For a business, unprecedented times demand an innovative and robust solution. No one expected COVID-19 to throw BAU activities out-of-track. Flights, trains, personal vehicles, contact centers, everything has come to a standstill, except a few organizations who had a smart Business Continuity Plan in place.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the old saying — nothing is more precious than human life; however certain businesses such as banking, hospitals, telecom, food, power, and pharma must continue to keep that life going.

Education institutes, medical centers, and FMCG banks, among others, are relying on an on-premise operation to run classes, consult patients, place purchase orders, or approve invoices and approve credit applications, respectively. The lockdown has led to the suspension of critical services, thus obscuring the reality to both customers and businesses.

How can businesses continue uninterrupted in these challenging times? Is it possible to maintain the scale of operations? How can one be released of mundane tasks to give precedence to human life? All these incessant questions have disturbed private and public organizations, looking for a reliable solution that can offer uninterrupted BAU experience.

Automation has never been this critical. With 5G connectivity making inroads, the remote operations seem more tangible and acceptable. A recent study by HBS stated that trust-based culture and higher productivity would be a few of the outcomes of social isolation due to reliance on technology during the COVID-19 lockdown. Remote working tools such as Slack, WebEx, Teams, and Zoom have seen never-before adoption rates (with Teams taking maintenance downtime).

While the above tools have been in place for long, assisting remote work operations, enterprises were challenged by disconnected activities that demanded constant human presence, operating out of legacy applications or a secure environment. Processes such as 4 Eye sign-off, invoice approval & disbursement, and transaction reconciliation required staff to be available round-the-clock working out of company premises.

Few business leaders, keeping abreast with intelligent automation, have adopted Robotic Process Automation to not only better define their BCP, but also to scale their operations.

RPA, with its low-code automation platform and hyperautomation capability, applies native Artificial Intelligence capability to discover business processes, automate them and orchestrate using a cohesive platform. A thin client-based orchestrator lets process owners, on their handheld devices, remotely monitor and control digital workers running the enterprise processes.

Focused on reducing the automation cycle and increasing the scale of operations, specific ready-to-deploy skills can be accessed from the Marketplace, that let businesses immediately kick-off their RPA journey. Among these skills, Digital Workers pre-trained in business operations such as invoice reconciliation, talent management on SAP, productivity management on O365, and client management via CRM tool Salesforce let businesses realize the key benefits of automation in a shorter timeframe. Once the solution is deployed, the day-to-day operations that must continue uninterrupted at office premises or behind a secure environment such as Citrix can run without any human intervention.

A controversial report by BCG predicts that the lockdown, resulting from social isolation mandate, may continue for a more extended period, leaving many individual contributors overwhelmed by the pipeline of outstanding tasks. A readily accessible personal assistant that could run non-stop to address scheduled demand is the need of the hour.

Enterprise Personal Digital Workers are integrated/built-in to certain applications or installed on personal machines to reduce the workload of regular asks and are available 24×7 to run without any assistance.

Never before have health and hygiene been this important. While social distancing may help flatten the COVID-19 curve, driverless vehicles, contactless store purchases, or real-time traffic management have made a strong point that — Artificial Intelligence, with constant feedback and on-demand assistance from human — will drive Automation Singularity.

Automation Singularity defines a state wherein human specialists drive customer orientation using their creativity and empathy and are complemented by digital workers with extreme productivity and consistency. The feedback mechanism and monitoring can happen remotely, driving excellence in automation.

AssistEdge has been running non-stop critical operations at global enterprises in pharma, telecom, and manufacturing with a scale of 500+ unattended digital workers in a single environment.

EdgeVerve, with its 300+ enterprise clients and values inherited from Infosys, offers free AssistEdge licenses to ensure BAU continues, while human lives stay secure in these challenging times.

With free access to AssistEdge Academy and an active community forum engaging 10,000+ RPA enthusiasts, citizen developers can now learn and automate their critical processes while maintaining social distancing.

