Month: June 2020

Automation Driving a Resilient Workforce

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises are enforcing crisis-intervention strategies to meet the profound economic shifts, from supply chain disruptions to managing a remote workforce. What stands out is enterprise resilience across operations, technology, and people. Driving workforce resilience is at the top of the business leaders’ agenda. Adapting to the new reality lays a strong foundation for the future, ensuring organizations can thrive and sustain growth. Transitioning to a virtual workforce in the current crisis is inevitable.

How are enterprises ensuring their teams work remotely with minimal disruption to operations? How can enterprises activate a flexible workforce in the face of a crisis? This calls for the increased adoption of automation to drive a resilient workforce.

In collaboration with SSON and Infosys BPM, EdgeVerve conducted a joint survey to monitor the impact of COVID-19 on enterprises. Over 200 global organizations took part in the survey. 56% of the organizations indicated that they were looking at automation as one of the disruptive technologies are organizations to build business resilience.

Adapting to the new reality — a remote workforce — with automation

Many enterprises across industries are sharing success stories of how automation has provided them immunity from COVID-19-like crises in the future. Automation is not a magic bullet; it requires complementary technologies that run alongside it to help build more resilience. Leveraging automation to transition to a virtual workforce, building responsiveness, and resilience, in the long run, is no longer a pipe dream.

For instance, one of our customers, a large telecom company in Europe, had already adopted automation across the enterprise. As a result, the company was able to leverage RPA to highlight customers that were at high risk for COVID-19, ensuring they received prioritized services promptly. Since the customer was already operating in an automated environment, they were able to pivot quickly.

Leaders who put people at the heart of an organization can rebound from a crisis quickly. A pandemic like COVID-19 has brought human resilience to the forefront as organizations find ways to respond expeditiously, enabling collaboration to address pressing business needs. With a distributed workforce, employers are implementing strategies to safeguard and protect their employees, emphasizing trust, resilience, and spirit of togetherness.

Human + Digital workforce

Automation is about optimizing the Human + Digital workforce. At EdgeVerve, we refer to the evolution of intelligent automation as Automation Singularity, which is becoming a critical part of the enterprise business strategy.

“Automation Singularity” refers to a highly customer-centric and agile oriented state of constant improvement and optimization through the future workforce, opening up an expanded horizon of possibilities.

According to Sateesh Seetharamiah, Vice President & Global Product Head at EdgeVerve, enterprise processes will be more immune to disruptions, as the ability to switch work from humans to the digital workforce evolves.

How can process mapping and complementary technologies like AI help in transitioning to remote working?

With companies announcing permanent remote-work policies, the new working model is undoubtedly a part of a future workforce strategy. The new WFH policies not only help grapple with the current pandemic but also define the future of how we work. Remote working, which started as a program to deal with the crisis, has now led to companies transitioning to full remote-work policies.

Enterprises have started discovering the capability of process automation beyond its traditional use. RPA — unattended automation specifically — was predominantly used to serve back-office processes. The current crisis has amplified the strategic possibilities of attended automation, particularly in customer service, where Human + Bot is connecting end-to-end processes seamlessly.

Customer service or contact center teams already committed to an automated environment have been able to react quickly to the crisis by shifting to digital resolutions. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, they have been inundated with significantly higher volumes of calls. The digital workforce can scale up or down to meet rapid, unexpected changes in volume.

Process mapping solutions like AssistEdge Discover can help monitor the activities of the remote workforce, maintain workforce productivity and compliance, and monitor how users interact with systems.

RPA-led automation introduced the possibilities of moving human work to digital workers. Besides, complementary technologies such as AI-enabled workflow, NLP driven text analytics, and low-code platforms have brought innovative human-digital worker collaboration in unimaginable ways, redefining the future of work concepts.

The respondents of the joint survey (mentioned earlier), see themselves more aggressively adopting Future of Work concepts, transforming the way work is done and by whom.

Read the complete report to gain more insights into how automation drives business resilience and the future of work concepts in the face of current business disruptions.

AI Delivering Business Resilience with Intelligent Debt Collections

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly changed how we work and provide our services to customers, compelling us to rethink business strategies. The crisis has affected business-critical processes in ways we’ve never imagined before. In these unprecedented times, it is crucial to have a future proof business resilience strategy that can help organizations manage disruptive situations.

The crisis has significantly impacted the debt collection services in the financial services industry. Banks, credit unions, and financial institutions are leveraging AI for smart debt collections, expediting loan default management.

In the webinar, “AI Delivering Business Resilience with Intelligent Debt Collections,” Praveen Kombial, Vice President & Global Head — Business Applications, EdgeVerve emphasizes the importance of Artificial Intelligence in ensuring business continuity with a robust debt collection strategy without affecting customer experience.

According to Gartner, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value by 2021. Artificial Intelligence is gaining much interest across the world. Only a small percentage of organizations have adopted core practices that would enable them to realize the full potential of AI — from using data effectively to support AI goals and commitment by senior leaders to mapping potential AI opportunities. The good news is that the market and consumers are ready to consider AI as a key lever for digital transformation.

How can banks and financial institutions leverage the power of AI to deliver business resilience in their digital transformation journey?

Let’s consider the complexities in banking, from increasing regulatory compliance to emphasizing on customer protection. What stands out is data — Utilizing near real-time, high velocity, and current data enables better decision-making in the entire ecosystem and transforms banks into data-driven organizations.

Lending enterprises need to move from siloed data sets and point analytics to generating insights across a customer’s journey. As we know, a customer’s journey in a bank is across different value chains: a lending value chain, a card value chain, deposits value chain, and an enterprise’s procurement value chain. Using advanced AI/ML analytics in different parts of the customer’s journey generates near-real-time data that can help drive insights and translate some of those insights into action. This is what truly encompasses Cognitive Connected Value Chain.

Imagine if you could:

  • Create automatic risk reports to your underwriting segment
  • Help managers decide on the micro-segment that they could lend
  • Predict IT failures and ensure business continuity
  • Expedite customer onboarding
  • Reduce indirect spend

How can business resilience help maintain your organization’s ecosystem? How can AI help banks and financial institutions address the current challenges?

The massive shrinkage of GDP and large-scale unemployment rates are disrupting world economies. The lending organizations are responding to the current COVID crisis by offering loan extensions and deferred payment options, addressing increased collection volumes and maintaining customer experience, and providing assistance programs.

This is where FinXEdge Collect comes in. A data-driven intelligence application powered by advanced Machine Learning, it helps various stakeholders in the lending value chain identify at-risk segmentation, reduce delinquency rates and charge-offs, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance customer experience.

In short, AI helps ensure business continuity and resilience in the face of the current crisis, preparing the financial services industry to gear up to a new reality. Combining the power of AI and advanced analytics breaks down siloes and empowers businesses to use data to identify new opportunities. AI-driven solutions help financial institutions manage debt collections by leveraging massive volumes of data, improving efficiencies, and enhancing customer experience.

Listen to our latest webinar with Efma, where Praveen shares insights on how AI can help financial service providers responsibly lend and collect in these unprecedented times.