Small Businesses Thrive with Access to RPA
While large enterprises tend to be the first to access and adopt new automation technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the good news is that affordable enterprise-grade RPA solutions are now available for small and medium-size businesses. This trend will be welcome news as these companies aim to compete with the enterprise in the marketplace.
The maturation of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered an explosion in AI-based automation applications. Among the most game-changing AI-based automation technologies is RPA, which can increase productivity, reduce cost, aid decision making, increase customer satisfaction, ensure compliance, and more.
Universal Appeal of RPA
Like word processing and email, RPA is a technology whose usefulness cuts across all industries and that offers benefits to businesses of all sizes.
Just as there are business processes common to every size business—such as billing, invoice processing, payroll, employee onboarding, customer service, financial analysis, and business planning—every size business can benefit from the application of RPA.
Let RPA Do the Grunt Work
Every size business has accounting ledgers, customer databases, invoices, accounts payable, HR forms, payroll, and other data-entry applications that are repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone when performed manually. These applications are ideal candidates for SMBs to reap the benefits of RPA.
The value of RPA begins with the automation of basic data-entry operations that include:
- Entering data into forms
- Merging data into reports and filling out templates
- Automating workflows to streamline repetitive tasks
- Moving data between spreadsheets and analytics software
- Entering customer data into text fields
RPA - From Crawling to Running the Web
While web searches can yield valuable information for many business uses—such as discovering prices, trends, prospective buyers, and competitive information—searching can be a time-consuming and tedious process for human workers.
For sales teams, for example, finding prospects and building contact lists is key part of their operations. Manual searching can consume hours of a salesperson’s time. RPA bots can perform these operations, freeing sales teams to devote their time to engaging prospects and winning more business.
Performing searches to find prospects, discovering information to personalize engagement with prospects, and reaching out to prospects in personalized ways are just some of ways that RPA bots can automate and leverage searching on behalf of a small and mid-sized business.
RPA bots can be programmed to crawl the web tirelessly to discover relevant information, return it, populate applications, analyze, and act on the information.
Give Customer Service an RPA Boost
Customer service is an area in which RPA can provide an abundance of benefits, including cost-savings, increased revenues through personalization, increased cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and improvements in loyalty and overall customer satisfaction.
Chatbots have become ubiquitous on business web sites because they can handle customer inquiries 24/7 and reduce the burden on human customer service reps. AI-based chatbots also can learn and collect and analyze customer interactions to improve service and customer satisfaction.
When fielding customer calls and inquiries, customer service reps must pull up customer records and identify key elements of the customer’s account. Orders and refunds also are processed. By automating these routine tasks, RPA bots enable human customer service reps to devote more time and attention to helping customers, resolving issues, and building better customer relationships.
Our recent article about Hyperautomation describes how combining RPA with conversational AI can magnify the benefits beyond those that could be gained by each technology individually. By implementing RPA solutions, SMBs can position themselves to gain further benefits of this type of Hyperautomation.
Quick ROI for QuickBooks Automation
A large majority (about 75%) of the millions of U.S. small businesses use QuickBooks for accounting. RPA can improve efficiency and lower costs by handling many of the repetitive accounting tasks involved in QuickBooks accounting, including:
- Importing QuickBooks invoices into Excel spreadsheet rows
- Generating sales receipts in QuickBooks for updated MS Excel spreadsheets,
- Generating MS Excel rows for new QuickBooks payments
- Creating rows in Excel for QuickBooks expenses
- Updating mailing service subscriber lists to include new QuickBooks customer
- Sending email notifications for new QuickBooks invoices and payments.
Not only can SMBs accrue savings in time and money by eliminating time spent on routine and repetitive data-entry tasks, finance workers can spend more time focusing on analysis and financial planning to generate more revenues and profits. The same efficiency can be gained by automating other SMB accounting and core business applications like Sage Software, Salesforce, and SAP.
Making a Business Case for RPA
Besides the above examples, there are many time-consuming and costly operations that can benefit by being automated by RPA systems, including eligibility checking, returns processing, contract management, payroll processing, and storing and analyzing information.
A simple way to determine the business case and ROI of applying RPA to a particular business process is to answer the following questions:
- How repetitive is your process?
- How many man-hours does it take to complete?
- How much does it cost in terms of workforce and maintenance?
- What is the cost of automating the process?
RPA can be added to existing businesses applications easily and with little disruption. In many cases, you’ll find that RPA can improve efficiency, boost productivity, save money, and provide a spectrum of added business benefits.
Why Roth Automation for Affordable SMB RPA Solutions?
Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes. Our relationship with affordable RPA solutions providers enables us to offer uniquely affordable solutions tailored to the needs of SMB organizations, including RPAaas (as a Service).
To learn how your organization can benefit from our affordable RPA solutions, and RPAaaS, speak with our expert consultants today.