RPA in Telecom Industry

May 15, 2020 | Robotic Process Automation

In a company, there are various processes spread out through departments. Identically is true for a Telco company. How many processes are you aware of? Normally, we are limited to the workflows that we do personally.

According to one of the most influential speakers and developers of enterprise standards, Mark von Rosing, there are 3 types of processes; operationalmanagement and supporting processes. We can further divide those into numerous subcategories, amounting to tens of processes within a single organization.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), allows organizations to automate parts or entire processes at a fraction of the cost and time previously spent. The technology is non-intrusive and works on top of your existing IT infrastructure, without the need of replacing expensive, often legacy systems, and the implementation process only takes a few weeks.


Why is the Telecom industry a perfect candidate for automation?

The more processes a company has, the more its thirst for repetitive work grows. This defines the number of your employees’ full-time equivalents (FTE’s) spent on such work on a regular basis.

According to Gartner, the telecommunications industry is among the top adopters of RPA, joining the banking and insurance industry.


Reasons why telco is a suitable candidate for automation:

Repetitive, rules-based tasks

The threshold for appropriate service delivery in the telco industry is supported by high-frequency manual, repetitive, rules-based processes. The basis of their work is thus made up of tasks that are highly eligible for automation.

Accuracy and high reliability 

If a telecommunications operator wants to boost its customer service, it needs to guarantee a reliable and accurate process outcome. This is not an easy job, taking into consideration typical preconditions of task fulfillment, such as the need to go over numerous systems and updating them.

Data quality

Across the industry, all providers encounter an increase in service demands. This makes a scalable workforce such as RPA a reasonable entry on their checklist. It will reduce the error rate down to almost zero, improve your data quality and shorten the process from 2 to 5 times, resulting in satisfied customers, better operational efficiency and last but not least – cost reduction.


RPA use cases in Telecom industry

  1. Reducing manual sales order processing effort

RPA technology can capture the business process tasks performed by the employees of a telecom company. Having a well-structured workflow depends above all on employees’ actions. A well-structured workflow serves as an infrastructure for automated processes. By mapping each process step with its associated cost for manual execution, it is easy to identify the automation of which steps leads to the highest return on investment.

  1. Responding to partner queries

Software robots are smart enough to interpret emails, respond to simple questions, and forward complex ones to humans. This is particularly useful for telecom companies, which usually rely on partners like independent brokers to sell their services.

  1. Competitor price tracking

The transparency of online pricing is a strong motivator for tracking competitors’ prices, especially in the case of eCommerce. And since eCommerce is becoming the norm in telecommunications according to CNBC, careful price monitoring is a very valuable asset. Obviously, it goes without saying that automation, with its error-proofness and 24/7 capacity to work, can provide a telecom company with the most careful kind of comparative price analysis. Moreover, software robots can do tracking at the individual, category, and brand levels, which can offer a deeper understanding of the competitive outlook.

  1. Significant cost reduction

RPA is like a digital workforce that imitates human interaction, without the need for a screen, mouse, or keyboard. It is the fastest-growing segment in the IT industry, and one of the reasons is the price/performance ratio.  

A software robot’s return on investment (ROI) is roughly 3-6 months, depending on the size of the project and while it does the repetitive tasks faster and at a reduced cost, your employees can focus on other, more productive work.


One digital step ahead

Staying relevant in the telecommunications market means being more efficient with your back- and front-office processes, providing better customer services and improving your data quality while achieving operational excellence.

RPA allows companies to leverage their existing systems and take the workload off their employees and thus streamline their businesses.

If you’re looking for more information on RPA, please visit our landing page to see which tasks are supported by RPA.

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