The word “digital transformation” is still making a buzz. Thanks to the COVID’s impact across industries; a new survey by Mckinsey states that COVID has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years. Does digital transformation simply mean adopting and integrating innovating technologies to automate business processes and improve customer experience? Well, digital transformation is not a one-time project but a continuous process, which needs to be “improved” constantly. In fact, it goes beyond mere automation using software bots or Robotic Process Automation Digital transformation can be achieved through hyperautomation and a holistic automation strategy to realize its true benefits.
Let’s explore more about hyperautomation here.
Hyperautomation: The driving force behind digital transformation
When industry analysts named hyperautomation as one of the top technology trends of 2022, it came as a no-surprise to many businesses. The reason being, hyperautomation already started picking pace post the pandemic, helping companies across industries navigate the challenges and sustain.
For example, service desks of IT companies had to cope up with the sudden influx of requests coming from remote employees spread across the globe; help desks of travel companies had to manage the refund requests and other queries of travellers; banking institutions were forced to look out for modern technologies for customer onboarding, anti-money laundering and other critical processes; healthcare industry was at the forefront of technology adoption during the COVID times to offer the best care experience for patients, and also perform research about the development and supply of vaccines and other medical care items; and the examples don’t just end here.
What is hyperautomation?
Hyperautomation is not just a mere process automation.It involves a combination of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), low code/no code platforms to identify, vet, and automate business processes without or very less human intervention.
Why is it important? Benefits of hyperautomation
Improved customer experience
In this digital-first world, where we can order a pizza in a click of a button, get food essentials delivered in 15 minutes, what if even banks can give their retail customers a smooth onboarding experience, with 40% decrease in their onboarding process time, or healthcare institutions can answer the questions of patients immediately, with the help of AI assistants. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of every business. Using hyperautomation technologies like AI assistants and RPA, businesses can ensure their customers always get instant answers to all their questions. It greatly enhances customer experience, and also reduces the burden of customer care representatives.
Enhanced employee experience
Technologies at work and employee experience are directly proportional. With an increasing number of millennials and gen Z at work, they want the same level of experience as they get in the consumer world. Right from creating applications to speeding up work, choosing their assistants, to resolving simple technical glitches, they feel empowered when equipped with the appropriate tools.
To maximize employee experience and allow them to focus on creative and more value-adding tasks, organizations can implement RPA bots to automate monotonous tasks. By opting for low-code platforms, business leaders can empower their employees to create enterprise applications with minimal to no coding experience. IT desks can deploy self-service chatbots for employees fix minor issues round the clock.
Reduce operational costs
Hyperautomation is a real value driver and enhances cost-saving opportunities. A leading technological research and consulting firm estimates that within five years, hyperautomation will reduce companies’ operating costs at least by 25-30%. And that intelligent automation will reduce as much as 70% of the managers’ workload by 2024.
Many organizations may prioritize speedy delivery and compromise on the quality of code, thus resulting in technical debt – the cost of having to rework on the coding again. With low-code platforms, since you have only a minimal level of coding, it can significantly reduce this technical debt, and also by making a smart investment on RPA and intelligent automation strategies, other organizational debts like data debt, architecture debt and security debt can be reduced.
Adds real value to business
If employees of an organization are busy and hard working all day, copying and pasting data on spreadsheets, replying to hundreds of similar customer emails, or evaluating customer reactions on social media channels to analyse the sentiments – does it mean it is really adding value to a business? Not really. Creative tasks, key decision-making, innovation, etc. are all in the realm of “value-adding”. When implemented right, hyperautomation can increase the agility, drive continued business growth, boost efficiency, and bring in more revenue.
How it is used?
5 top use cases of hyperautomation
Hyperautomation, as a people-centric technology has found its way into almost every industry and every process. Below are some of the top five industry use cases of hyperautomation
Healthcare:
Automation offers a plethora of benefits and scope for healthcare. From image analysis, patient scheduling, accessing and transferring data, Digital Nurse avatars, improving operational efficiencies cutting back on manual administrative tasks, claims management, remote consultation, among others. Technologies such as RPA, artificial intelligence, machine learning and no-code/low-code have been ushered in the new normal. The market size of healthcare automation is also quite big. A report by Fact.MR states that, “the global healthcare market was valued at US$ 36.9 billion in 2020, and is projected to reach US$ 88.9 billion by the end of 2028 at a healthy CAGR of 8.4%.”
Retail:
Supply chain crises. Inventory management. Keeping up with customer expectations. Sudden shutdowns. The retail sector had seen it all during the pandemic. Moving forward, with social distancing and other hygiene protocols, major shifts in buying behaviours, the new normal is forcing retailers to move to e-commerce platforms and embrace digital transformation. Without just sending automated emails about shopping deals, retailers with hyperautomation can now collect data about their customers like birthdays, preferred brands, favourite colours, etc. and send personalized emails with offers. AI will automatically save the required data and target the right customers. Sophisticated AI tools with predictive analytics can forecast demand, AI-based chatbots and virtual assistants embedded in the website can act as “style advisors” for shoppers and be available 24×7 to answer their queries.
Manufacturing:
Hyperautomation services are not only required to automate backend processes but also in an industrial set up. If a manufacturing company wants to deploy a robot for mass production of a particular part, an engineer has to design the code, test and execute, and then with the help of other professionals and IT experts, the robot has to be integrated with the existing infrastructure to enable machine-to-machine interaction. Hyperautomation can help integrate this robot and ensure the task is performed on time accurately.
Another example is work instructions. Work instructions are a set of procedures that guide manufacturing teams to build, pack and ship products accurately and to perform day-to-day and for handling emergency situations. Automation tools can automatically prepare, print, and distribute these instructions in documents to all the respective stakeholders, once the specifications have been received.
AI can predict machine downtimes and alert the need for maintenance to ensure all the physical processes run smoothly.
Banking:
There are tremendous opportunities for banks to leverage hyperautomation solutions. Right from end-to-end regulatory reporting, back office operations such as auditing, loan origination, human resources, customer onboarding to customer service. Interestingly, several banks have started adopting RPA and cognitive intelligence technologies to automate tasks accurately without the need of human workers. In the customer service, chatbots with conversational AI capabilities assist customers by answering their basic questions and help human representatives during their interactions with customers.
Insurance:
The insurance industry deals with several paper-based processes that are prone to errors. Let’s consider some key processes.
Policy management generally involves guiding customers with policies to suit their needs, filling up many documents and updating them whenever a customer wants changes to their policies. Insurers can automate the process of entire policy selection. Once the customer data is collected, the system will analyze it and send suitable policies for every individual. Bots can take up the manual work of extracting, sorting and updating the details.
In claims processing, intelligent automation solutions can collect data in various formats from different stakeholders, verify if the data is legitimate, and process it or escalate it to insurance agents if the data is found suspicious, thus reducing fraudulence. The claims information will then be automatically sent to the customers. Predictive modelling is used for calculating risk factors and policy premiums for specific segments of customers.
Conclusion
The future will be automated. In the new age of tech era, hyperautomation platforms will no longer be a privileged or a competitive technology, but more of a necessity for a business to scale up and succeed. With all the essential technologies “just there”, all that an organization needs to do is evaluate, plan and execute the correct automation strategy to reap the benefits of cost-savings, improved bottom line, increased productivity, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
