The rise of RPA has opened up new opportunities for businesses to lure existing and prospective customers. Certain RPA benefits are all set to offer rich customer experience. This blog talks about the benefits of RPA for your customers.
According to Microsoft, 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today compared to one year ago.
The customer service and the experience your customer gain represents your brand image, mission, and values. It has always been a key business differentiator. Recent technology advancement had expanded customer choice offering better customer service. As a result, companies have started renewing their policies for customers.
Retaining a customer is very important. An increase in customer retention for only 5% can incur a profit of at least 25%. This is because repeat customers trust your brand and product/service and are more likely to spend more with your brand. Customer experience now became company-wide responsibility. From c-suite to IT, brands are placing customers at the center and design processes and communication for improved customer experience.
Studies have revealed that automation can significantly improve customer experiences. Even there are dedicated software that aim at easing communication and solve customer queries as fast as possible.
Futuristic companies are experimenting with the latest digital tools to offer value-added solutions to their customers or clients. While analyzing the customer journey, they highlight the ‘make’ or ‘break’ moments in the overall journey. Companies find the pain points and try to make it customer-friendly to attract them more.
Customer experience is mainly about convenience. Voice assistants, chat assistants, and smart voice speakers are already helping consumers to solve their day-to-day queries. From a company perspective, RPA deals with customers on a range of predictable and tedious requests.
How can RPA join in the customer experience journey?
Customer journey maps the entire path a customer takes to find and obtain a product or service, where they navigate, what they encounter, and what information gets along the way. This journey can be simple or twisted depending upon the interaction or exposure to many different channels.
Customers are often impatient. They expect shorter waiting time on queues or easy process for their applications. RPA can help to eradicate most of the typical customer pain points and transform the process.
At which point RPA can be put to use?
RPA tools can transfer the work with the originally submitted information and data in real-time, transferring it to the right department as soon as possible. Software robots can process transactions, manipulate data, or trigger responses depending upon the tasks. From logistics, e-commerce to healthcare service, RPA technology can deliver more cost-efficient, streamlined, and compliant customer service. Also, any regulated industries with high volume business processes can take advantage of RPA. This, in turn, frees employees to focus on higher-value activity that drives customer experience.
RPA approaches are intuitive, and it accelerates the data integration process. Software bots seamlessly transfer data from one point to another with minimal or negligible interpretation. It reduces wait time, errors, and cost to serve by 25%.
Gartner predicts, within the next two years 72% of organizations will be working with RPA
Two forms of RPA
Attended mode RPA: These bots focus on front office tasks. Employees keep an eye on these software bots in the flow of their work. If bots are unable to perform the job, they send it to the designated employee to solve the problem.
Unattended mode RPA: These bots handle the back-office job. They are scheduled as per the task requirement and work on claim processing or invoice generations.
Robotic Process Automation has traversed a long way. Customer service operations require both types of RPA to fulfill the need of the present hour. For example, an employee can start the conversation and pass it to the attended automation bot to end; it can further give to unattended RPA bots to complete the overall process. Bots can also work in night shifts without any hesitation.
The role of RPA for enhancing customer service operations
• Streamline work for the departments
If the RPA bots are placed at the beginning of the process, they can smartly direct the customers to the respective customer care team. This helps to offer less time taking and exceptional support. Additionally, it helps the company to understand and analyze the process and creates an opportunity for improvement.
• Employees can nurture real customer relationships
Repetitive tasks take a long time, including seeking customer details, sorting & connecting. RPA bots can help by quickly tracking customer information through several systems. This helps employees to reduce lead times, ensuring a better support experience.
• Improve process predictability
RPA not only minimize error, but also improves process predictability, enforces compliance, and adheres to guidelines. It assures 4-5 times faster performance by employees, streamlining the inquiries, records all modifications in the system, and keeps workflow updated.
• Adjusting with the existing staff and process
RPA bots work well with your current system; thus, it makes the method of data entry and analyzing easy. It’s kind of a new layer over your existing infrastructure that will optimize the overall process value.
A Georgia based insurance company uses RPA software to process more than a million contracts and thousands of claims. A prompt response to the customer increased customer satisfaction. A mix of self-service customer’s mobile capture and back-office document capture & management helps in automating these processes. This increases customer satisfaction by 15%, boosts productivity by 30%, and reduced follow-up calls from customers by 25%.
Some common examples:
• The very popular and chatbots are available almost everywhere. They come with the capability to fulfill customers’ requests instantly rather than passing it to the service representative.
• RPA bots filter junk requests as well. They defend against spammers and ensure that low-priority and unimportant customer service requests don’t eat up times. And employees can genuinely focus on real customer issues.
• One of the most sophisticated RPA implementations is enabling self-service. It offers customers access to a wide range of back-end applications. This accelerates the speed of problem-solving and boosts transparency.
• The RPA-enabled process provides customers with immediate data insights. Be it the progress of an order or the exact delivery time of the order; software bots can perform the necessary action. According to IBM’s report, “in a 6-minute customer service call, 75% of that time is devoted to agents doing manual research, with valued customer interaction at a dismal 25%.” Robots are fast can be applied beyond customer services as it can automatically prepare, analyze, and interpret data.
Plan for your success
If you are thinking of implementing RPA tools to boost your customer service operations, you need to follow the following key steps:
• Plan your current customers’ journeys and the process around them.
• Study and analyze which processes need to be simplified and how that simplification would ease the customer journey and operational team.
• Talk with the customer service team and solve the employee’s queries regarding the same.
• Prepare your employee’s as it will not only help customer service but also other departments like IT, operations, marketing, and finance.
• Plan for future improvements based on the initial results.
In the end,
Businesses must understand optimizing customer service with the RPA software creates an excellent opportunity to help employees and improve overall customer service. You should look at the key performance indicators quarter by quarter to ensure that the appropriate customer service is delivered.
