Category Archives: CRM

In the business world, the combination of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Process Management (BPM) has proven to be more advantageous than ever before. Mainly due to competition, enterprises are in the rush to create and find new ways to attract more sales and elevate their place in the market, always having in mind product manufacturing cost reduction while maintaining or increasing the rate of production.
Consequently, enterprises that possess an exceptional CRM system will boast a better profit compared to the rest that may not have this system applied, making the tools of CRM an essential asset to earn and preserve more clients and higher revenue.

What exactly is CRM and BPM?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comprises of software technology, strategies and/or practices that organizations and enterprises can employ to analyze and manage data of interactions with clients. Furthermore, it is a system used to better understand the intricate liaison between company and customer.
BPM (Business Process Management) works on the principle that processes are central to an organization. BPM tools improve an organization’s processes through analysis and automation.
The key difference between these two types of software is that CRM focuses mainly on the commerce department while BPM can encompass the use of CRM in the array of processes it targets. Although each tool can be used separately from each other, they provide the best results when combined.

Some of the benefits of the fusion of CRM and BPM are:

● Greatly improves CRM’s data usage given that BPM allows the 3rd party’s references and reports.
● Provide the enterprise with higher predictability. For this reason, CRM will thrive when given more data and sales opportunities, enhancing its capability for organizing possible sales leads while accelerating the commercial processes and marketing.
● Maximizes cross-selling and up-selling. Through the merger of CRM with a BPM system, cross-selling and/or the increment of sales for a client (up-selling) can be vastly improved regarding the processes of business to allow an optimal performance of sales and attain superior results.
● Eliminates unnecessary processes.
To conclude, the implementation and merging of both CRM and BPM is becoming more and more important taking into consideration all the benefits that the processes provide to improve customer service, internal process and commerce efficiency.

In our previous article, we introduced the concept of RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Here we will try to address some of the assumptions that arise when considering whether RPA makes sense for a company irrespective of its size or the industry.

Will RPA replace the humans in the workforce?

While RPA leans toward replacing the tedious repetitive tasks which are human error prone, it does not entirely replace the human workforce which is the life of the company. RPA is intended to improve the efficiency and productivity of people working in a company. No system, whether it’s AI or RPA, is intelligent enough to replace the rational mind of a human being and in essence human beings are indispensable.

RPA processes or robots can make mistakes

You are spot on! YES, RPA processes or robots can make mistakes, IF there is a flaw in their design. These robots will follow their instructions to the T and are not capable of correcting the flaw in their instructions. Hence testing RPA robots is extremely critical and crucial, it cannot be stressed any further.

APIs can be used instead of RPAs for automation

You are again right! I guess it’s a good day to buy a lottery ticket. Now back to the Assumption, there’s a huge caveat here. You can avoid RPA completely and build your automation using APIs, but why would you do that? It proves to be extremely cost ineffective and error prone. The major benefit of using RPA is to make the processes cost effective and not error-prone. RPA is designed to replicate human behavior at a large scale.

RPA works only in certain industries

As long as you are not in the niche area of making handmade samurai swords, it’s safe to say RPA will be useful for your industry. Every industry has tasks which human beings do that are repetitive in nature and prone to error. These are the areas that RPA targets to alleviate.
Here are some examples of tasks that RPA can address:
– Claims processing in the Insurance industry. Well, based on my experience in the insurance industry, I can say there are many tasks that are prime for RPA.
– Detecting fraud in banks and the payment processing industry.
– Detecting insider attacks in Salesforce CRM applications across any industry.
– Order management and processing, and logistics in retail and ecommerce.
RPA is costly
There, there! RPA is meant to be cost effective and would not be taken kindly if it was burning a hole in the proverbial pocket. RPA does have an initial implementation cost, however it is not as significant as BPM software or the famous API solution. Additionally it results in cost reduction in the processes and saves human hours thereby reducing expenditure in other areas.

Well, I hope I have provided some food for thought here for RPA and automation inside your organization, in line with UIPath vision to enable every customer to deliver ‘a robot for every person’ in the organization. As always, I value your feedback and am available to help your organization.