How RPA is Helping Contact Centres Deliver Better Customer Experiences

RPA (or robotic process automation) is a strategic fix that enables you to digitalise the more common, replicable agent tasks within a contact centre. RPA is a sort of overly that can be applied to the existing technology that you are using whilst extending the life of the applications within your contact centre. If you haven’t already, it’s time to join the other 44% of organisations that are already leveraging RPA and utilising its many benefits.

In this article, we’re going to talk you through robotic process automation in greater detail so that you can decide as to whether or not it’s something that can bring value to your business. The short of it is, yes it can! But, let’s back that up with some reasoning first.

What is RPA? (Robotic Process Automation)

So, what is RPA? Well, there are two different forms of robotic process automation:

• • Attended: RPA bots functioning actively at the front-end, launched by agents in the flow of their work
  • Unattended: RPA bots working autonomously in the back-end, running scheduled tasks such as processing claims and/or generating invoices

You can utilise both types of RPA for your contact centre. For example, one of your agents can begin a task with the support of an attended RPA, and then use unattended RPA to finish the process.

But that’s not all! Customer service leaders in a contact centre environment use RPA to achieve the following functionality as well:

• • Speed up contact centre agent work for better customer service: With RPA you can automate agent tasks within manual rule-based situations, such as carrying out basic calculations, cutting and pasting from various apps, and other time-consuming tasks that can distract an agent from focusing on the more complex customer-facing tasks that a bot can’t handle.
  • Application integration to reduce errors and improve compliance: RPA will enable you to integrate various applications without causing any disruption to the underlying infrastructure. They can also be utilised to automate the more repetitive tasks that are prone to error which not only allows your organisation to collect better data, but to deliver more accurate outcomes as well.
  • Increase agent confidence for better customer relations: With RPA automating the low-value tasks that would otherwise distract your agents from their core activities, your agents can invest more time in nurturing customer relations. In addition, relevant knowledge and data surfacing at the right steps throughout the process will give your agents greater confidence when dealing with customers.
  • Shorter wait times for your customers: As RPA bots can perform certain tasks four to five times faster than an agent, it speeds up the inquiry capture and resolution process thus shortening wait times for your customers and delivering a superior level of customer service across the board.

What Does RPA Mean for Your Business?

When leveraged properly, it will almost feel that RPA was designed specifically for the contact centre environment. It can bring so much value!

You see, as the overall scope of RPA continues to broaden and handle more tasks within a contact centre, and as your agents begin to focus more of their precious time on the more valuable customer-facing tasks, you can achieve the following:

• • Maintain a smaller team of highly effective agents: With RPA you can keep your head-count down, whilst easily being able to manage higher interaction volumes. This is because RPA allows you to automate the basic, time-consuming tasks and frees your agents up to deliver a superior level of customer service. In essence, you can achieve more, with less.
  • Focus your agents on the more valuable tasks that have a greater impact on customer relationships: As you begin releasing new products and services with complex features, your contact centre agents will invariably take the brunt of the burden. That being said, with RPA, you can offload the repetitive tasks, level up your agents nurturing and customer-relation skills, and ultimately improve both employee and client satisfaction.

Conclusion

And there we have it! Robot process automation can help you take your business to the next level by giving your agents more freedom to focus on their customers, rather than wasting time with repetitive and low-priority tasks. Everybody wins!