Prioritizing Automation to Help Your Business Adapt in 2020

While you may not have expected an entirely smooth road for the start of 2020, the rough start to the year hasn’t been what anyone expected. And when circumstances ahead are uncertain for businesses of every industry, it’s time to strategize about ways to keep your business running smoothly, providing the best customer service possible. Automating key processes is one of the ways to provide stability for your business in the coming months.

Ensure your business can run smoothly no matter what happens next

Your personnel might be working from home now, or they might need to take a leave of absence for a little while. If your processes up to this point have required people to manually run them, and if only a couple people know how those processes work, it’s time to standardize and codify with automation.

You may not be able to depend on all the services outside your business continuing to run either. For example, sometimes businesses use NOCs as a cost-effective option to run jobs. But when the people who usually run the jobs at the NOC can’t get into their place of business, your jobs will be stalled.

Automation solutions like robotic process automation (RPA) and workload automation (WLA) provide real value right away by taking care of your tactical operations. Having a digital worker who can get up to speed immediately can keep your business on track. Even if you’re dealing with a hiring freeze, you can put the people you do have to work in value-adding capacities while digital workers and job scheduling software take care of repetitive, day-to-day tasks like data entry, report generation, file movement automation, application integration, and batch processing.

As you implement automation, you can ensure that it’s stable by choosing a solution that automates through an API. GUI automation is great for certain tasks, but it does rely on an interface staying the same in order to prevent the bot from breaking. If you are short-staffed, you aren’t going to have time to fight fires. Instead, you need to make sure that the processes you put in place will continue to work again and again. Using API automation can help you accomplish this.

Provide top-notch customer care even when resources are lacking

Businesses still need to keep up with customer expectations, even when they’re uncertain about what the economy will look like and don’t know when storefront businesses will be able to be open again. At banks, customers will still expect to be able to open new accounts, apply for loans and credit cards, and access documents and information about their existing accounts online, even if they can’t do it in person. Banking institutions should automate processes and make them available digitally when people can’t come in to receive those services in person at a branch.

Any company with high transaction volumes will need to be sure that systems are current with the most recent data. Especially when circumstances are uncertain, banking customers depositing a check or transferring money from one account to another will be looking for the same speed of transaction they’re used to experiencing. Even though personnel might be lacking, it will still be vital for business to continue as usual, with as little disruption as possible.

Here are some key ways businesses can use automation to maintain top-notch customer experience:

• Keeping the most current information available in customer portals and websites with browser automation Processing applications to quickly get data to the correct systems and ensure normal response times with scheduled reports and automated data entry Providing automated responses for common problems (password resets, account balances, order tracking) to keep call center lines open for more complex problems

Choose an automation partner who is resilient and experienced

As you choose solutions to help you automate, look for a stable partner that has experience and continues to provide support no matter what. With a partner in automation, you can implement the strategies you need in your business to weather the current crises.

Fortra has been helping businesses improve operations, change strategy to tackle the problems of the day, and implement new technology to take their businesses forward for decades. When you choose Fortra automation solutions, you partner with experts who offer support at every stage of the process, whether you need help with implementation, training, or troubleshooting.