As customers increasingly come to expect companies to deliver a quick and personalized experience, brands are looking to technology solutions that deliver on those demands and eliminate the risk of errors. One tactic that is working well and helping businesses achieve results is known as robotic process automation (RPA), which enables organizations to digitize and automate common or reproducible tasks.
RPA is a software technology that simplifies the building, deployment, and management of robots that emulate human interactions with digital systems. RPA bots can understand information on a screen and take actions like navigating digital systems, discovering and extracting data, and completing keystrokes. But critically, they can complete these tasks faster and more consistently than humans without taking a break.
A use case of RPA solutions will involve either attended or unattended bots. Attended RPA bots are launched by agents as they interact with customers, whereas unattended RPA bots work autonomously on tasks like claims processing and invoice generation.
What Is RPA In Contact Centers?
RPA in contact centers involves automating and simplifying as much of the customer interaction process as possible. Contact centers involve repetitive yet necessary tasks that human users typically don’t want to work on, such as explaining return policies, collecting customers’ contact details and checking warranties.
Automating contact center processes makes customers more likely to get the information they need quickly and without the risk of mistakes. RPA is ideal in contact center situations where agents are trained to use closely controlled applications. and RPA can be inserted into the workflow to take on more tasks, lift the load of repetitive, manual tasks off the agent’s job description and enable them to focus on work that adds broader business value.
How RPA Improves Customer Experience
By implementing RPAs for simple, repetitive tasks, contact centers can easily enhance the quality of customer service. RPA bots can perform simple tasks rapidly, often up to five times faster than manual human activity. This helps companies:
The benefits of RPA in contact centers include:
Streamlining Customer Interactions
The sheer volume of call traffic coming into a busy contact center makes RPA a critical tool for streamlining customer service actions and interactions. It increases efficiency and drives profitability by enabling call center agents to focus on work that delivers value to the business.Improving Response and Resolution Times
A contact center RPA solution enables businesses to speed up their agents’ work and better serve their customers. RPA can use rules-based processes to automate manual tasks, such as basic calculations, cutting and pasting information from apps and launching apps.
Enhancing Personalization
As companies release more complex products and services, it can be challenging for agents to keep pace with the change and maintain the level of personalization that customers expect. RPA takes the burden away from agents, taking on repetitive tasks and answering customers’ questions about new features. This keeps customers happy and frees agents to work on nurturing relationships.
Providing Real-Time Information to Agents
Using RPA to automate low-value, repetitive tasks frees customer agents to work on core activities that are more creative and flexible so they can deliver value to the organization. Agents, therefore, are more likely to produce higher-quality performance and be happier in their roles.
Enhancing Accuracy and Consistency
Contact center RPA helps businesses integrate new applications without affecting their underlying infrastructure. RPA chatbots are also helpful for automating repetitive tasks that are prone to human errors. As a result, businesses can ensure more accurate outcomes and collate better data.
Implementing RPA in Contact Centers
RPA offers massive potential for contact centers, given its ability to bolster business efficiency, deliver cost savings, and drive agent and customer satisfaction. But to enable RPA success, companies must select the correct use cases, clearly communicate changes to their entire contract center teams, and support the process by integrating it across their systems.
Before implementing RPA in a contact center, it’s vital to decide which processes could benefit from being automated. RPA is typically best suited to use cases involving simple and high-volume tasks, so avoid issues that see frequent changes or could cause costly errors.
A good use case of RPA is the onboarding process, in which an attended RPA bot can automate the delivery of documents that a customer needs to fill out and sign. Another good RPA example use case is basic information entry, whereby an agent triggers the bot to update customer details across multiple systems. RPAs can also be used to automatically update customers if a scheduled appointment is delayed or validate a new customer’s documentation.
RPA Implementation Process
Rolling automation out across the organization requires a clear strategy and a plan for implementation, which includes the following steps:Best Practices for Successful Implementation
To ensure the success of any RPA implementation, businesses must first get the basics right and lay the foundation in place. Implementing this process helps software respond to unexpected circumstances, learn from new situations and communicate with other systems. Best practices for RPA success include:Integration with Existing Systems and Processes
Deploying RPA will help businesses speed up customer interactions and deliver more efficient processes. But to truly maximize the power of this technology and unlock new possibilities, it’s vital to integrate RPA with existing systems.
For example, companies can now plug advanced AI capabilities into RPA bots through character and image recognition, machine learning models and natural language processing (NLP). Armed with this knowledge, RPA bots can understand semi-structured or unstructured data, read virtual desktops and visualizing screens and comprehend speech to carry on conversations with customers.
Accelerate Automation With Uniphore
RPA is a software technology that simplifies the building, deployment, and management of robots that emulate human interactions with digital systems. RPA bots can understand information on a screen and take actions like navigating digital systems, discovering and extracting data, and completing keystrokes. But critically, they can complete these tasks faster and more consistently than humans without taking a break.
A use case of RPA solutions will involve either attended or unattended bots. Attended RPA bots are launched by agents as they interact with customers, whereas unattended RPA bots work autonomously on tasks like claims processing and invoice generation.
FAQ
RPA is a software technology that simplifies the building, deployment and management of robots that emulate human interactions with digital systems. RPA bots can perform repetitive tasks, like navigating digital systems, discovering and extracting data and answering customer questions faster and more consistently than humans.
RPA helps contact centers enhance the quality of service they deliver to their customers. RPA bots can perform simple tasks rapidly, often up to five times faster than manual human activity, which helps contact centers improve handle times, deliver on service-level agreements and quickly answer customer queries.
Before implementing RPA, contact centers need to have a clear deployment plan and then test their proposed processes. Once RPA is implemented, businesses must monitor its performance and tweak the approach to maximize its effectiveness.
RPA is the future of contact centers as it helps businesses speed up their processes. RPA helps contact centers improve customer service and enables call agents to be more effective and productive.