Business Continuity is something that enterprises tend to adhere to theoretically. Most companies have a plan at place but only on paper, leading to managers and leaders gasping for a course of action during this unprecedented time of crisis. The sudden focus on business continuity can be perplexing to some of us. Why is Business Continuity the most mentioned keyword currently among top CXOs globally? Why is there a sudden focus on Change Management? That’s because the world, as we know, is at present in dire straits. We are amid an economic meltdown owing to the recent pandemic that has engulfed humanity — the COVID-19. Due to the immense possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus and nearly a global average of 5-6% mortality, if affected, organizations are taking the necessary precautions. They are going to great lengths to ensure that their employees do not face the wrath of this pandemic by coming to the workplace physically and by not adhering to the social distancing norms that must be practiced during these turbulent times. Even if we somehow overcome this disruption, we’re unaware of the collateral damage that we’ll have at our hand and how businesses, especially in the Travel, Hospitality, and Retail industries, would operate post this pandemic. Companies are looking for solutions that will work as a contingency plan for weeks, if not months, to come. One of the immediate solutions that organizations across the world implemented was allowing employees to ‘Work From Home (WFH).’

But does that solve the problem operationally? Well, as convenient as it might sound from a business continuity perspective, the reality is a bit afar. Operations in physical presence are usually collaborative, where an employee abides by a specific operating procedure that is standardized across a business function. Working in silos, on the other hand, defeats the purpose altogether. The chances are that WFH operating protocols and procedures won’t be followed, or even if followed, will result in erroneous transactions and human errors that will have an overall impact on process excellence.

So how do we address such a situation at hand currently or also in the future? Process Discovery can be one of the viable solutions that helps address the ambiguity around process excellence attributed to employees working from home. AssistEdge Discover is a market-leading process discovery product that captures and leverages digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aids enterprises in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Free from human biases, the business process maps and insights generated by the analytics engine in AssistEdge Discover provide a powerful foundation for inter-functional collaboration, process excellence, and continuous improvement.

Benefits of Process Recording for employees working from home

SMEs for a business function can record a particular process with the help of a desktop recording tool, which will capture every user action across different applications relevant to the process. Moreover, there is also a scope of addressing exception handling by recording processes of different scenarios and addressing the complexity that comes with it. Once the recordings are done and dusted, SMEs can feed it to a neural network algorithm, which will automatically clean the additional noise or events that are irrelevant to the process and create a holistic map view of the process with different variations as per the complexity. This can be directly exported as a Business Requirement Document, which will help employees connecting remotely to gather accurate information on the operating procedures and standards. The process variations will also help employees understand what actions to perform from an exception handling point of view. This will result in minimal human error, accurate process transactions, and an overall spike in process excellence standards set across a business function, which can be extrapolated to an organization level subsequently.

In the post-pandemic era, most enterprises would be overwhelmed by the complexity of a work-from-home model affecting their business delivery. If we juxtapose it to organizations who are early adopters of Process Discovery, the foresightedness will bring in enhanced brand value and a content customer base while leading the digital transformation of an organization.

Read how Process Discovery helps improve team efficiency during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Amid the spread of COVID-19, which has officially reached a pandemic status, most of the global organizations have rolled out mandatory work-from-home policies to ensure business continuity. Keeping client deliveries intact by allowing employees to work from home is the new business norm. While it significantly helps save long hours of commute and provides an opportunity to be with near and dear ones, it also imposes a new set of overheads for many of the employees, in terms of staying on task in a new environment as well as maintaining the productivity level.

To improve efficiency and productivity, organizations have enabled virtual mechanisms to connect with the team. In-person collaboration is essential to keep the team motivated and is necessary for creativity and innovation. Employees are also encouraged to:

Accurately logging the information mentioned above is a burden for each employee, and auditing them at an individual level is probably a daunting task for the management too. Automated process discovery, while discovering process nuances at its core, is the need of the hour in these challenging times.

These process discovery products capture all the digital interactions (such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, and copy and paste data) made by an employee with different enterprise and web applications. The data captured at this granularity form a base for the necessary audit and adherence reports as well as automatically helps generate attendance and productivity views of departments and individual employees. Below is a glimpse of a login-logout adherence report and application interactions trend.

