RPA can deliver significant efficiencies to your customer service team. Source: Shutterstock

RPA can deliver significant efficiencies to your customer service team. Source: Shutterstock

How RPA can immediately transform your customer service team

BUSINESS leaders understand the value of robotic process automation (RPA). The technology helps companies stitch legacy systems together, automate repetitive workflows, and free-up employees to better serve the organization or its customers.

In most organizations, customer service is a cost center — but it is critical to providing a delightful experience after the sale, ensuring satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business.

To drive efficiencies in the customer service department, business leaders might consider deploying RPA extensively as the technology will not only allow them to reduce costs but will also help free up agents in these departments who can tackle challenging requests more effectively.

According to Forrester Principal Analyst Kate Leggett, there are four key ways that business leaders can deploy RPA to immediately transform the work done by customer service agents:

# 1 | Standardize work for customer service agents

When RPA is used to welcome customers into the service pool, seek basic information, and sort them into buckets for different customer service teams to address — it automatically standardizes the work for agents and helps them provide better, smarter, and more intelligent support to customers.

Further, standardization also makes it easy for the business to better understand and analyze its customer service agents and their response time according to the queries, creating opportunities for improvement.

# 2 | Boost customer service agent’s confidence

Customer service agents often get bogged down by the mundane tasks that they’re usually tied up with — including asking for customer details, sorting, and connecting — before they actually deliver any value. As a result, they start to believe their job isn’t important.

With RPA, agents are able to tackle issues head-on and avoid wasting any time sorting out the basic, mundane details, ensuring they’re able to focus on what the customer really needs and deepening the bond with them.

# 3 | Speed up customer service agent’s work

According to the Forrester Principal Analyst, RPA robots can perform tasks four to five times faster than agents, streamlining inquiry capture and resolution and improving handle times and service-level agreements.

As a result, customer service agents are able to delight customers and turn them into advocates of the brand, creating lasting value for the organization. After all, no customer likes to dial into or chat with a service representative and wait for hours before they can get a useful response.

# 4 | Deliver actionable insights

While agents are focused on providing support to customers, they’re also required to manually enter a lot of data — which is intended to help the business gain insights for business improvement at a later date.

However, not much of that data is actually used because the data is often difficult to patch in or has too many errors (yes, customer service agents make mistakes with data entries sometimes).

With RPA, data entry is automated and allows for the patching of legacy systems that hold data with new-age systems that analyze data is easy — helping the business create actionable insights almost instantaneously.