Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that uses robots that emulate human actions to automate digital tasks. The bots can mimic and learn rule-based actions and interact with any system or application just as human beings do. However, RPA bots can work round the clock without experiencing fatigue and don’t show bias in processes like human beings.
This has, therefore, made RPA services a crucial part of business operations. Many tasks in business operations such as marketing, information technology (IT), scheduling, and time tracking can all be automated. Among these, the biggest beneficiary of RPA technology is the IT system as it’s the backbone of any business.
Adopting RPA in your IT operations can be complex because it may require allocating a budget and training your staff. However, you can outsource it to an IT company. For example, you can check out any New York managed IT company if you have your business around the city.
Checkout this 7 Step Guide of RPA implementation for Enterprise Digital Transformation
6 Simple Ways in which Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Will Change IT Operations
While adopting RPA in your IT operations can be challenging and costly upfront, it’s still worthwhile. This is because there are several ways that you can leverage it in your operations. This article discusses six different ways to do it below:
- Manage Large And Unstructured Data
- It’s common for businesses to expand their operations over time as revenue increases or particular markets become ripe for exploration. While this is good for business, it’s also challenging. Businesses can find themselves collecting and managing high volumes of data from different locations and different departments. This data is usually unstructured; hence, it’s difficult to take any actions with them. Also, choosing to process the data manually will increase the chances of errors.
- In contrast, leveraging RPA will increase your agility in managing and processing large datasets. First, the system will compile data from different locations and feed it into the operating systems automatically for processing. Secondly, the bots will mimic any human action required to process the data, such as identifying what’s on the screen, extracting data, and completing the correct keystrokes. However, it will complete these processes faster and with no errors.
- Moreover, RPA systems will update any changes in the data in real time. For example, if a customer makes changes in their account, the subscription database will automatically be updated. This results in more accurate data recorded, so employees can focus on analyzing the data rather than managing it.
- Increase Employee’s Responsiveness To Customers
- Customer satisfaction is a significant factor in determining how many customers your business will retain and how many it’ll lose. As such, your employees are required to provide a seamless experience to your customers. RPA solutions can ensure a positive customer experience by responding to any inquiry adequately and on time. Anything less than a seamless experience could push your customers to your competitors.
- Automation may be the first step you need to take to offer a better customer experience. Handling repetitive tasks frees up more agents to focus on more customer-related tasks to achieve productive interactions. Moreover, the robots can also be deployed as chatbots to facilitate first contact for straightforward questions. Your team can then focus on high-value cases such as pitching a sale to prospective customers or provide end-to-end product engineering solutions.
- RPA systems also offer support to agents by automatically capturing customer profiles and history. This will give the agent the necessary information and better insights into a customer to respond to their inquiries. Consequently, customers will get more value from the interaction, and your business can make more conversions.
- User Management
- When users create an account in your business, they automatically become part of your IT system. Often, users may require help with their accounts, such as in setting up their passwords or updating profile information, to mention a few. If your agents attend to these processes manually, they’ll waste a lot of time and cause delays because, typically, many users need help with their accounts.
- Consequently, you risk stalling processes and causing dissatisfaction among users. So, to prevent such cases, you should deploy RPA systems to help with user management. For example, resetting passwords is a repetitive process and has a consistent structure. Therefore, the process can easily be automated. With the RPA system, users can handle the whole process themselves without requiring any agent intervention.
- Additionally, other processes such as account creation, email creation and verification, and other repetitive user actions can be automated to save time. When the user information is collected, it can be structured accordingly to help with future service requests. Once users can handle some inquiries on their own due to automation, you’ll have more satisfied customers.
- Patch Management
- Patch deployment is a crucial security step in fighting cybercrime. So, manually patching your IT system is always a bad idea. First, it leaves more room for errors that attackers can use. Secondly, it takes a lot of time to complete patching, yet it’s a repetitive task that can be automated.
- Every step in your patch management process can be automated by integrating the RPA system into the network. Tasks such as synchronizing vulnerability databases, scanning machines for missing patches, and deploying the missing patches follow a consistent structure and can be run through bots.
- The robots can also test the patches before deploying them to the systems. This way, the bots can move ahead with deployment in a matter of minutes. Automation allows the patching process to be run without interfering with the IT system, ensuring that the system is always protected. This saves the business a lot of time and money that would have gone into manual patching processes.
- Automate Data Backup
- Backing up data has a very crucial benefit to your business. Securing data backups should be a priority to avoid dealing with disasters such as stolen data, overwritten data, or other forms of data loss. With this in mind, most businesses will agree that secure data backup and recovery is essential. The question now is, how often should the data be backed up?
- The answer is simple—data should be backed up as often as possible. Keep in mind that no one knows when a disaster can strike. But even with the importance of data backup, most organizations consider it a secondary activity and fall victim to data losses. So, to avoid this, you can deploy RPA systems to help with automated data backup.
- The system needs to be configured upfront before the data is backed up, and the administrator will specify the time it should happen. After that, the system will run on its own and ensure the cases of data loss are minimized.
- Incident Management
- Mishaps in the system are common. However, how they’re managed is what’s important. Manual diagnostics of such incidents are time-consuming Sometimes, your team may even miss these incidents.
- However, not all incidents require staff intervention. An RPA system can conduct diagnosis services and select the issues that rule-based algorithms can remedy. Also, the system can alert your IT team in cases that require expert services in real-time. This ensures that all incidents in the system are dealt with as they arise, preventing more severe damages.
- Moreover, the RPA system offers round-the-clock monitoring to the system. So, the response time is reduced and issues are resolved early enough. By cutting downtime caused by incident management, businesses will increase productivity and customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
In this digital era where business operations depend on how well the IT system is managed, enterprises are directing more of their focus to IT operations. The goal of every business should be to complete processes faster and more efficiently. Luckily, a custom enterprise software development services provider offers RPA that has several benefits that businesses can leverage in IT operations. Some of the ways you can leverage RPA in your IT operations have been discussed in this article, which further shows how important RPA is.