Since these insights and adherence reports are backed up with the empirical nature of the captured data, it will also help accelerate approval efforts, which will ultimately:

AssistEdge Discover is a leading process discovery product that captures and leverages user’s digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aids organizations in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Powered by empirical data, the outcomes are free from human biases providing a powerful foundation for operational excellence and continuous improvement.

When are you automating the attendance and productivity tracking in your enterprise for remote workers?

Over a last couple of months, we have been witnessing an overwhelming humanitarian crisis unfold.

A crisis, likes of which the world has not seen in the modern digital world. The analysts globally are quick to acknowledge the detrimental impact this event may potentially have on the world economy. According to a report by McKinsey, countries across the globe are staring at GDP degrowth of 6 to 12% and for most a countries recovery is estimated to happen not before 2021 Q2. At the ground level, people’s ability to pay bills and their loans on time will get impacted

Amidst extended global lockdowns aimed at stopping further spread of the virus, economic activities are severely impacted at an unprecedented scale. We all do see an array of prompt and proportional response to the impending economic crisis at all levels: the governments are infusing Trillions of $s worth bailout packages, the federal reserve are reducing their target rates / guidance values, the regulators are offering leniency to the lenders / banks in terms of reporting delinquent debts.

In this time of dire need, a measured response from the lenders is going to define lenders’ relationships with their customers and can potentially generate a lifetime of loyalty.

Governments across the world are issuing relief packages e.g. CARES Act (approved by US congress) that aim to provide timebound protection against foreclosures action and offer right to forbearance for federally backed Mortgages and Student loans. Reacting to the situation, many lenders have declared that they would work constructively with the borrowers to assign suitable assistance programs based on specific needs. While this is a great gesture, a few operational challenges lay ahead of them:

Given these daunting challenges how can lenders convert a potentially adverse situation into customer delight?

Customer needs, A good place to start!

As a side effect of this disastrous event, people’s earning capacities will be impacted. However, this is unlike any other situation that we have witnessed in past, both in terms of severity and proportions.

To be able to assign a suitable assistance program, lending institutions need to first look at broad segmentation based on the magnitude of impact on their earning capacities. Here’s an example of segmentation based on industries where customer is employed and the amount of time it will take to bounce back for pre-Covid-19 times:

Engage customers and offer right assistance program

Identifying the customer segmentation is the first step in the right direction to offer personalized help to the borrowers. Once an incumbent account is segmented, the assignment of assistance program can be done based on the alignment of the internal business and legal teams.

A sample segmentation and their program assignment is illustrated in the table below

Looking to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rescue

Correct Identification of such customer profiles requires evaluating a large number both traditional and nontraditional user attributes. In addition, it is fair to assume that there will be large volumes of such requests coming in. Processing all such request manually is going to be humanly impossible.

As shown above, propensity to pay (behavioral score) is an important element in recommending the right remedial actions, especially for the customer segments 1, 2 and 3. Traditional risk models, are incapable of sifting through the Giga bytes of unstructured data and extract the behavioral profiles of the customers.

Advanced text analytics and machine learning techniques have proved to be highly effective in evaluating and quantifying qualitative aspect as such. Swift assignment of appropriate programs to assist the borrowers in this time of need will enable lenders to build a strong and lasting bond with their customers

Accurate risk segmentations using AI models can also benefit lenders and collection agencies in identifying self-cure customers, who form the large part of the delinquent portfolio. This allows the call calories to be directed to the riskier account and result in higher resolution of more difficult accounts. Furthermore, advanced text analytics techniques can automatically pick important follow-up actions that an operator may forget to note due to the pressure of handling spike in inbound call traffic.

FinXEdge offers a suite of AI based business applications that are specifically built to solve the problems mentioned in this blog. Download our whitepaper to understand how to collect effectively without affecting the customer experience, by embracing AI

For more details visit – https://www.edgeverve.com/finacle/finxedge/finxedge-collect/ or schedule a consult to engage with an expert (Link – https://www.edgeverve.com/finacle/finxedge/finxedge-collect/#meeting)