Being Intelligent with Automation — Automating Every Industry
Automation can reduce costs, save time and increase ROI, but it needs to be implemented intelligently to garner the best business outcomes.
Business decision makers are feeling increasing pressure to adopt automation for their workforce. Automation can reduce costs, save time and increase ROI, but it needs to be implemented intelligently to garner the best business outcomes. If you’ve been following our blog series, Being Intelligent with Automation, you’ve already read about the differences between AI (artificial intelligence) and RPA (robotic process automation) and how to start thinking about which would be best for your business. In this blog, we’ll give you some real-world examples of implementation across a variety of industries. Hopefully, this will help you start brainstorming use cases for your business and get an idea of how to implement these new technologies to best meet your business objectives.
Intelligent Automation: Facilitating more human-to-human connection
Before diving into industry use-cases, we want to dispel some common objections to intelligent automation and talk about the ideal philosophy for introducing intelligent automation into your business processes — whether existing or aspirational. Once automation becomes a more open discussion in your organization, your employees may have some reservations about their jobs being replaced or that they’ll be expected to be educated in the technological aspects of automation. To address these concerns, it’s important that the discussion include the effects that automation will have on their day-to-day work.
Automation is not a replacement for your employees, rather it is meant to augment their existing tasks, so they can spend their time on the valuable tasks only they can perform. Whether it’s spending more time with customers or working on creative projects, your employees need to know that you value their soft-skills. Intelligent automation will allow them to shine by taking on menial tasks, so they can prioritize the projects and tasks only a human can do. In the following use-cases, you’ll see how intelligent automation will augment your employees’ jobs and allow them to bring their true value to the forefront for a beneficial partnership between human (your employees) and machine (intelligent automation).
Intelligent automation in healthcare
In the healthcare sector, whether implementing AI or RPA, healthcare employees are freed up to focus on complex skills like patient care and patient advocacy. Insurance claims are one area where healthcare organizations can benefit, particularly from RPA. According to Ernst & Young, there are seven common and promising use cases of RPA implementation for healthcare:
· Streamlining vendor applications and estimations
· Capturing and managing claimant data
· Streamlining, automating and enhancing communications
· Scanning, indexing and converting forms and data
· Validating payments
· Customer-facing enhancements
· Integrating other enabling technologies
Being that claims management requires rule-directed tasks such as data input and data processing, it’s a great candidate for robotic process automation (RPA).
Alternatively, a use-case like imaging analytics or providing diagnoses is better suited for artificial intelligence (AI). AI can not only identify characteristics faster than humans, but many studies have also proven AI to provide much more accurate diagnoses. Here, AI can interpret images or a set of behaviors to determine a diagnosis. Some studies and use-cases have included AI diagnoses of Alzheimer’s, primary progressive aphasia, cancerous legions and heart arrhythmias — to name a few. Here, again, implementing AI to deliver diagnoses not only gives patients a faster, more accurate diagnosis, but it also gives doctors more time to spend with patients rather than analyzing symptoms, behaviors and scans to determine diagnoses.
Intelligent automation in financial services
The financial services sector is a great fit for intelligent automation considering how much the sector relies on analyzing data and making predictions based on existing data. And, like the healthcare sector, it’s a vertical process that gets a lot of value from spending time with customers. Avanade, in conjunction with Microsoft and Accenture, published a report on the rise of intelligent automation in financial services. In this report, they outlined a number of use-case scenarios that leverage RPAs:
· Customer onboarding
· Intelligent help desk
· Fraud detection
· Credit issuing
· Setup car insurance
· Email classification
· Payments
· FNOL
Again, any of these processes being automated frees up time for finance workers to spend time doing more valuable, creative and complex tasks like working directly with customers. There are many use-cases for AI in finance as well, but one particularly compelling use-case is the use of AI in fraud prevention.
AYASDI, for instance, put out a whitepaper on an AI powered, anti-money laundering solution that reduced the investigative workload by twenty percent. Fraud prevention requires significant human involvement and can quickly become a drag on earnings. In this use-case, the critical piece is deciphering between signal and noise. Using AI to identify false-positives ensures that employees are only putting their efforts toward cases that need their attention.
Intelligent automation in sales and marketing
There are countless use-cases for intelligent automation in sales and marketing. From prospecting, to competitor analysis, to data entry, intelligent automation allows marketers to spend time tapping into their creative sides and gives sales representatives more time to do what they do best — talk with customers.
Automation can make marketing efforts more personalized, better align marketing and sales efforts and give sales representatives the edge they need to close bigger deals faster. With so many possibilities, we’ll focus on a customer facing use-case that ensures alignment with marketing while passing qualified leads onto sales.
One valuable use case of intelligent automation for sales and marketing is a simple chatbot with prepopulated responses to customer questions that help find where they are in their buyer’s journey and whether they are a qualified lead to be passed onto sales. It all starts with marketing efforts directing customers to the right landing page, then having a chatbot on that landing page that can steer the conversation in the right direction whether they:
· Direct customers to more information
· Find out what pain points customers are facing
· Find out if they’re ready to buy/talk to a sales representative
If the customer is ready to buy/talk to a sales representative, the bot can pass the conversation on to the sales representative that will be reaching out to them. That way, the sales representative can ensure they have a relevant conversation and close the deal with the customer on their call. Sales representatives who know what customers are looking for right away demonstrate that they don’t want to waste customers’ time, which is something that customers appreciate.
Learn more
These are just some use cases for three different industries. There are many more use cases for EVERY industry to help augment employee’s work. Employees can spend more time on what matters while the organization saves time, money and increases their ROI. In our next blog, we’ll cover the need for and the how-to’s of prioritizing processes for automation and deciding whether it should be done in-house or through a vendor.
If you’re considering intelligent automation for your organization, visit our website at social27.com.
