How much time does your organization waste manually monitoring email inboxes, processing inbound email messages, and entering data into business systems? Do your employees still key in data from email messages and attachments? What about help desk requests such as password resets or new user set up? From receiving accounts payable invoices to onboarding users or processing simple information requests, chances are several hours per day are spent managing emails that could be received and processed automatically.
Robotic process automation (RPA) for email automation lets you step away from your inbox and start automating your critical email-driven tasks.
What is Email Automation?
Email automation uses RPA bots to monitor email boxes to directly process inbound messages, moving the appropriate information to the people and systems that need to process the message. Email automation is also a great way to service customer, vendor, and employee requests automatically—saving time and improving accuracy.
Let’s delve into three specific ways you can employ RPA for email in your organization.
Launch Tasks Based on Incoming Email
Think about the tasks you have to perform because you receive an email. In a customer-facing role, that might be providing order information (when did my order ship? Can I get a copy of my invoice?). In other roles, that might be to generate reports for sales or management. In IT, you’ll have help desk requests for password resets. Email automation can take care of a number of tasks coming into your inbox without manual effort.
Automatically Route Attachments from Incoming Email
Whether it’s an invoice, a receipt for archival, an Excel report, or another type of document, you can set up tasks with RPA to identify the attachment and follow rules for processing. Maybe the invoice is sent through AP processes, the receipt is sent to your document management system, and the Excel report is filed for reference later on. While Outlook automation does exist within the platform, it’s limited by only being able to file emails within Outlook. An RPA bot could file your document or Excel within an EDMS or in SharePoint.
Automate Outgoing Email
The possibilities for automating outgoing email are endless, but here are a few use cases. HR might need to email all employees within a certain region every other Tuesday to remind them to get their time off requests in before the end of the pay period. Sales support might need to generate and send a monthly sales report to each individual representative with their totals for the month. Customer service might need to send individual emails to every customer confirming that a recurring order is about to ship. You can also set up bots to send emails based on triggers so that an email is only sent if a certain activity happens.
Email Automation Use Cases
Automating email helps you to be more agile and on-the-ball. The right information, document, or reminder can get to the right place at the right time, dependably, even if you are out of the office or busy with other value-adding work. Here are six places you can put email automation to work.
Help Desk Automation
You can set up your automation platform to intercept specific types of help desk requests like new user creation or password resets and deal with them automatically. Help desk automation takes the burden off of your help desk team and allows them to spend more time on complex problems that require a human touch. Common help desk systems like ServiceNow or Zendesk can be easily integrated into your automated email processes.
Accounts Payable Automation
Finance departments generally receive a high volume of AP invoices, and it’s usually essential that they are processed in a timely fashion. You can save time by setting up an email inbox to receive the invoices. As soon as they arrive they can be automatically routed to the AP department or a document management system for intelligent AP automation.
Automate Customer Information Requests
There are still a lot of businesses out there that haven’t invested in a website to allow customers to check their order or shipment status, so the customers end up sending an email to request the information. There are a few ways you could streamline this process with automation. For example: set up a designated inbox for the requests. The customer sends an email to that inbox with their order number in the subject line. RPA bots can verify that the sender’s email address matches the order number before sending the customer an automatic response with the order information.
Order Entry Automation
In some cases you might be receiving Excel, CSV, or other files with lists of hundreds of orders. With automated data scraping, eliminate the need to manually key the information into another system or database by automating the receipt of the orders and the data entry.
Automated Report Generation and Distribution
Report generation and distribution is one of RPA’s most popular solutions. Often the report distribution capabilities are used to send the report to a group of stakeholders at a set time every day or every week, but the platform provides more flexibility than that. Say you have a sales rep in the field, about to board a plane to visit a customer and wanting to check that customer’s profile. The rep sends in an email request including the customer number, and RPA bots automatically generate a customer report and send it to the rep.
Try Email Automation Today
Start a trial of robotic process automation from Automate to see how easy it is to automate your inbox—all without writing any code.