Intelligent Automation Wave Headed Toward Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail Industries
Retail has been a thriving industry in recent years. According to recent studies, global online sales in the United States are expected to double by 2023, accounting for 20~25% of the retail space.
In addition, convenience matters now more than ever. Innovative retailers are setting the bar high for customers, making the competition tougher for other retailers. Accordingly, the retail industry will undoubtedly face several challenges that will require retailers to restructure business processes.
With ever-increasing complexity in the industry, retailers have the daunting task of achieving efficient operational workflows for repetitive processes such as inventory management, customer relationship management, marketing, and sales analysis.
This blog will explain how artificial intelligence-powered robotic process automation (Ai-powered RPA) can foster greater trust and collaboration across the global supply chain with real-time, universal insights into the products and processes.
ERP Management
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) refers to systems used to plan and manage all the core processes of an organization.
Intelligent automation solutions can automate all the essential ERP processes like invoice processing, account payable management, account receivables, and so on. This can significantly reduce operating costs and increase employee productivity.
Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Streamlined management of the logistics and supply chain enables organizations to convey their products from suppliers to consumers, monitor inventory levels, and track the shipment so that materials are delivered on time.
Intelligent automation solutions are beneficial for increasing efficiencies in the supply chain since the processes involved are repetitive and rule-based.
Customer Relationship Management
With the ever-increasing number of e-commerce vendors, 24/7 customer service has become an integral part of the retail industry. AI-powered RPA can enable a wide range of services. It can be used before the sale to reply to the customers' queries and after the sale to track product delivery, send the latest updates to the customer, and collect customers’ survey responses.
Intelligent automation can automate the whole process by manipulating machine learning techniques such as natural language processing (NLP), which reduces operating costs while making these services available 24/7.
Claims and Refunds Management
When working in retail, damage is inevitable. It could happen either in transit, in the warehouse, or at the store itself. Therefore, tasks such as submitting proofs and processing claims for refunds can get tiresome.
Intelligent automation can automate claims verification and fraud detection processes, shortening claim settlement time.
Marketing and Sales Analytics
A comprehensive analysis of sales data is essential for devising a successful marketing plan. Creating and analyzing these reports manually is extremely tedious. AI-powered RPA can automate various tasks such as data entry, data extraction, data processing, and the generation of high-quality reports.
Additionally, promoting new products and services and regularly contacting customers is a repetitive and expensive task. Intelligent automation can automate this process and send personalized messages to clients, improving customer and employee satisfaction.
With all of these repetitive work offloaded to intelligent automation, employees can engage in higher value-adding tasks such as marketing and sales analytics to strategize targeted solutions that can help improve the company’s bottom line.
Intelligent automation in the retail industry
The above-listed cases are the most common tasks that can be automated using intelligent automation solutions within the retail landscape. Intelligent automation solutions help streamline the lengthy and tedious processes commonly found in the retail industry and reduce the risk of errors. This helps cut operating costs, enhance customer experiences, and improve employee satisfaction.
Want to know more?
Contact our friendly team to discover how much time and effort Laiye can save your company. Also, explore the ways your firm can use the freed-up time to increase sales and improve profitability by reading our success stories.
