Transforming Digital Dreams into Action

RPA o fers several advantages. It enable telcos achieve the muchdesired e iciency by streamlining time-consuming and expensive operations while they navigate the digital shi t

India’s telecom sector has seen unprecedented twists and turns in its journey. The sector has witnessed the transformation from being a voice dominated service to data based one; from seeing enormous growth to facing shaky regulatory environment and reduced tariffs. Forced by the huge data uptake and the fall of traditional voice and text business, the industry is consistently evaluating new age technologies and non-traditional strategies to remain relevant and make profits.

“RPA tools mimic the manual path a human worker would take to complete a task, using a combination of user interface interaction describer technologies.”

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one such technology that can help telcos significantly improve business efficiency, productivity and help them focus on providing exceptional customer experience.

In simple terms, RPA is a technology that leverage the skills of intelligent software embedded with exceptional artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to handle high-volume repeatable tasks previously performed by human beings. The technology enables service providers to reduce costs, provide better quality, accuracy and deliver superior level of experience.

According to a Gartner observation, “RPA tools mimic the manual path a human worker would take to complete a task, using a combination of user interface interaction describer technologies. The market provides a broad range of solutions with tools either operating on individual desktops or enterprise servers.”

Tackling the Next Wave of Growth

With the launch of the 5G technology anticipated in the next few years and the ever-increasing competition from over-the-top (OTT) players, the telcos need new ways to manage customer expectations better, and excel, while focusing on new growth areas.

Besides providing core telecom services, the telcos, today, are looking at various alternate streams for expansion and aiming to become multi-service providers. They are moving to domains such as entertainment, mobile security, shopping, and mobile payment to target new customers and increase their revenues. While this has surely helped them produce new revenue pipelines, they are seen struggling with maintaining operational efficiencies and meeting customer expectations.

In such a scenario, telecom service providers are required to evaluate their traditional IT systems and automate their processes to meet their dynamic business goals and achieve higher return on investment. investment Many of them may have legacy systems and would need new age solutions to ensure integration capability.

Technologies such as Robotic Process Automation can help telcos streamline several time-consuming and expensive operations — from supply chain, billing and network management of revenue management and customer concern — and help them concentrate on understanding the pain-points of their customers.

Using RPA, customers’ issues can be addressed much faster. In an issue of a call from an aggrieved customer, bots can quickly get out important customer data and track history of the compliant enabling agents to solve the matter promptly. The technology can also help improve the reputation of a service provider by reducing the errors in bills and identify discrepancies at a faster rate.

Flexibility is the Key

RPA enables telecom companies to free up their people engaged in time consuming repetitive, voluminous, and rule-based tasks on a day-to-day basis. These forms of processes can be assigned to software robots to help telcos personnel focus on more creative outcomes. Through RPA, businesses can automate any such processes quickly and cost-effectively without any heavy investment.

According to a Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) report RPA for Telcos: The Next Wave of BPM Evolution, communication service providers (CSPs) could leverage RPA to automate back-end activities such as data entry and validation, and reconciliations, activities that involve turnaround times (TATs) running in days. Executing such tasks within minutes will allow telcos to plug substantial revenue leakages, and enhance customer satisfaction, through prompt resolution of grievances.

Additionally, service providers can also look at deploying RPA for streamlining their customer support processes, including the ones related to ticket management, first call resolutions, and customer call handling. The TCS report further states that diligent tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) around BSS operations can eventually help CSPs identify areas of inefficiencies and lower the cost of running service centers.

The embedded intelligent automation technology can be used to help telcos identify and address specific demands of customers through round the clock in-call assistance, chatbots and virtual assistants.

So what’s Ahead?

The industry experts consider RPA as a logical extension of the existing Business Process Management (BPM) implementation. While BPM helps optimize and automate business processes, RPA largely deals with automating repetitive tasks and performance improvements.

In the next few years, RPA is likely to be adopted massively by organizations of all scales. According to Gartner, by 2025, three out of 10 jobs will be done by software, robots, or smart machines allowing replaced employees to do more crucial jobs. It says that the biggest adopters of RPA are banks, insurance companies, telcos and utility companies.

In 2020, telecom operators across the world are likely to test and experiment RPA technology to improve their efficiencies and modernize their networking. In India, struggling operators will find it helpful to cut down their work load considerably. This will help telcos increase their operational agility and take on their dreams of becoming successful multi-serving providers.

Nevertheless, one also needs to remember that RPA is not a one-size-suits-all technology. Telcos need to

consult with subject matter experts and deep-dive into the processes to identify all possible scenarios before deploying such technologies for a given purpose. The success of RPA also depends upon the quality of data management solutions that a company has and how structure the task is that calls for automation.

“The embedded intelligent automation technology can be used to help telcos identify and address speci ic demands of customers through round the clock in-call assistance, chatbots and virtual assistants.”