Digital transformation became a hot topic recently, it is accelerated because of COVID-19. Many business owners have heard about it, however do you really know what are the technologies in place and how to utilise them to improve operational efficiency for SMEs?
Here we share an example from Xservices with you. We received a debt collection request from a customer recently, his situation maybe unusual but quite understandable: there are approximately 50 outstanding debts sitting with him and most of which are small amounts (eg less than $1,000). He thought it is not worth to keep chasing internally, given the large amount of time spend and small likelihood of payments. He then inquired Xservices and wondered if Xservices could help him.
Our answer is yes, as a professional debt collection agency, we can help. We evaluated the situation and believed that this job is quite time consuming and human errors maybe unavoidable if our debt collectors to collect these debts by traditional methods. We then developed a software robot (the “bot”) to automate the initial debt recovery procedure which is repetitive, it is also known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The bot only took a minute to complete the initial debt collection process without any error, compare with 2-3 days’ time of manual effort.
So, RPA is the technology that we have used to improve our operational efficiency and reduce human error, it is the most widely used technology in our day-to-day business. RPA relies on pre-defined business rules and structured data to perform, it interacts with softwares to perform tasks just like human, but more quickly and without error. It potentially enables staffs to spend time and focus on more valuable tasks, in our example, would be the following debt recovery procedures that require our debt collectors to interact with debtors.
Consider the following for successful RPA utilisation:
1) Does the process you want to automate with high volume and repetitive tasks?
2) Are the data digital and structured? (Eg in an Excel spreadsheet)
3) Is there a clear rule for the process to be automated? (Low or no exception rate)
If your answer is yes to all of the above, congratulations, it is very likely that your operational efficiency can be improved by RPA.
Our next blog will introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Machine Learning (ML) and how can we use them to grow the business.
Xservices is a professional debt collection agency, we utilise technologies to help our debt collectors achieve desired outcome. Let us know if you need active debt recovery services!