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Today, the emergence of robotic process automation (RPA) technology is stirring the winds of change in the business world, offering benefits which have a lot of appeal to various organizations and departments. However, one particular unit where robotic software provides a specific value for businesses is in their call centers where manual processes play such a significant role in the day to day operations. By automating these repetitive processes, RPA is delivering efficient, cost-saving solutions to customer service operational and technology challenges, and hence, helping call centers achieve more while completely changing the customer experience for the better. Let’s take a look:
Optimizing Operational Costs
On a tactical level, the cost savings of RPA are far-reaching, both regarding operational and infrastructure costs. As businesses begin to scale, the hiring of new employees is both costly and time-consuming. Throw in the typically high turnover rate in BPO markets, and the whole process becomes a severe drain on a company’s ability to reach its optimal operation cost. With RPA, instead of hiring new employees, or even outsourcing labor, businesses can instead deploy cheaper robotic resources to perform many of the same roles. In fact, a KPMG report claims that labor automation through RPA can reduce an organization’s operational costs by 75 percent! At the same time, RPA ‘s ready-made automation technology is fully adaptable, so it can be fully implemented without changing anything in the current system’s architecture. In fact, most RPA software doesn’t require coding to program; the only real criterion is to know call center workflows and processes. The result is that RPA empowers business call centers to manage their operation, and thus lessening their dependency on the IT department. It was for this reason that Frank Casale of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA) suggested that “most IT infrastructure support jobs will be eliminated over the next three years,” and even further downsizing operational costs.
Boosting the Customer Experience
On a strategic level, the real value of an automation tool that handles all the small, repetitive, everyday tasks that fuel daily operations within the call center, such as opening cases, checking order status, record updates and much more, is in empowering call centers to deliver a superior customer experience. How so? First of all, all call center staff can react to customer interactions in various ways, for better or for the worse. Therefore, depending on which agent the customer speaks with on a given day, that customer can have a drastically different experience. RPA brings consistency to the customer experience, while at the same time, RPA has a near zero percent error rate, so the experience is seamless for the customer. This also includes the post-call, customer follow-up needed to finalize the issue at hand, validate customer satisfaction or offer new business opportunities to those same satisfied customers. Furthermore, when a customer does reach a call center agent, instead of questioning the customer for data and jumping from one system to another just to access the relevant order information in the systems, which can be timely and frustrating for the customer as well as the agent, RPA enables the customer service agent to integrate data into fields across all associated systems with only one entry, which speeds up the handle time considerably, and enhances the overall customer satisfaction.
Indeed, RPA is officially ushering in the era of automation in the call center, and the benefits of improved greater employee efficiency, optimal customer satisfaction operational profitability is becoming harder to ignore, for agents and customers alike!
[About the author]
Dylon Mills is the Director of Marketing Content Strategy & Development at Uniphore. As such, Dylon’s main responsibilities are to strategize, create and deliver content for Uniphore’s product portfolio that align with the global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing campaigns. Dylon’s prior work experience includes Product Management at one of the top Fortune 500 Technology companies, Symantec Corporation. Outside of work, Dylon enjoys problem-solving and any project that includes building/tinkering with tools. Dylon holds a BS Consumer Economics from the University of Georgia.
