The Advantages of RPA in the Telecom Industry

With the modern digital disruptive forces shaping nearly every aspect of every sector imaginable, the service providers are forced to re-think their business approaches and re-engineer their existing processes to provide better customer experience. The telecom sector is no different, as the number of people getting connected with the global networks are increasing steadily and at a faster rate. Though most of the telecom companies are trying their best to be technologically equipped to handle the huge volume of processes, they are struggling to manage data, control cost, improve business, and compete with competitors to provide better and affordable offerings.

Telecom providers worldwide are facing severe pressure to deliver cutting edge customer experience and cater to the increasing demands and expectations of customers in every corner of the world. However, to remain profitable they are looking for better viable options to cut down operational costs, increase agility and enhance efficiency. This is where emerging technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes very useful as lifesavers.

The Telecom industry is well suited to adopt RPA and overcome some of the nagging issues severely curtailing their productivity. They have an overwhelming number of back office processes such as customer reassignment, renewals, credit checks, order processing, unlatching, porting, customer on-boarding in CRM from forms, customer dispute resolution and others. RPA solutions can help them to quickly streamline their back-office operations by eliminating highly time consuming and laborious repetitive tasks, handling large data volume with reduced risk of errors, enabling enhanced performance and greater productivity.

Here are some of the major pain points the telecom companies are facing:

Major Challenges

1. Low Performance and Productivity in Backoffice processes

Telecom service providers handle a huge volume of data and they rely on back office IT operations for the office staff to work on various platforms, applications, systems and databases. There are number of everyday processes and people working on different platforms.  When these multiple platforms work simultaneously, human intervention is required to avoid issues in coordination, hindering their quality time to focus on strategic initiatives and customer interactions, significantly reducing productivity. This also leaves room for human error and a higher Turnaround Time. For instance, if the order creation and service removal process is manual, it involves a huge challenge of removing certain services from the entire subscriber base.

2. Repetitive Time-consuming tasks

The processes involve multiple manual, time consuming and repetitive tasks, consisting of activities such as updating fields, navigating through applications, retrieving or uploading customer data, handling different file types and several others. For instance, the process of backing up client phone system configurations and storing that data on servers for future use, if manual can be really time consuming.

3. High overhead expenses

There are multiple sources of expenses such as for employee salaries, multiple software and hardware costs, maintaining data security and integrity and various others.

4. Increased risk of errors

Since some of the activities performed by the call agents such as understanding information and going through knowledgebase are manual in nature and there are higher possibilities of errors. Since the correct information may not be readily available, this may also take up valuable time of the customer, dissatisfying the customer.

RPA is a non-invasive technology and approach facilitating the use of software to automate mundane, high-volume, rule-based and repeatable tasks. The most interesting part is that this technology can be integrated without changing the existing enterprise IT infrastructure landscape.

Let’s see how RPA can make life much easier for telecom companies:

1. First Call Resolution (FCR)

Some of the tasks performed by customer care agents include rekeying data, updating fields, retrieving customer specific information and others. Software bots facilitate call agents with easier and quicker access to relevant information, helping them to properly address customer needs the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call.  Customer care processes with higher FCR rates achieves better customer satisfaction and customer retention, typically enjoying lowered operating costs and happier employees.

2. Improving Average revenue per user

Average revenue per user is a key KPI in the industry to watch for. RPA identifies sales opportunities by analyzing the data on the customer and the customer’s eligibility for possible promotions or sales campaigns while the call takes place, driving cross-sells and up-sells. Making this information available at the time of the call produces results in more focused pitches which helps increase close rates and average deal size.

3. Higher performance, productivity and greater scalability

The software bots are capable of handling large data volume, enabling enhanced performance. They perform tasks at a much better speed without downtime, significantly increasing the productivity of the processes. The bots can be easily downsized or upsized based on the demands and its highly adaptable and can easily handle the inevitable increases in data. Moreover, by eliminating the highly time consuming, laborious and repetitive tasks, employees can devote their quality time focusing on more important strategic initiatives, freeing their time for more creative and innovative tasks. Automating the back-office processes reduces the turn around time from days to just minutes, also reducing the customer chase up calls and significantly increasing the Return on Investment.

4. Time and cost savings

Automating the repetitive and time-consuming tasks previously performed by humans significantly saves the labor cost and streamlines processes. In case of the process for backing up client phone system configurations, the robots can chain up hundreds of technical tasks to create a seamless backup system for all clients for any telephony system, resulting in considerable time and cost savings. Long handling time can severely impact the customer satisfaction. Bots can be built on top of a CRM or other user software and deployed to automate the time consuming, transactional work and save FTE per month for more value-added tasks. Moreover, the initial cost of implementing an RPA solution is far less compared to implementation of an ERP or Business Process Automation solution.  The same solution can be used to automate several back-office operations, significantly reducing the cost

5. Enhanced Accuracy

The software bots can help employees to easily identify errors, referring to the history of similar errors that occurred in the past. This reduces the possibility of errors to a great extent and improves response time.

Telecom industry is well placed to leverage RPA

Telecom industry functions on different processes that are repetitive but at the same time crucial for service delivery. With competition growing, the companies cannot afford to leave its customers with bad customer experience. RPA adoption appears to be the perfect approach to overcome some of the challenges posed and chronic issues hindering their growth. The very nature and flexibility of the RPA technology allows a wide range of operations to be automated for any Telecom company.    Most of the time consuming, repetitive back office processes can be automated totally and the operations involving human intervention, reasoning and decision making can be automated partially to the desired extent.

How can 10xDS help?

10xDS is driving digital transformation by leveraging our vast experience, expertise, state-of-the-art Intelligent Automation COE and deployment methodology to streamline processes for clients across a wide range of Industries and functions. Our services can help bring greater efficiency to telecommunications functions – from supply chain and operations to enterprise management and customer care.

So, what are you waiting for? Jumpstart your Digital Transformation journey with 10xDS RPA services today.

Want to gain further insights into our RPA and Intelligent Automation services? Talk to our Automation Experts!