RPA (robotic process automation) and digital process automation is often called upon by CTOs as the remedy to legacy systems which largely still use repetitive tasks for many of their business processes.
So, what’s the solution for achieving better outcomes for customers through automation? Where operational efficiencies and cost savings can be found by internal staff, there are also ways for CIOs to apply these rules so that the customer can directly benefit too.
Organisations need to be able to make personalised decisions in a split second to meet modern customer expectations. Keeping customer interactions current, relevant and convenient no matter what happens next doesn’t have to be complicated. The right technology is available to automate and perfect operational excellence. First, CIOs and CTOs need to prep their systems to make it possible.
Improve overall satisfaction with automation
The key to reducing the speed of customer service delivery without compromising on efficacy or quality is to focus on the series of steps that make up a service. To do this, businesses should consolidate all the steps in a process and look for gaps that could add friction to the customer journey.
When applied strategically to customer service processes, RPA bots can ensure that relevant information is always available, no matter what channel the interaction took place on. By automatically moving data from one source to another, RPA connects the full journey, bridging gaps between systems and data integration and eradicating some of the barriers preventing them from serving customers most effectively.
For example, RPA case management helps speed up processes and reduces the amount of manual work required from agents such as copying and pasting information across systems, which can also reduce the risk of costly errors while speeding up the service. This enables agents to move more quickly through any interaction, resulting in faster, more accurate resolutions as well as shorter wait times for everyone.
Furthermore, with the help of robotic process automation employees are free to engage in the more valuable tasks that go the extra mile for customers.
How companies can overcome the content processing drawbacks of RPA
Enable customer success across all channels
The digitally connected world is broader than it once was, so businesses need to be prepared to meet customer expectations at every touchpoint. Whether on web chat, the company website, Facebook Messenger, the mobile app, Twitter, Apple Business Chat (iMessage), WhatsApp or SMS the experience should be consistent.
Truly channel-less interactions powered by RPA and digital process automation take it one step further by enabling customers to move freely, back and forth, from one touchpoint to another with the context of their interactions fully intact. By automatically moving and updating information across channels businesses will always have the full customer story, not just the fragmented data collected from siloed telephone, email and app interactions. That way, customers will get the best outcome for them regardless of the method they choose to contact your business.
This level of automation can even allow employees to handle multiple interactions on a single user interface. By automatically connecting every channel and with all the available information right in front of them, agents can vastly reduce time to resolution and the cost of serving each customer.
Enhance customer experience with AI
However, simply automating repetitive tasks like finding and sorting customer information is perhaps just a short-term sticking plaster solution. By implementing smart automation technologies like RPA and digital process automation alongside artificial intelligence (AI) models, organisations can create an always-on system that quickly and consistently engages customers across all channels and devices.
Intelligent automation goes far beyond the use of robotics, leveraging an AI core to empower personalisation at scale and in real time.
AI connects all the important information regarding the customer’s preferences, historical behaviour, recent interactions, sentiment, and even intent into one place and then decides what to do next. AI-enabled bots can automatically open each email, SMS or chat conversation and apply natural language processing (NLP) to decode the customer’s needs and the urgency of the request from each interaction. In doing so, it instantly routes requests to the right place and decides what to do next for the best result.
Not only can intelligent automation enable a proactive service which will always take the next best action for the specific customer, but automated bots can also send an appropriately tailored reply to the most convenient channel without any human intervention.
Where robotics has demonstrated previously that more streamlined processes will lead to faster, more effective outcomes, organisations should be using it to improve customer experience at scale. When immediate response is everything to the customer, brands which get it right can reap the rewards. Those that don’t may find their customers looking elsewhere.
Organisations which demonstrate the greatest level of adaptability through agile platforms garner the most success during these periods of flux. Furthermore, businesses don’t have to put up with poor technology and improper processes. RPA and digital process automation technologies can ease the burden of the customer service agent and achieve superior results in a fraction of the time.
