In an increasingly saturated corporate world that is reeling from the aftermath of a global pandemic, modern business owners are under tremendous pressure to optimize costs and boost productivity. On top of that, the customer demand for digitalization is at an all-time high. With more and more customers moving online, it has become imperative for businesses to embrace the digital journey.
Now, what’s the simplest way to overcome these challenges? Back-office automation. By automating the back-office, business owners can guarantee a high-quality customer experience and experience an overall improvement in productivity.
So, let’s analyze the three ways in which back-office automation can help an organization.
#1 Speed
Even in this digital era, many organizations are bogged down by a lot of repetitive and paper-intensive tasks. It can lead to unforeseen delays that further slow down the overall process. For example, take the case of a bank. An applicant must submit several documents like payslips, tax returns, bank statements, etc., as part of the loan application. The bank must then verify these documents.
If the documents are incomplete, the bank will reject the application and return them to the customer for making the changes. And once the documentation and verification are complete, the underwriter must calculate the affordability and creditworthiness of the customer. All these factors make traditional loan processing extremely slow. Roughly, it will take up to 30-35 days to fund a loan.
With automation, an organization can drastically reduce the cycle time of such processes. That is, by automating these repetitive tasks, they can achieve high levels of speed in completing these tasks without compromising on accuracy. By streamlining the entire workflow through automation, they can reduce the amount of time and labor that goes into every internal task.
#2 Quality
Today, organizations have to deal with high volumes of data, making it error-prone. For example, take the case of a supermarket. Thousands of transactions happen on a daily basis. Cashiers are prone to making errors at the time of billing, especially while entering the data. Unfortunately, even the accountant might miss it at the time of verification.
Even though these errors might be trivial and unintentional, their overall impact is huge. They will not only impact you financially, but can even hamper your organization’s reputation if such errors reach the ears of the customers. With back-office automation, you can reduce the error rates and increase the overall service quality. Using AI/ML models integrated with deep neural networks and rule-based approaches, data processing, extraction, and classification can become flawless, thereby leaving little room for errors.
#3 Security
The risk of cybercriminals is on the rise. No organization, big or small, is spared from the malicious eyes of hackers. Unfortunately, the costs to detect, investigate, and recover losses are extremely high, which can take a huge toll on the organization’s coffers. As hackers are becoming increasingly savvy, businesses must come up with a solution to detect and eliminate fraudulent activities. By automating most of the back-office operations, any discrepancies or breaches in the system will be automatically flagged off the automation system. In short, by leveraging the power of automation, businesses can keep their data safe, which will help them stay one step ahead of fraudsters all the time.
Summary
Back-office automation offers numerous benefits for an organization. However, most companies tend to overlook it, as all the focus is on improving the customer-facing front office. Likewise, some companies are skeptical of replacing their legacy systems that are already integrated with the organizational structure. In this highly digitalized ecosystem, they are missing out on the benefits that adopting automation can bring to them. It is a true gamechanger for the corporate world, and with automation, we can offer unforgettable experiences to customers.
