer's experience (everything runs smoother and faster) but also the satisfaction of the employee. The employees just love workflow automation software!
What to do before choosing automation?
Define your goals
Before actually starting to automate, make sure you have a comprehensive list of all your processes so that you know what you want to automate. It helps being prepared, and it helps later on with setting up the automation tool.
Select the right tools
Make sure to research the market and all that is offered in the industry. Don’t make a hasty decision, take your time choosing the right tools. Remember, the end goal is to help your employees and increase customer satisfaction.
Train your employees
Once you have chosen a tool, organize a workshop or training program for your employees. It is important that once the tool is integrated in your business the employees know how to actually use it. This is an important step that takes up a lot of time and effort, but should not be skipped.
How to automate your business processes?
Robotics process automation - RPA
Robotic process automation is one type of technology that enables the automation of business processes. It is software that can be used to build and deploy digital robots that perform all of the repetitive, rule based tasks that were up to now done by your employees.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a developed technology that can perform tasks for which, up to now, human intelligence was needed. Artificial intelligence can improve on itself by training its data model, in that way becoming more and more accurate over time.
Business process management
Business process management is a discipline that helps you study and analyze the processes at your organization. With business process management, you can improve your processes, eliminate redundancies and defects, and generally just optimize your processes.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing can play a big part in automation, as AI systems and RPAs can be delivered over the Internet, or “the cloud” to offer cost reductions, higher security, and reliability.
Advanced analytics
Advanced analytics is another perk of having automated business processes. Advanced technology like AI and RPA makes it easier to discover and analyze things in-depth.
Why automate business operations?
Cost savings
Automating business processes is a huge opportunity to expand your business and at the same time save money. With automation, you can take on more and more tasks without making new hires or investing in even more expensive tools. All can be done by customizing your existing automation system.
Improved efficiency and equality
Automation software takes can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for your employees to focus on higher value work that requires their unique skills.
Efficiency is improved through automation as it eliminates mistakes caused by human error, as well as repetitive tasks that are often done manually. By reducing these two factors alone, you can see how much time is saved by using automation software.
Increased scalability
Automating business processes increases efficiency, meaning less labor is needed to manage your business' growth. You can expand your business by scaling up your automation systems to accommodate more customers. You don't necessarily need to hire new people or create new departments.
That said, the digital revolution is well under way, so you can no longer ignore these technologies. If you're still employing traditional business process outsourcing techniques, it may be time to consider tools that are more efficient and effective. A great place to start is by evaluating automation software for BPO companies.