By Jenni Palocsik, Solutions Marketing Director, Verint

We love “before and after” pictures. A house that’s fallen into disrepair can be renovated into a design showpiece. An abandoned, malnourished puppy can be nursed back to health. A closet or garage can be organised from a complete mess into a system that is easier to use day in and day out.

Why are these contrasts so appealing? Because they help us to see the potential in a way that can inspire us to tackle a similar change with the expectation of similar positive results. The same is true with written case studies. We value the information that is shared from the customer’s viewpoint that articulates what the previous challenges were, what actions were taken to address those problems, and the business benefits and ROI realised.

In this age of the digital customer, organisations are under increasing pressure to deliver fast, efficient and accurate service. Robotic Process Automation is one of the ways organisations can improve accuracy and respond more quickly to help meet customer expectations. Organisations using Robotic Process Automation (commonly known in the industry as RPA) see the before and after results of each new automation first-hand. Here’s a before and after example from an organisation using RPA:

The customer service department of a multinational technology company needed to migrate their customers to new service contracts at the end of the current term as part of the renewal process. Before they implemented RPA, the employees in the group would need to manually transfer the customer’s information from the old contract to the new one and then send it out. The company used Robotic Process Automation to automatically process more than 65,000 service contracts, migrating them to the new documents upon renewal.

The “After” view showed a big change—the time for each transaction went from 12 minutes down to 7 minutes, improving productivity by more than 40%. As an even more important benefit, however, the improved accuracy in the new contracts migrated by the RPA software robots led to improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost of operations.

When you start this journey, it is important to prioritise your organisation’s processes for automation. If your organisation is implementing a robotic process automation solution, you’ve probably identified a long list of current tasks and processes as candidates for automation. Moreover, as your solution produces tangible benefits, such as increased productivity, employee capacity, and quality (decreased rework), requests for additional automation will probably grow very quickly.

So where should you start — and how will you manage demand in the future? Start by establishing a small group of decision makers, along with a framework for reviewing the ongoing list of items for automation. You’ll need a consistent set of criteria for evaluating and prioritising future automation requests. We recommend you create an “automation prioritisation scorecard” that includes the following categories: percentage of process based on rules; operational impact; application stability; scope; scalability and organisational factors. Next, you’ll need to assess each process for its automation value.

When deciding to use robotic process automation it is important to know that efficiency gains of 10-15 percent from automation can result in significant productivity improvements when applied to a large volume, whereas automating a process that is very difficult or complex, but is only performed once each month, has less operational impact.