Digital workforces transform how organizations work. By extending their existing team with the added power and automation capabilities of bots having bots, organizations can create a digital workforce that functions much more efficiently and helps reduce costs.
What is a Digital Workforce?
A digital workforce leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help your employees augment their performance. With automation options like IVR, automating repetitive tasks, or enabling intelligent actions with “human in the loop” solutions, bots can be applied to streamline, digitize, and automate a wide variety of tasks and processes.
In general, the digital workforce is like a team of software robots powered by RPA and Artificial Intelligence to create Intelligent Automation opportunities. These are bots that not only automate your manual labor but also use their minds to make intelligent decisions during their operations. You can quickly scale these robot workers when you need them.
Benefits of a Digital Workforce
Digital workforces deliver many benefits to organizations. They can help scale your team, save costs, boost productivity, and transform the customer experience.
Reduced Costs
Similar to the rise of cloud services allowing for on-demand resources, a digital workforce allows you to scale your teams on-demand. It allows organizations to leverage workers outside their organizations, but only when they need it.
A study found that 35% of Americans are freelancers. Companies are moving from contract workers or full-time employees to on-demand staff. We can see the rise of Uber and Foodora due to the increasing desire of the on-demand teams.
Enhanced Performance of Employees
Modern technologies like AI and machine learning make things easier for employees. There used to be a time when we needed to go manually review all work to ensure its accuracy. Now, technology handles that task for us.
One of the best examples for writers is Grammarly. It checks out each minor and significant mistake on the document and automatically suggests a correction. Moreover, the algorithm keeps on learning as it gathers more and more data. Another great example is Lynn, which checks your non-disclosure contracts as per the standard.
Apps like FeeBelly help you to check out hidden fees from the contract, helping you make an important decision on whether to sign an agreement or not.
Boosts creativity of your employees by freeing them from mundane tasks
A McKinsey report predicts that organizations will automate over 23% of work hours by 2030. Here is the list of tasks likely to be automated:
Does that mean that you will have no other jobs left to do and that technology is a dangerous thing? It’s not. A study shows that the advancement of technology will create more jobs than it destroys. If we take a look at the overwhelming demand for data professionals, we can draw the conclusion that it’s all because of new technologies. Automation will free up repetitive and routine tasks that will allow your employees to focus on more productive and challenging tasks.
Improved Customer Service
90% of American customers regard customer service as one of the most crucial factors for deciding whether they are using that particular business or not. What makes customers happy? The answer is reliable processes, quick answers to their queries, and taking care of them, or we can say after-sales service.
The digital workforce promotes analytics and performing work with more efficiency. It lets your employees be more creative and offer a better customer experience. Customers will get a prompt answer to their questions. It can minimize the waiting time for customers by managing operations smoothly, which will ultimately lead to improved customer service.
Examples of a Digital Workforce
A digital workforce works best when applied to repetitive tasks that require human input. Here are some examples of jobs that can be a part of the digital workforce.
Digital SAP Accounts Payable Clerk
It’s responsible for automating tasks like reconciliation, invoice, payments related to that invoice, and so on by using a combination of routine bots and IQ.
Digital Oracle Accounts Receivable Clerk
It comprises a massive range of functionality inside of the Oracle E-Business Suite. The organization can reduce its invoice processing time via a digital workforce by up to 60% with increased accuracy of up to 100%.
IT Admins
This workforce assists IT Cloud Engineer in Instance Creation, User Management, and creating Utilization Report on behalf of the company’s AWS’s usage.
Healthcare Claims Processing
By using RPA for Healthcare, organizations can parse through claims files and extract critical information. In the event that the number of claims processed does not match the expected total, an audit report is generated for hospital staff.
Building and Scaling Digital Workforce
Lay a Blueprint for Automation
You shouldn’t automate without a plan. The automation process should start from something small, like generating daily reports for a user. After it works out, you can slowly increase it to enterprise-level automation.
It’s possible to add more robots with the correct software. After the initial hurdle, there should not be a problem in adding new robots to your workplace. We recommend having a plan and then a monitoring team to observe the progress of automation.
Find Automation Opportunities
It is impossible to automate everything at once. Each department has its processes and challenges. An organization’s goal is to observe and analyze the operations of each department to find out the automation opportunities in each one of them. In some cases, you may want to use both humans and robots to collaborate. The best example of human-robot collaboration would be a call center.
Be Smart and Strategic
You need to be strategic to get the maximum return on investment from automation tasks. It’s essential as you will need to add more automation to your workplace later. Here are some suggestions that you can follow:
- Form reusable automation templates.
- Do not allow your robots to learn from human inefficiencies.
- It’s not unusual for you to forget automated operations. Keep note of every automated service and see if it is adequately automated and optimized or not.
How to Implement a Digital Workforce
A digital workforce provides a competitive advantage for your organization. With a digital workforce, you can improve how your employees operate and transform the customer experience. When implementing a digital workforce, your organization needs to start small and scale the projects as you begin to see success with your automation projects. If you need help with implementing a digital workforce, consider working with firms that have experience with automation.
At Productive Edge, we work with leading organizations to transform their businesses and elevate the customer experience. To learn more about how Productive Edge can help your business, contact us.
