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.

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.