Today, in almost every major industry worldwide, there is a growing focus on developing a front end digital business strategy to automate operations, lower costs and improve customer service, and hence, the overall customer experience. Especially as emerging technologies have begun threatening long-established companies in verticals such as retail, insurance, banking, government and more, the push for automation is now more critical than ever when it comes to optimizing front-end business processes to meet growing consumer expectations. At the same time, business leaders must decide which digital transformation solution will have the necessary immediate impact on its core business operations today, not a few years from now, and as well as open new business opportunities moving forward.
Today, robotic process automation (RPA) technology has emerged as the leading front-end solution to lead the enterprise digital transformation charge. An automation software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities used to automate and standardize repeatable business processes, Gartner expects that the demand for RPA tools to grow at 20 to 30% every quarter, while according to Forrester Research, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market will reach $2.9 Billion by 2021, from $250 million in 2016!
Let’s look at some of the reasons why RPA can be the backbone for front-end enterprise digital transformation:
Implementation
RPA ‘s ready-made automation technology is fully adaptable. It doesn’t require coding to program, so it’s simple to implement and configure legacy systems, ERP and external systems without the need to tear down or even restructure current platforms that are central to business operations, enabling deployment to occur in a very short period. In fact, 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 while lessening their dependency on the IT department.
Optimization
On a strategic level, robotic process automation tools handle all the small, repetitive, everyday tasks that fuel daily operations within the call center, such as opening cases, checking order status, record updates and many more, thus empowering call centers to deliver superior customer experience. RPA brings consistency to the customer experience, with a near zero percent error rate. 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, until now, call center operations needed to scan a range of back-end system to deal with customer service requests. Now, rather than needing to have a bunch of applications open on their workstations, agents can use a single RPA front-end solution to unify data together on a single screen, all of which speeds up the handling time considerably, and enhances the overall customer satisfaction.
At the same time, the cost savings of robotic process automation 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. With robotic process automation tools, instead of hiring new employees, or even outsourcing labor, businesses can instead deploy cheaper robotic resources to perform many of the same tasks.
Building for the Future
As enterprises build up their level of automation, they will gradually improve their automation algorithms, while new applications and components of RPA related to continually advancing cognitive computing, artificial intelligence will serve to create long-term, sustainable, digital transformational capabilities, creating a competitive advantage now and into the future. RPA software fuels a culture of innovation, empowering companies to respond quickly to trends and evolving market demand. Furthermore, with the Big Data analytical capacities that RPA offers, companies accrue extremely valuable knowledge about their business patterns and workflows. They can then leverage this data to pursue more advanced digital strategies on their front end which can reshape their processes to become even more efficient.
For any company looking for an effective, cost-saving solution for today’s customer service operation and technology challenges, it requires fundamentally altering the way in which a business operates on their front end. Today, customer-facing robotic process automation software is the best solution for meeting this challenge, enabling greater operational efficiency, and hence, profitability, while drastically improving the customer experience, thus serving as the backbone for a true enterprise digital transformation.
Learn more about Uniphore and their focus on automating customer service.
[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.
