How does RPA Benefit the Telecommunications Industry?

With data becoming the new gold and the presence of seamless connectivity the new normal, telecommunication companies have their task cut out. The unprecedented growth in the number of connected devices thanks to technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G requires the telecom industry to deal with several challenges. These include increased competition and customer expectations, controlling spiralling costs, managing data, improving business agility, developing new services, and acquiring talent, among others. This is where RPA in telecom can posit itself as the best bet to overcome such challenges.

In fact, robotic process automation in telecom can help companies manage unstructured, distributed, and large datasets, increase responsiveness to industry disruptions, streamline operational tasks, generate better revenue streams, and provide high-quality, fast, and affordable services. According to Forrester, RPA is expected to command a market of $2.9 billion by 2021

What is RPA?

RPA or Robotic Process Automation enables the automation of business or industry processes using configured AI-based software robots to mimic interactions between humans and computers in a wide range of sectors. These robots or ‘bots’ can help businesses to perform high-volume, rule-based, and repetitive tasks while allowing the workforce to focus more on the core business activities.

Why use RPA in telecom?

RPA allows telecom companies to achieve a host of outcomes and business goals. These include scalability, agility, and organizational growth, change operational cycles, improve the transmission of data and information, strengthen data security, offer affordable and fast customer services, and reduce costs, among others.

Benefits of using RPA for intelligent automation in telecom

RPA has widespread usage in the telecom domain and has emerged as a new standard for telecommunications companies to implement and meet their operational and overall business goals. The various benefits of RPA towards enabling enterprise process automation in the telecom domain include:

Invoice processing and purchase order: The technology can be used to perform a range of hierarchical tasks that is often repetitive and time-consuming. These include monitoring networks, distributing emails, conducting periodic maintenance, keeping backups, responding to customer queries, on-boarding and off-boarding of customers, and debt collection, among others. RPA can offer total automation of the above-mentioned tasks including processing invoices and purchase orders thereby saving time and effort for the employees. The technology can help employees to be deployed in areas where they can focus on developing or fine-tuning strategies for income generation.

Delightful customer experience: Customer satisfaction has become the cornerstone for companies to beat the competition and grow. Since the customer care department of any telecom company remains at the forefront of customer engagement, it can do well to implement RPA in business process automation and ensure faster query resolution. The NLP and ML capabilities of RPA can deal with customer queries by accessing past data and providing solutions therein. RPA can perform quick actions such as recovering customer data, updating fields, on-boarding/off-boarding customers, and rekeying information, among others. It can help employees deal with high volumes of customer calls and resolve issues without the latter having to follow up. No wonder, it can facilitate customer retention and loyalty.

Network management: With 4G standard being used all across and 5G in the offing, telecommunications companies are dealing with the transfer of humongous quantum of data and information between devices and applications. Telecom network management has become a challenging task thanks to the complexity of distributed networks and increased levels of traffic. Telecom service providers are finding it difficult to navigate complex applications, key data manually, and retrieve huge volumes of information, quickly and efficiently. However, with RPA implementation, service providers can leverage automated solutions for incident management thereby enhancing the capacity for dispute resolution.

Transformation of data: The telecom industry deals with colossal amounts of data stored in different formats and arrangements. With robotic process automation in telecom, the data can be transformed into a uniform, organized, and structured format. Besides, AI-based RPA can help telecom companies analyze structured datasets to identify predictive patterns and give consistent and accurate forecasts on market changes, customer behavior, and other parameters.

Conclusion

As the telecommunications industry undergoes rapid transition with the advent of 5G, it can leverage technologies such as RPA for enterprise process automation. The technology’s flexibility and scalability features allow telecom companies to address various challenges, improve customer interaction, perform complex and repetitive jobs, and expand the bottom line.