How COVID-19 backflipped Australia’s offshoring strategies overnight
How COVID-19 backflipped Australia’s offshoring strategies overnight

How COVID-19 backflipped Australia’s offshoring strategies overnight

Some of Australia’s largest companies had to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Greg Eyre, VP ANZ for Blue Prism, explains how intelligent automation through a digital workforce can help at this challenging time.

Australia’s love affair with offshore outsourcing has taken a massive battering over the past four months as the world continues to reel from the impact of COVID-19. This has led to a long-lasting change in how businesses will operate moving forward.

Some of Australia’s largest companies, particularly in the telecommunications, banking, government, aviation and other services-led sectors, felt the full force of the pandemic and had to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight. Large portions of workforces suddenly became unavailable overnight, impacting the smooth delivery of call center, IT and business process workflows conducted on behalf of Australian customers.

It’s a sobering realization how unprepared many organizations were to support ongoing operations in the face of a widespread labour shortage.

With India and the Philippines, the two major outsourcing locations for Australian businesses, call centers and support operations either closed or significantly reduced staff in these countries due to social distancing rules. Many support staff were ill-equipped to work remotely, due to inadequacies in the technology, Internet or living conditions required to support them.

While call center operations have been heavily impacted, so too have the many back office business process outsourcing services that Australian businesses offshore. These are the repetitive, trivial and mundane tasks that are outsourced due to cheaper labour costs, such as data input, loan processing, accounts payable and receivable, expense processing and digitizing of document streams.

Those impacted were forced to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight. Most already had a Business Continuity plan in place that enabled them to switch operations elsewhere if a particular city or country became unavailable. But very few took into account what happens if all outsourced centers suddenly become unavailable, or at least working to a significantly reduced capacity.

This has caused a massive scramble to build a blueprint to get through this period of disruption, but also for organizations to redesign what their future operations will look like six to 18 months down the track.

Consequently, many enterprises-initiated programs to remove the offshoring risk and bring these activities back in-house. This not only comes with increased labour costs, but it strains the existing workforces in Australia as they take on the additional workloads.

Others are looking at technology as an alternative to support their operations moving forward to avoid the risk of having to offshore services again. Automation, in particular, has been flagged as a more sustainable and viable option.

Employing digital workers

With the ability to automate time-consuming, mundane and repetitive tasks, robotic process automation (RPA) offers enterprises the opportunity to employ automated digital workers to augment and complement their human colleagues.

This is an appealing option for Australian businesses that have traditionally offshored back office business processes and workflows. The first step is to review the processes that they currently outsource to determine if they could be automated and brought in-house.

Digital workers won’t replace humans with machines – it isn’t a plot to dismiss humans from the workplace altogether. Instead, they ‘free the robots’ inside of human talent, enabling them to focus on higher value and more rewarding activities that serve to differentiate the business and enhance the customer experience. This in turn increases their overall job satisfaction.

One of New Zealand’s largest banks, for example, has 40 call center employees receiving 500 change of address requests a day from customers. This used to take an average of four days to complete. Since implementing a Digital Workforce, the bank has reduced this wait time down to minutes and freed its employees to work with customers on complex problems and enquiries.

Since COVID-19 hit Australian shores, we’ve seen a rise in interest from banks in employing digital workers to take the pressure off their call centers in direct response to the increased demand for financial assistance, mortgage extensions and so on. Likewise, airlines assessed how a Digital Workforce could help them process the massive influx of refunds due to cancelled flights, which was causing very long wait times for frustrated customers to reach call centers.

A Digital Workforce can quickly perform what would normally be time-consuming tasks for humans. This gives employees the freedom to provide a quicker and more personalized approach to customer experience.

Ensuring a future workforce

While it remains unknown what the overall impact of COVID-19 will ultimately be, it has lifted back the veil of offshored outsourcing to show the potential vulnerabilities that Australian businesses are relying on. It’s forcing these organizations to reconsider what their future operational strategies will look like.

Intelligent automation through a digital workforce is a viable and sustainable option for taking complete control of your business processes through a legion of virtual workers that your business will easily manage.

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