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RPA Creates More Rewarding Customer Service Experiences and Helps Employees Perform at Their Best
Customer service is of the utmost importance in helping businesses strengthen their brand, stand out from their competition, and ensure customer loyalty. However, it can sometimes be hard to keep up with the large number of customer support tasks. That’s where robotic process automation (RPA) can help.
Solutions based on the strategic and effective use of custom-written RPA technology help businesses improve their workflows and achieve outstanding results, ultimately supporting better customer service. Through custom RPA solutions, employees can go beyond meeting their productivity goals and customer-facing employees can focus on creating more rewarding customer experiences.
Below, we discuss RPA solutions and their importance in ensuring a rewarding customer experience as part of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that enhances the customer journey.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic process automation is a technology that allows computer systems to perform tasks typically handled by humans. It helps companies boost their productivity, decrease costs, and be more competitive by automating menial and repetitive tasks, all while maintaining accuracy and high levels of customer service.
RPA uses intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to handle an organization’s most basic and time-consuming activities. These include tasks such as collecting data from different sources, updating spreadsheets and databases, and filling out forms.
In customer service, solutions that utilize RPA technology can simplify processes like responding to commonly asked questions and directing customers toward self-service pages as part of a seamless omnichannel experience.
While traditional automation uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate systems, robotic process automation makes use of software bots to understand the actions of users at the user interface level. An RPA developer must be thoroughly familiar with the target system.
The Goal of RPA
The goal of RPA is to eliminate low-value tasks and free employees to spend more time on work with greater impact—like interacting with customers—to achieve better business results.
Intelligent automation can significantly advance customer experiences with your brand given that Americans are willing to pay 17% more to do business with companies with excellent reputations in customer service. Indeed, 90% of Americans consider customer service an important factor in determining whether or not they want to be associated with a company at all.
RPA bots offload the weight of inefficient processes across any business vertical or industry so employees can focus on what matters most. Tasks that check the following boxes can be optimized by RPA software to support your business:
- Time-sensitive
- Labor-intensive or high-volume
- Repetitive
- Rule-based
- Highly structured
- Prone to human error
Understanding RPA is imperative for today’s businesses. Solutions that use RPA enable efficient automation of routine tasks in customer service, such as:
- Loading and changing data.
- Filling out forms.
- Streamlining information on different systems.
- Screening application forms and documents.
- Managing people requests.
How RPA Solutions Help Improve the Customer Service Experience
Solutions that employ RPA software improve the customer service experience in multiple ways.
For one, it speeds up processes and reduces repetition, which enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. Intelligent automation creates positive outcomes and improves customer service by providing quick and consistent support with reduced handle time for customer service agents.
Second, it helps create happier, more focused employees. On average, 40% of employees’ time is wasted on repetitive manual tasks, according to an Automation Anywhere study—and 75% of employees believe spending time on tasks that can easily be automated is a poor use of their skills. By using automated processes to reduce or eliminate mundane tasks, employees can spend more time creating more meaningful customer experiences.
Third, RPA solutions increase productivity and accuracy. Through streamlined workflows, customer service teams can complete tasks faster and more accurately. UiPath’s 2021 Office Worker Survey found that 67% of global workers feel crushed by repetitive tasks. Intelligent automation of repetitive tasks can help people find fulfillment and attain higher productivity at work.
Automated processes, such as conversational artificial intelligence (AI), have a lower margin of error which helps businesses meet customer expectations. RPA solutions eliminate potential human errors entering customer data, providing streamlined service and saving companies time and money.
Additionally, RPA solutions reduce costs and increase revenue. They provide early visibility into trends, creating opportunities to eliminate human error, reduce unnecessary spend, and improve productivity.
Finally, RPA solutions help maintain best practices by providing consistency in service delivery throughout the contact center. They also ensure that all employees use customer information effectively and efficiently.
Ultimately, RPA solutions allow for better tracking of tasks, knowledge sharing, and consistent service delivery, thus helping employees provide better customer service through the contact center. They can generate remarkable benefits for multi-national corporations as well as local small businesses by offering significant time-savings for completing repetitive tasks and better utilizing employees’ skills on more meaningful work.
How to Measure and Optimize Customer Support Effectiveness With RPA Solutions
As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor creates RPA solutions for our clients. After implementing process automation in customer service, BPOs like iQor can measure its effectiveness for their clients in the following ways.
