Robotic process automation in telecom

We’re living in a digital realm where more businesses and industries are automating their workflows and operations. Integrating robotic process automation (RPA) can help telecom companies simplify the handling of operational tasks and generate lasting revenue streams. There are a number of activities in the telecom industry that are manual in nature. Some of these include rekeying data, updating data fields, and understanding information by going through the massive knowledge base.

RPA use cases in telecom cover quite a lot of services such as on-time billing, payment processing, customer service, number portability, speeding up the document verification and SIM allotment process, data entry, data processing, data management, and much more. RPA robots are capable of replicating human actions and can easily interact with the interface. RPA implementation can close the gap between data sources and access by offering specific data that a customer/staff needs.

RPA-powered bots make it super easy to add customers whenever a new one joins and also simple to remove when they leave. It helps the telecom sector save time, reduce the chances of errors, reduce costs, and save their employees from wasting their time on unproductive manual tasks. RPA-based software robots are fully equipped to respond to simple queries, interpret emails, and redirect the complex questions to humans, making the overall process of query resolution much simpler.

RPA technology enables software bots to rapidly access data, thus assisting the telecom agents in addressing the high volumes of customer demands on their first call without having to do repeated follow-ups. RPA promotes First Call Resolution (FCR) rates, thus helping the telecom firms guarantee customer retention. Customer care processes with higher FCR rates lead to enhanced customer satisfaction and retention with lowered operating costs and happier employees for businesses.

Unassisted customer service portals are increasing in popularity among telecom service providers as 69% of telecom customers attempt to resolve their own technical issues before reaching out to the service provider. RPA bots provide a 24/7 available self-service portal to customers, as they can collect information on the customer’s inquiry, fetch data on the problem, generate a step-by-step guide to solve the customer’s problem, and generate a report on the customer’s inquiry.

Automating the back-office process of debt collection can also be an effective RPA use case. RPA helps telecom firms to identify and collect what their organization is owed on the respective due dates. A robust RPA platform can automate various steps of the debt collection process, such as payment information updates, due dates, payment reconciliation, and urgent escalations.

The average revenue per user is one of the main KPIs in the telecom industry to look for. By using RPA technology, telecom companies can identify sales opportunities by analyzing customer data and the customer’s eligibility for various promotions or sales campaigns while on an ongoing call, thus driving both cross-sells and up-sells. To have this information available at the time of the call, translates to better sales pitches, leading to increased closing rates and average deal size as well.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) subjects the telecom industry to heavy regulation, including antitrust, licensing and pricing laws. Staying compliant with regulatory mandates can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, but RPA can make it less of an administrative burden. All a company must do is schedule a group of unattended bots to regularly collect relevant compliance data from specified systems and compile it all in a central spreadsheet.

Keeping track of what competitors and customers are doing is vital business intelligence, and RPA can help by collecting and aggregating high volumes of data. Understanding patterns in consumer data usage can help telecom companies plan for infrastructure updates to better meet customer demands. RPA can make it easier to leverage this data by collecting it from a network performance management system and aggregating it in a centralized spreadsheet.

With the rising cost of cyberattacks and data breaches (up to $4M per breach) it is important to mitigate these risks to avoid tarnishing the brand’s reputation and facing lawsuits. RPA bots can help telecom service providers avoid cyber threats by automating privileged data management, software updates and patch downloads, detecting unauthorized access and reporting it, running cyber threat hunts and penetration tests, detecting malware and virus attacks.

Glow’s role

Here at Glow, we embrace RPA-friendly practices when it comes to dealing with our clients. We realise that RPA presents a huge opportunity for telecom companies and we like to capitalise on it, using our experience in the field to our advantage. We are looking forward to a future where RPA becomes the norm rather than the exception and being a leader in the telecom industry.