The telecommunications industry continues to be at the focus of growth, innovation, and disruption as a result of new technologies that continue to filtrate the market. The cut-throat competition and growing demand for seamless connectivity are the biggest challenges that these companies are facing.

These disruptive digital trends are continuously driving new and exciting innovations. Market players need to learn to adapt and to be equipped with new-age technologies and innovative strategies in order to keep growing and expand their reach within the global market.

Artificial Intelligence, 5G, DevOps and others, are at the forefront of the industry and among these growing trends in the telecommunications sector is Intelligent Automation (IA).

Companies can no longer depend purely on manual operations for various functionalities such as customer relations, sales, marketing, etc.

Automation has increasingly been playing a crucial role in helping companies overcome various roadblocks such as low productivity, high overhead expenses, and risks of error. Nonetheless, it still has manual processes still embedded within it and Intelligent Automation aims to bridge this gap.

Intelligent Automation can be defined as robotic process automation (RPA) with built-in cognitive capabilities. More simply, it is a combination of RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Together, empowering rapid end-to-end business process automations and advancing digital evolution.

Why is IA being implemented in the telecommunications sector, what benefits can be gained?

Customer support plays an important role in any business, but we are constantly faced with the challenge of capturing the voice of the customer; the process of gathering and understanding customer feedback in order to directly improve the customer experience and overall, the product as a whole. Enabling intelligent automation can assist with:

• Anticipating and identifying issues that could potentially impact the end-customer, as well as calculate and understand the consequences for the business.
• Automatically analysing and implementing the correct remediation.
• Implementing a root cause analysis, and subsequently initiating corrective actions to prevent the same issue from recurring in the future.

It allows for support teams to design the customer experience they want, and then implement the improved process to support this experience. Thus, leading to positive impacts on productivity, cost, and customer satisfaction.

Response times can be significantly reduced to current or potential clients with the introduction of IA. Intelligent robots are capable of analysing emails, queries, calls and can provide basic responses, while only diverting complex issues to the support team. Thus, cutting down on response time for more simple issues faced by clients and allowing for the support team to focus on the issues that require more focus and attention.

Employing a manual sales order process can be extremely labour intensive and can lead to delays, errors, and functional carelessness. Automating this process with IA can streamline the workflow and increase sales.

IA can help to reduce operational obstacles as it can navigate legacy systems and other functional barriers and connect all areas of operations as it is designed to handle unstructured, inconsistent processes and data.

Process discovery is also benefited by the use of IA as it further helps to reduce bottlenecks which can occur in complex processes hence increasing operational performance.

How business is conducted is fundamentally being changed by intelligent automation and the reasons why companies are choosing to use it, is quite simple. It allows for maximum automation of everyday tasks and activities while allowing for skilled workers to handle exceptions. Thus, resulting in more efficient processes, which in turn free employees to focus their unique skills elsewhere and discover new opportunities.

At Teldat, we are always working hard at analysing and looking for new ways to adapt to new technologies, in order to bring the best possible solutions to our clients.