Our Blogs
Home / Our Blogs
Top 5 Back-Office Functions That Should Be Automated
The old ways of managing and supporting business processes are undergoing a paradigm shift. Disruptive technologies – like intelligent automation (RPA+AI) – are helping chief experience officers (CXOs) re-invent their business operations by bringing in optimizations.
The back office provides vital support and administration to the business and can help create service differentiation with business functions such as IT, HR, and finance. Digital-savvy CFOs and CIOs across the globe realize that efforts to transform customer-facing systems and processes are limited without equally effective and integrated back-office operations. According to EY estimates, automation of back-office work could provide companies with savings of about 20% to 60% of baseline full-time employee (FTE) costs. Overcoming barriers to transformation A survey found that 60% of customer dissatisfaction sources originated in the back office. It is also estimated that 10-20% of all transaction volumes in a contact center are the result of execution issues in the back office. Efforts to digitize core business processes are not new. Over the last two decades, companies have invested in enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, large-scale custom systems, and business process management to transform their core operations.
Some have tangible benefits, but most created unintended side effects such as subpar user experiences, disparate applications, and IT systems, and more. Enterprises today have an average of 1500+ applications alone, and in large organizations, this can run into tens of thousands. And inefficiencies that arise from the back office — legacy systems, siloed data sources, and manual and disconnected paper-based processes — can have a significant impact on productivity and poor customer experience. The foundation of the back office of the future: intelligent automation As organizations are gearing up to be future-ready, technologies such as RPA and AI are becoming increasingly the tools that boost transformation efforts. They can have a significant impact on back-office functions to bring about operational efficiencies: reduced cost, faster turnaround times, and increased productivity. Intelligent automation (IA) empowers rapid end-to-end business process automation and accelerates digital transformation. It combines the rule-based, 24/7 task execution of RPA with artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive capabilities —such as computer vision, natural language processing, and fuzzy logic — with processes and performance analytics. Augmenting RPA with AI technologies expands the possibilities of back-office automation to include nearly any scenario, including a Digital Workforce that can reason and make decisions and learn on the job to become valuable resources in your human workforce.
