By 2025, the robotic process automation (RPA) market is expected to hit $3.97 billion, growing at a 31.1% CAGR rate within the duration. With the technologies, companies are able to overcome various challenges and meet the expectations of their consumers.
Robotic process automation use cases differ in industries across the globe. Here’re a few examples of robotic process automation application in various industries and few use cases that are applicable in all industries;
Financial Services
1. Know Your Customer (KYC)
While dedicated KYC solutions are emerging, if your company does not prefer to use one, it is possible to use RPA bots to automate portions of KYC process. For edge cases that require human intervention, case can be forwarded to an employee.
2. Account Reconciliation
Extracting data from bank statements for reconciling records and comparing them against the company’s own records was manually done via complex spreadsheets. However, this is a process that can relatively easily be automated.
3. Loan Processing
As with most document processing tasks, this process is also suitable for RPA automation as complex business logic can be embedded in bots partially automating loan decisions and the manual processes that follow the decision
4. Trade Execution
In cases where legacy systems are not capable of storing complex limit orders, RPA bots could help. However, this is more of a band-aid case as in the long run, moving to a sophisticated and capable trading system would probably be a good investment given how it could improve trading and reduce the load of traders.
5. Balance Transfers
The Bank needs to complete payments using The Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) which offers same-day funds transfers. The manual process which takes 10 minutes per request can be automated and reduced to a few seconds of turnaround time per request.
6. Back-office Operations
Credit Checks, customer dispute resolution, handling court orders, running audit checks are some back office task that are candidates for automation.
7. Account Closure
This could be either assisted or unassisted bot where banking advisor would close the account in one system and bot would record this interaction and update all the corresponding systems based on the number and types of accounts client has with the bank.
8. Dormant Accounts
A solution where customer account was deemed dormant based on the business logic, a bot can execute business logic by gather data from multiple systems and make a determination.
9. Processing Online Loan Applications
As with most document processing tasks, this process is also suitable for RPA automation as complex business logic can be embedded in bots partially automating loan decisions and the manual processes that follow the decision
Insurance
1. Claims Processing
Claims processing is at the heart of every insurance company. Since customers make claims at a time of misfortune for them, customer experience and speed are critical in claims processing. There are numerous factors that create issues during claims processing such as
Manual/inconsistent processing: Claims processing often involves manual analyses completed by outsourced personnel.
Input data of varying formats: Customers send in data with various formats
Changing regulation: No insurance company has the luxury of not accommodating to changes in regulation in a timely manner. This requires constant staff training and process update.
These lead to human biases in claims processing which can lead to losses, customer dissatisfaction and lack of visibility in a crucial process.
RPA bots can deal with all these issues. Essentially, bots take in unstructured data in forms, extract structured data and process claims based on pre-defined rules. This approach takes care of all major issues with manual claims processing:
Claim verification can be automated with rules
Bots can deal with various data formats to extract relevant data
Rules can be changed with regulatory changes, without any need for training, immediately ensuring compliance.
2. Appeals Processing
After claims are processed, some claims results in appeals which is another process that can benefit from automation. With Pega Robotics we can automate upto 80% of the appeals with 99% accuracy rate.
3. Address Change Requests
4. Provider Registration
5. Customer Inquiry – Email
With most of workforce working remotely and getting used to virtual engagements, clients are also using alternate channels such as email for question, concerns or a request, RPA bot can process large volume of emails, apply NLP and extract data, create case for the case worker. With bots and AI we can also fulfill some of these inquiries without human interaction.
Retail
1. Product Categorization
Global retail companies need to harmonize SKU data from multiple markets to be able to look beyond numbers to insights like “What is our toothpaste market share in Eastern Europe?”.
Traditionally these tasks required employees to manually match SKUs to categories in complex spreadsheets. Since this is a task that does not directly impact customers, fault tolerance is not very high and RPA bots can be used to automate the process saving thousands of hours of work. Everest Group’s report provides details on a specific example.
2. Automated Returns
Automating returns can both improve customer satisfaction and reduce manual labor. RPA bots can be used to automate manual aspects of the returns process such as checking customer purchase record from the system.
3. Trade Promotions
Shop floor trade promotions require a significant amount of backend admin work. Key tasks include
– Creating and allocating funds for promotions
– Generating reports that give visibility of promotion performance
RPA bots can automate these tasks as they are mostly mundane back-office tasks. Bots can make it easier and faster for retailers to launch trade promotions.
4. Inventory/ Supply Chain Management
Some retailers rely on legacy systems for stock keeping. RPA bots can perform constant checks on these systems providing data on key metrics like items with low stock levels or rapidly changing stock levels.
5. Customer Inquiry – Email
With most of workforce working remotely and getting used to virtual engagements, clients are also using alternate channels such as email for question, concerns or a request, RPA bot can process large volume of emails, apply NLP and extract data, create case for the case worker. With bots and AI we can also fulfill some of these inquiries without human interaction.
Telecom
1. Credit checks
Required for post-paid accounts and typically involves manual processes, if applications are not integrated with credit bureaus, bot can very easily fill this gap.
2. SIM swapping
Assigning a new SIM to a user. Could be due to a change of SIM format or a case of lost/stolen SIM
3. Customer dispute resolution
Automatically classifying disputes, resolving ones that can be automatically resolved and assigning the more complex ones to related parties is a relatively simple yet effective back-office process to automate
4. Porting customer numbers
Customers switching to other operators need to get their numbers ported which can be fully automated.
5. Customer Inquiry – Email
With most of workforce working remotely and getting used to virtual engagements, clients are also using alternate channels such as email for question, concerns or a request, RPA bot can process large volume of emails, apply NLP and extract data, create case for the case worker. With bots and AI we can also fulfill some of these inquiries without human interaction.
6. Address Change
This is a very common request in Telecom which requires update in various system, and typically some of the applications are legacy and perfect candidate for a RPA.