Want to boost your team’s efficiency or support scaling in the future? Business process automation (BPA) can help—and it can do so while supporting human creativity.
When wielded well, BPA can tackle repetitive tasks so customer experience (CX) pros can focus on higher-level strategy and giving projects unique creative flair. Thoughtfully onboarding BPA can help you achieve a world of benefits and provide more support for your team.
Here’s how we would recommend approaching balanced, benefit-oriented BPA implementation.
From Monotonous to Momentum in Minutes? The Potential of Business Process Automation
Business process automation allows organizations to use machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other solutions to streamline common workflows.
When used well, BPA can help your entire team enjoy many benefits, including:
- Increased efficiency
- Cost savings
- Improved accuracy
- Enhanced customer experience
- Scalability
- Better employee experiences (less time on repetitive tasks!)
- Faster time to market
- Fewer mistakes with built-in workflows to get the right people involved
- Automated recommendation
- Automated insights to drive innovation
- ... and more!
BPA can help you achieve these benefits in several ways. For example, BPA eliminates manual errors. It allows employees to focus on strategic tasks. It also ensures tasks are completed accurately and consistently, leading to improved customer satisfaction. And, quite compellingly, BPA enables teams to handle increased workloads without additional resources. This can promote growth and scalability while helping businesses embrace a more-with-less mindset.
The Human Aspect of Automation
Using BPA well isn’t about leveraging automated solutions on their own. It requires thoughtfully meshing what tech offers with your team's expertise. This may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be! The initial step of designing and setting up your automated processes is straightforward and user-friendly. This means you can start reaping the benefits of BPA without extensive setup time.
Of course, to make sure your automated processes align with your goals, you’ll need to reassess and update them regularly. Your business’s needs will shift over time. And human oversight is critical for holistic, creative evaluation of any work your BPA solutions produce.
But, at the end of the day, the time you spend designing processes and improving them on an ongoing basis will be much less than the time you spent on repetitive tasks in the past. This makes it an efficient, sustainable approach to business growth.
One thing that can make transitioning to BPA a little easier is providing your team with training about how to work effectively alongside automation. When team members learn how to automate and delegate to BPA processes, they’ll gain more time to focus on tasks that require their unique abilities.
The Machine Aspect of Automation
Interested in BPA solutions to streamline tasks?
BPA can take some repetitive projects off your team’s plate. It can help you release creative that speaks to more people. And it can even help your team lay the groundwork for all-important human connection.
A few smart ways we’ve seen business process automation used include:
- Customized workflow management: Using BPA to design tailored workflows and approval processes
- Accelerated project launches: Using BPA to get new CX projects to market without the usual hurdles and delays
- Unified team collaboration: Using BPA tools can help teams visualize and organize CX projects much more cohesively and efficiently
- Enabling truly dynamic personalization: Using BPA and personalization at scale to roll out personalized offers, unique recommendations, and read-your-customer’s-mind-level ads to every single person in your database
Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks for internal creative teams frees up human time to focus on more enjoyable projects. Automated workflows also enable real-time notifications, task assignments, and progress tracking. This fuels more effective communication and fewer headaches when task lists go awry.
But Does This Really Work? A Real-World Application of Business Process Automation
OTTO, a German e-commerce platform, wanted to optimize its advertising efforts. It knew the way forward was data-driven programmatic advertising. OTTO was also having trouble finding user-friendly, customizable ways to create and release that type of creative.
By training their talent on a powerful yet easy-to-use BPA solution and using a solution that integrated well with its existing tech stack, OTTO ensured more time for creativity while achieving its scaling goals.
OTTO also appreciated its newfound ability to learn and earn at the same time. According to the company’s online marketing manager, “We were able to gain insights into which creative concepts best pay off, and how different KPIs are [achieved] in respective periods of time.”
Ready to Harness BPA for Yourself? Remember These Three Tips
Setting up BPA to support automation and human talent will require thinking ahead.
Here are three onboarding steps we recommend:
- Clearly define your business processes. Before implementing BPA, map out each step of your target process. This will help you determine which tasks can be streamlined and which require human intervention.
- Involve your team in the implementation process. Seek your team’s input and feedback as you figure out the best ways to use business process automation. This will help you identify potential bottlenecks. It’ll also ensure that the automation aligns with your team's needs.
- Continuously monitor and optimize your BPA workflows: Review your automated workflows to identify areas for improvement. Do this often. Collect feedback from your team and make necessary adjustments.
Welcome to the Future of BPA: Balancing Technology and Human Ingenuity
Benefiting from business process automation requires striking a good balance between tech and human ingenuity. Looking for intuitive, innovative solutions that can help achieve that balance? Innervate is ready to assist. Check out our comprehensive guide to BPA to find your next steps.
