The adoption and utilization of various telecom are on the rise, primarily driven by cutting-edge computing, 5G technology, and the Internet of Things.
While the increase in demand presents perfect opportunities for telecom service providers to generate revenue, it comes with substantial challenges burdening telecom players.
With more users sending large chunks of data from different networks, service providers have realized that handling even basic functions, such as order fulfillment and customer support, is becoming increasingly challenging.
As such, telecom service providers have turned to automation to handle these challenges and simplify operational risk management.
However, is the large adoption of automation through robotic process automation beneficial to telecom service providers?
Why Adopt RPA in Telecom Sector?
The Telecom sector is currently a giant sector with service providers struggling to handle various operational processes, such as managing large volumes of data, controlling costs, developing new services/models, and increasing business agility.
As mentioned, daily operations, such as order fulfillment, billing, and customer support, have proven complicated and challenging, thanks to millions of subscribers relying on few service providers. Struggling with these repetitive processes prevents players in the telecom industry from focusing on crucial tasks or growth.
Telecom service providers face the following challenges that RPA can solve:
High overhead costs
Despite having high-profit margins, telecom service providers deal with high overhead costs. This includes hardware and software acquisition costs, employee salaries, and data security.
Low productivity
Communication service providers handle massive volumes of data daily. However, their efficiency depends on back-office staff working on various systems, applications, platforms, and databases. This takes up a large percentage of employee time, reducing productivity.
That aside, handling massive volumes of data increases the turnaround time and chances of human error. For instance, if there is a need to remove service processes, it takes a lot of time to remove specific services from all registered subscribers.
High risk of errors
Handling several activities in the telecom sector manually increases the chances of human errors. Rekeying crucial information and updating data can lead to serious errors and customer dissatisfaction. Finding the correct information also takes a lot of customers’ valuable time.
Benefits of RPA in the Telecom Industry
Advancing technology has also led to increased customer expectations. Enterprise and individual customers expect high-speed communication abilities amidst the growing data amounts. Fortunately, integrating robotic process automation can help businesses in the following ways;
Network Management
A challenging area for telecom service providers is achieving capacity demand, especially with an increasing amount of content being transferred between users through various apps and devices. Increasing traffic levels and network complexity makes it challenging for service providers to manage their networks.
Ideally, service providers should navigate complex applications, rekey data manually, and retrieve large volumes of customer data from their network infrastructure. While this may seem challenging, robotic process automation provides service providers with automated solutions for various repetitive tasks. This allows network engineers to focus their attention on other important tasks.
First Call Resolution
Customers certainly don’t like taking follow-ups with support or customer-care agents to resolve repetitive concerns. While customer care agents may be making genuine efforts to resolve customer issues, following up on issues frustrates customers and prompts disloyalty to your brand. Rapid process automation in telecom helps service providers solve customer queries and concerns on the first call.
Telecom service providers can use RPA technology-powered bots to access data and assist customer care agents in addressing various customer demands on the first call without repeated follow-ups. RPA also boosts FCR rates, which help telecom firms improve customer retention and loyalty.
Fast Response to Partner Queries
Most companies plying the telecom sector rely on third-party companies, specifically independent brokers, to market their services. RPA queries are programmed to respond to simple third-party queries, interpret incoming emails, and forward complex questions to human customer care agents, simplifying the query resolution process.
RPA also improves customer service as it automatically forwards calls from users through third-party agents to human support agents of telecom service providers. This ensures that customer issues are addressed immediately, which improves customer service ratings and increases profits.
Data Management
Telecom service providers handle and process large volumes of data stored in different formats. RPA-powered bots help such enterprises transform this data into a structured format. This makes data processing, data storage, data backup, data migration, data retrieval, and other data management functions a breeze.
Service providers can combine RPA abilities with other major technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, to generate meaningful insights. Such insights are important in making business decisions. Most RPA platforms allow customers to process large volumes of data, while assuring maximum data security and access control.
Debt Collection
Robotic process automation helps telecom service providers stay afloat on payment information, due dates, payment reconciliation, escalation, and legal compliance. These are some crucial back-office tasks that consume significant employee time and degrade productivity.
Integrating RPA enables service providers to identify how much they are owed and the due dates. This boosts employee morale and allows them to focus on other core services that require critical decision-making abilities.
Invoicing and Purchase Order Processing
Various activities in the telecom industry involve repetitive actions, which can be automated to improve efficiency. Two such tasks are invoicing and purchase order processing, which can be simplified by robotic process automation. Similarly, automating these tasks frees your employees to focus on other high-value activities.
Gather Competitor’s Data
Knowing what your competitors are up to is important for vertical and horizontal business growth. Implementing RPA bots can help telecom service providers collect, analyze, and report important competitor information. For instance, automated RPA bots can scour competitor websites, social media accounts, and other platforms, fetching important data without human intervention.
Artificial intelligence can also process large data sets and present valuable insights that can be used to make business decisions. Using RPA in telecom gives service providers a real-time understanding of their competitor’s activities.
The Bottom Line
The telecom sector is among the top industries with a high rate of RPA technology adoption. The sector largely operates on different repetitive and time-consuming activities crucial for excellent service delivery. High reliability and accurate process outcomes are also a must for telecom service providers. These and many more challenges make RPA perfect for the telecom sector.
The introduction of RPA has its advantages, as well as aspects that need to be treated with care, lest they turn into drawbacks. Just like with any other transformative process, a company embarking on its RPA quest should be aware of both.
The pluses include speed, consistency, security, and, as a result, increased productivity. What a human worker cannot do – a robot can. This technology ensures practically faultless and easy streamlining of your operations, with interfaces of RPA software being notoriously user-friendly. In addition, robots can help your business save money. According to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation, RPA can bring your average costs down by 50%.
The minuses boil down to the initial investment, software upkeep & management, and employee hesitation. Indeed, the courage needed to transform your processes to fit a piece of RPA software is a leap of faith. But this is a necessary step all businesses who are willing to automate need to take at some point. The software also requires regular checkups and updates, and staff to understand how to complete these tasks. The latter means a bit of a learning curve for the average employee who needs time to adapt, or it means hiring new people altogether.
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