Introduction
Many telecommunication organizations were facing reduced revenues due to the intensive competition from over-the-top players providing high-quality services at lower prices. With such fierce competition, businesses had to stay relevant by embracing the digital era. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) plays a vital role in transforming the telecom industry and deriving more efficiency for functions.
Today the telecommunication industry continues to grow and is taking advantage of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to streamline business processes. RPA provides the flexibility for the telecom industries to automate the labor-intensive and time-consuming activities of different systems.
Challenges in the telecommunications' field
The telecommunications industry is vast, and service providers often struggle with an enormous number of operational processes regarding increasing agility, managing data, increasing efficiency, innovating, and reducing costs.
In addition, operational functions such as billing, executing orders, and customer support are becoming very complex and challenging to deal with effectively with the high number of subscribers and the different types of customized plans. The repetitive tasks keep businesses focusing on significant revenue-generating activities to provide the most satisfying cutting-edge solution for clients.
A few of the main challenges faced by the Telecommunication industry include:
Less Productivity:
Telecommunication back-office staff often have to deal with massive amounts of data working with different systems, databases, platforms, and applications daily. Dealing with so many media working at the same requires constant human intervention. Hence, taking away precious time and reducing work productivity.
Low productivity results in increasing errors and turnaround time; for example, in manual order creation and service removal, the main challenge lies in cutting out specific services from the subscriber database.
Increasing Overhead Expenditure:
A key challenge faced by telecom companies is reducing overhead costs. To name a few such costs; maintaining data security costs, workforce salaries, software, and various hardware costs. With an increasing level of prices, it can have adverse effects on business profits.
High Error Rate:
By conducting several activities manually, telecom companies have a higher possibility of errors. In tasks like updating data fields, understanding large amounts of knowledge effectively, errors are prone to occur. Such errors can lead to unhappy clients as the information needed is not available, compromising their valuable time.
RPA in telecom: advantages
Many telecom providers require innovative and unique solutions to deal with the intensely competitive market and navigate the transformative phase in the current challenging times. While telecommunication players are technically sound to take on automation, a customized out-of-the-box RPA solution is essential to be truly successful.
The current telecom industry has the edge in taking up Robotic Process Automation in automating the various processes involving repetitive tasks. Furthermore, RPA can overcome several challenges and ensure their business procedures have a competitive edge. ElectroNeek can help achieve just that.
ElectroNeek's platform offers customized cutting-edge solutions and assists in avoiding additional costs such as licensing. It is an integrated development environment for bot creators and designed to derive the maximum profits for partners. A very easy-to-use RPA platform that companies can request a demo to get a customized solution.
Ten use cases of RPA in Telecom
To truly comprehend the benefit of RPA in the telecommunication industry, we need to divulge into the many use cases for automation. Below are ten relevant use cases of RPA in respect of telecom companies.
Use Case 1 - Invoice & Purchase Order Processing
To be efficient, RPA is an excellent fit for the telecom industry due to the presence of repetitive business tasks which take up a lot of time. It is instrumental in digitizing invoices and emails to ensure employees avoid time wastage to focus on revenue-generating activities. RPA Technologies offer completely automated solutions depending on the complexity of each task.
Use Case 2 - Managing Networks
A tricky area for Telecom companies to tackle is capacity demand. An enormous amount of quality content passes between applications, devices, and various users. The increase in such traffic, plus the complex distribution and management of telecom networks, make it difficult for service providers.
Implementing RPA can help telecom providers in finding automated solutions to deal with such repetitive network managing processes. Allowing RPA to handle various incidents, events, and diagnostics reduces the burden on network engineers who can give more attention to compound tasks that require human intervention. Essentially, reducing errors and increasing the productivity of staff.
Use Case 3 - Onboarding/Offboarding Customers
Using RPA for onboarding and offboarding customers assists telecom providers in maintaining potent clarity on every client. A constructive element of RPA bots is they make it easier to add and remove customers automatically without much human intervention. Automating such tasks can aid telecom companies in reducing costs, errors and save time in avoiding unproductive manual activities.
Use Case 4 - Processing Sales Orders
RPA can seamlessly perform all the sales order processing with minimum intervention by the staff. Additionally, telecom organizations can map out every step of the process and its related costs by manually pinpointing which action needs to be automated to derive the highest return on investment.
Use Case 5 - Providing Average Revenue Per User
One of the chief key performance indicators for the telecom industry is the average revenue generated from each user. Utilizing RPA can assist in identifying sales opportunities through analyzing customer data and eligibility from different promotions. Thus, having such information readily available can lead to better sales pitches, rising closing rates, and the size of the deal.
Use Case 6 - Transformation of Data
Telecom companies rely primarily on storing high volumes of customer data in various formats. The back-office workforce takes care of managing data and working with different systems to provide satisfactory service delivery. Such tasks are labor-intensive and prone to errors if done manually. RPA tools can transform the data in a consistent and well-structured format, making it convenient for the staff
Furthermore, RPA combined with Artificial Intelligence can aid in analyzing and predicting customer behavior and patterns concerning structured datasets, making providing telecom services way more accurate.
Use Case 7 - Tracking the Price of Competitors
A good grasp of market culture and pricing strategies is crucial in a competitive industry like telecommunications. With the competition only growing, companies must equip themselves with efficient tools to track prices used by other players while being transparent with customers.
RPA can assist Telecom companies in conducting a comparative price study through monitoring markets in real-time. The bots used by businesses to keep track of the competition's individual or brand level outlook make it easy to make sound thought-out pricing plans.
Use Case 8 - Controlling Expenses
Utilizing RPA bots can reduce operations and capital expenses through the maintenance of potent data which is secure, providing regular reports, and managing various costs. An innovative solution like this can be good, particularly for small ones that benefit from significant cost reductions. In addition, RPA can help manage billing and revenue, removing the need for human intervention.
Use Case 9 - Collection of Debts
Automating the process of collecting debts is a practical RPA use case. It assists telecom organizations in identifying and managing debts from clients on time. ELectroNeek's powerful platform automates various functions in the debt collecting process, namely, payment information updates, payment settlement, and notifying critical escalations, increasing productivity dramatically and decreasing the worry of collection more than the service provided.
Use Case 10 - Resolving Customer Demands Quickly
RPA technology bots access data in real-time aiding telecom agents in dealing with large quantities of subscriber demands without following up repeatedly. Hence, increasing customer satisfaction and retention rates with the bonus of low operating costs and happier employees.
Conclusion
It is evident; the telecommunication industry can benefit significantly from adopting RPA technologies. No matter the size of the company, investing in automation can derive far more profits in a competitive market. In any service choosing the right RPA provider remains a highly crucial decision.
ElectorNeek is a full-featured and affordable RPA platform available for partners today. The main elements offered include no extra costs, and telecom companies can use ELectroNeek's platform to build a scaled automation environment (without platform licensing expenses). By creating with ElectroNeek, there is no restriction on the number of attended and unattended bots.