In the digital age, customers are now accustomed to 7/24 service and instant solutions. This fact has been known by companies for the last decade and almost every company tries to address this issue with their digital transformation efforts.
We are now accustomed to 30-minute full-course meals at our doors. We can order different sizes of the same shirt and send the ones that didn’t fit. When we return a product, we want our money back, now.
In this instant gratification age, successfully serving your customers is a challenge and RPA can help you with that.
But before all that first things first, what is RPA?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Definition
Every workplace has its own way of doing things, digital or not, every workplace has multiple processes. And when a process has more bureaucracy than human intelligence in it, it calls for automation. There are software “robots” aka bots that make these jobs for you.
For more information check our blog post about it: What is RPA?
Why Customer Service Management needs RPA
According to the Hubspot Survey, having the right kind of customer service may put you in a favorable spot among their competitors. Besides the price and quality of products, customers would rather invest in a brand that focuses on continually providing value beyond the initial purchase.
Among the most frustrating aspect of getting customer service help, below are voted the most.
Waiting on hold
Customers identify waiting on hold as the most annoying part of calling customer service. Everyone’s time is valuable and making a customer wait may leave a bad taste even if the overall product is a good one.
This can happen when you don’t have enough reps to answer the phones. Having around-the-clock service workers are expensive, and they are even more expensive if they are properly educated about your product or about problem-solving.
Your human customer service represents are important. Having a productive conversation with an emphatic and well informed is the one thing that could satisfy a customer. Therefore, hiring a robot workforce for repetitive mundane tasks frees your customer service staff’s precious time.
Repeating yourself to different representatives
How is your legacy system performing regarding to data storage and service employees’ access to that information is highly important.
Your employees need a unified communication system so they could access the history of the buyer’s journey.
If a buyer explained their problem once it is your job to quickly relay that message to the employee who can solve that issue.
RPA can help support your legacy system to operate more smoothly between employees.
Slow response time
Speed is everything to today’s buyers. Their patience wears out just in a few minutes. Your Customer service team needs a very powerful information system to solve any kind of curve ball that may come to their attention in order to solve it in a relatively short time.
Roadblocks to automation in customer service
Process immaturity
If a process does not work manually, it probably could not work when automated.
You need to have a clear picture of what your system currently is, or you will end up with an automated mess that will not serve your customers even one bit.
Your organization might have standard procedures to follow, but they might be outdated and have documentation issues.
This requires process improvement before even thinking about applying RPA.
Not knowing what your customer expects:
Today’s customers want to connect with you on their terms. Do they want human interaction on even a simple inquiry? Maybe they prefer chatbots and apps to manage their accounts and orders…
Chatbots can be useful to handle simple requests, but when a customer’s inquiry becomes complex, chatbots might not be able to handle it.
Don’t forget the humans in the process
If you started your digital transformation journey in recent years, your employees might have anxieties over losing their jobs to robots. This may result in their resistance to adapting to the transformation.
Also, you need to convince your C-suite executives this is a productive way of working as well. They are the key to any element of success that needs to be adopted into the company culture.
What benefits does RPA bring to the customer experience?
Cost reduction
Increased word of mouth
Lower operational risks
No need to change the existing IT systems
Enhanced employee satisfaction
Excellent ROI
24/7 attention to customer needs
How to implement RPA in customer experience
Begin with simple tasks and obvious bottlenecks
Let your agents worry about the customers instead of the paperwork and reports. You should begin your automation journey with low energy high-value automation.
Train your stakeholder employees
RPA will change the way your employees work. Therefore, they need to be trained in the new way of working.
Not only that, with the time they saved by transferring their repetitive work to the robots, they will be able to perform better customer service and even maybe enabled enough to cross-sell other products or services as well.
Automate the customer service experience with all touchpoints
You need to be where your customers want you to be. This could be an app, a chatbot, a social media message box…
RPA can help you to see the bigger picture with all those touchpoints fragmented through mobile, desktop devices or calls…
Call Us for 15 minutes of free consultancy
This blog post may be too vague for you to decide whether it is feasible to implement RPA in your current process.
We could only give vague advice before learning about your business.
Let’s connect with 15 minutes call and chat about how your company works and speeding up your processes.
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