Building Business Resilience during COVID-19 with Intelligent Automation

COVID-19 is first an impact on human life, affecting millions of people worldwide. The pandemic also has a growing impact on the global economy and how businesses function. Needless to say, the pandemic’s economic challenges are unprecedented. As governments make significant interventions to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, businesses are compelled to rapidly adjust to the changing needs of their people, customers, and suppliers, while also Building Business Resilience during COVID-19 with Intelligent Automation.

According to Gartner’s Business Continuity Survey, a minuscule 12 percent of organizations are highly prepared for an event like COVID-19. And, 32 percent of senior executives at businesses rarely update their operating model, according to initial data from a report by Accenture and Oxford Economics.

Let’s take an overview of the industries facing the heat of the pandemic and how.

According to Accenture, here’s the high-level and in-depth impact of the pandemic on businesses in all major industries:

• Systems impact – COVID-19 is pushing businesses to operate in new ways and testing their systems’ resilience like never before. As businesses face and handle a number of new system challenges and priorities, such as business continuity risks, ebb and flow in volume, real-time decision-making, and security-related risks, leaders will need to act quickly to address immediate systems resilience issues.
• Experience impact – All consumer facing companies will have to change what their brand and messaging is all about in a post-COVID world. This global pandemic is rapidly changing our experience, attitudes, and behaviors. The next normal will not resemble the old normal. The way consumers think and react and what they demand will change and companies will have to redesign experiences to match the new normal. In the consumer goods industry, for instance, all of this change will directly impact what consumers buy, which will lead to immense structural change in the industry.
• Operational impact – Business process functions are changing across industries as businesses get severely disrupted due to the immense pressure of the pandemic. For many multinational companies, complex and business-critical services handled by global operations must be restructured. The direct impact will be in organizations adopting a distributed global services model to mitigate enterprise risk.
• Commercial impact – Direct-to-consumer and B2B businesses strive to meet emergency needs, as coronavirus activates a new wave of commerce innovation. Companies that viewed digital commerce as a secondary channel will now reprioritize their business focusing on that. For instance, retail businesses are rallying to offer ‘contactless’ delivery and curbside pick-up services to meet the changed needs of their customers.
• Customer impact – This pandemic required companies to move at rapid speed, which is re-evaluating how contact centers function, how employees deliver relevant customer experiences, and how digital channels can be leveraged to support the rise in contact center volume. Consider banking, for instance, where social distancing restrictions will push customers toward using digital channels for services, accelerating the need for a connected and responsive team.

Industries such as travel and hospitality are among the hardest hit especially due to ongoing cancellations, pressure to issue refunds and a significant decline in new bookings.

Customers:

• Build alternate channels for commerce (both B2B and B2C) as sales teams mobility continues to remain impacted.
• Augment your Order Management capabilities to manage and process inbound sales orders and customer queries.
• Automate your invoice generation and submission to avoid delays and improve your cash-flow management cycle.
• Deploy AI based contact centers to handle surge in call volumes leading to increased wait times for customers.

Employees:

• Promote a digital way of working by enabling access to business-critical applications.
• Leverage Cloud to handle additional stress on existing IT infrastructure.
• Deploy Digital HR & IT Assistants to response to increased queries around new policies, systems, and Business continuity guidelines.
• Address Work From Home issues by augmenting your human teams with AI powered E-Workers.

Suppliers:

• Plan for alternate supply chains in case of impact to operations of existing suppliers to minimize downtime for your business.
• Invest in automating you order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and inventory management processes for improved working capital efficiency.
• Onboard new suppliers faster and manage and relay updates from existing suppliers directly in your ERP.
• Make timely payments for your supplier invoices and perform automated reconciliation

There’s only so much a human workforce can do…

In businesses’ bid to create a distributed global services model to mitigate and diffuse enterprise risk, they will look to automate routine and repetitive tasks with digital workers, which is human + machine models.

Such automation can help businesses now and position them for growth and success in a post-COVID world. With intelligent and resilient operations, organizations will be able to protect their people, serve their customers, and stabilize their business.

During times of crisis, business operations, the intelligence engine of any organization is more important than ever. Making transactional processes more digitized and focused on value-based operations can reduce the stress on people and help automate essential yet repetitive chunks of tasks.

Let’s meet the supervity.ai E-Workers and learn what they can do to help you recover and grow your revenues:

CX Ninja handles digital-first customer operations like no one else.

• It’s conversational commerce feature delivers e-commerce functionality over major social messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp helping you create alternate sales channels.
• Automated purchase order processing capability with in-built integrations for ERP systems and emails so you can acknowledge customer requests and orders in real-time.
• Contact center automation handles 80% of customer queries across voice, emails and chat reducing workload on your human teams and delivering better Turn Around Times for customers.
• Helps customers perform common services such as checking account balance, transaction summary, portfolio statement, order status, etc.

We deployed CX Ninja for a pharmaceutical company which was facing the wrath of COVID-19 as sales coverage became difficult with lockdowns and social distancing practices. We helped the client launch a conversational commerce assistant across voice and social channels to instantly collect orders and process them.

The customer was able to accelerate sales coverage and cycle times by 40 percent and a 60 percent increase in NPS due to quicker turnaround times and service. Learn more here.

HR Holly and IT Knight are the most efficient self-service personal assistant for employees to manage HR and IT Helpdesk related issues. On the employees front, organizations can use them to:

• Manage access and authentication requests for existing as well as new applications.
• Monitor critical infrastructure and assets on-premise or cloud for outage information and auto-remediate issues.
• Support and respond to HR queries and process automation needs such as providing information about policies, marking attendance, and granting leave.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing with access to SharePoint, company wiki, FAQs database for remote working, etc., with chat-based assistants on Slack, MS Teams, and more.

We employed HR Holly & IT Knight for a financial services business that was struggling to help their HR department process all employee issues. The customer achieved 90 percent faster resolutions of IT/HR help desk issues and increased employee engagement by 25 percent, owing to friendly surveys and actions.

Supplier Sam automates critical business processes like supplier onboarding, management, accounts payable (also called as procure-to-pay or invoice processing).

Here’s a list of actions Supplier Sam can take:

• Automate invoice processing for supplier invoices with 3-way matching.
• Establish regular communication with suppliers to identify and record any changes in delivery lead-times.
• Automated inventory and stock reports to assess the impact on production per new delivery lead-times.
• Process supplier documents and checks for compliance and risks for onboarding new suppliers.

A manufacturing firm decided to leverage Supplier Sam for straight-through invoice processing. Vendor invoices include unstructured data, which makes it difficult to pull information for entering it into ERP systems in a timely manner. With Supplier Sam, this financial services organization was able to accelerate straight-through processing of invoices by 60 percent and reduce manual efforts by 80 percent, yielding savings within 6 months.

Check out Supplier Sam here.

If you are thinking about mitigating the impact COVID-19 has had on your business, intelligent automation is the answer. Sign up for a demo right here.