- Increased revenue: How much money are you saving or making thanks to BPO solutions with intelligent virtual assistants? Your business may open up a new revenue stream by reassigning teams and workflows or adding new projects to expand operations. With higher customer satisfaction, you’re also bound to get new customers through word of mouth, ultimately increasing profits.
- Velocity: Velocity is the time it takes for an automated process to complete a task. BPOs can save their clients time and increase velocity by removing manual processes through RPA solutions.
BPOs like iQor can use these aforementioned metrics to identify opportunities to deploy RPA solutions to further enhance customer support strategies for their clients. Additionally, they can use intelligent automation to inform social media monitoring and respond to customer reviews and feedback to better meet customer needs.
How Can You Make the Best Use of RPA Solutions in Customer Support?
Here are some ways to get the most out of RPA solutions:
- Start by automating simple tasks.
- Upskill customer support agents as RPA deployments mature.
- Automate customer service across all touchpoints and omnichannel platforms for a connected experience.
- Focus on specific metrics and determine how well RPA is doing in those aspects.
It’s also imperative that the solution implemented by your BPO provides RPA security so automation and convenience align with cybersecurity protocols. In addition to a CX private cloud, here are four ways to accomplish this:
- Implement change control and review for RPA technology scripts.
- Ensure the RPA bot has audit capabilities.
- Avoid fraud and abuse by enabling privileged session management.
- Rotate bot credentials frequently to ensure accountability for the actions of the RPA solution.
Typical Use Cases for RPA
Research indicates that 20% of organizations have adopted robotic process automation as of 2021, a noteworthy jump from just 13% in 2020.
At iQor, our cognitive RPA custom solutions have yielded outstanding results for clients. iQor developed an RPA bot that simplified the voucher program for a major airline carrier, saving time and significantly improving productivity. The airline program saved 1,965 hours per year by reducing handle time by two minutes per voucher request. They saw a 29% reduction in overall handle time and were able to process 36,400 transactions per year.
iQor’s RPA solution has generated improved outcomes across other business processes as well. It has been used to simplify processes for a global HR team, automating HR-based workflow requests. In checking for accuracy, providing real-time visibility into staffing metrics, and offering other payroll and benefits improvements it has saved 650 hours per employee each year. With 100% process automation it completes 75 complex HR transactions per hour, supercharging the HR workforce.
Some additional use cases for RPA technology solutions in customer support to improve contact center analytics include:
Update CRM Data
RPA solutions can cull customer data from a CRM solution and update it with the latest information. In this way, it frees up the customer support team to focus on helping customers instead of updating common data, such as cold calls, interactions with customer support employees, reports, documents, and emails.
Root Cause Analysis
When an incident occurs, the RPA solution can be used to gather data automatically so that your team can quickly identify the root cause. Once they know why an incident occurred, they can more easily solve the problem.
Assist Customer Support Agents
According to Salesforce, 63% of customers expect customer service agents to be familiar with their expectations and unique needs.
An RPA solution can fetch customer data, such as purchases, previous complaints, demographics, and tickets, for the customer service rep to help them better deal with customer inquiries.
Instant Response
RPA solutions can be used to automate simple customer service functions, such as sending customers on hold new information about their order or shipping status. RPA is also great for generating responses to common requests or questions from customers, saving time and helping to provide better service.
Final Words
In sum, custom RPA solutions offered by BPOs like iQor can be immensely helpful in enhancing customer service and the customer experience for clients of all sizes. Whether large or small, companies can benefit from the enhanced productivity, cost savings, and improved customer service that RPA solutions provide.
Experience the iQor Difference
iQor’s intelligent automation delivers better customer experiences and helps employees perform at their best. Our cognitive RPA software solutions are customized to client needs. We use AI and machine learning to handle high-volume, repetitive, or slow, time-consuming tasks. With streamlined workflows using RPAs, our team completes tasks faster and more accurately to provide amazing customer experiences.
If you’re considering outsourcing customer support, explore partnering with iQor. We are an award-winning global BPO, purpose-built to deliver omnichannel customer service through our work-at-home and in-office agents spread across more than 50 locations worldwide.
We know how to maximize RPA for superior customer service, efficiency, and cost-saving. To learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals, listen to our podcasts or contact us here.
Ada Smith is director of analytics at iQor.
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