What is Robotic Process Automation?

Question

Accepted Answer

Automation in the contact center can reduce costs and delights customers in three main areas:

1. Reducing Hold Times:

Automation is good for handling transactional issues, while customer support agents are good at handling complicated questions. When you nudge customers with simple issues towards automated systems, your flesh-and-blood agents have more time to handle complexity.

2. Increasing Responsiveness:

When on a call, your agents may have to spend a lot of time digging through customer records to understand the status of their account, orders, and previous conversations. This tends to increase your mean time to resolution without contributing anything towards solving the problem. Robotic process automation (RPA) does all that busywork for the agents instead. This means that the agent spends more time listening to the customer and solves their problem faster. And this is another way that automation can reduce hold times.

3. Collecting Information:

After a call, your agents may have to spend some time recording details about how the call turned out – whether they resolved the customer’s issue, how the customer was feeling, if the call needed escalation, and so on. Although this information is vital when it comes to capturing and evaluating contact center metrics, it also means that there’s a gap before your agents can take the next call. In addition, there’s no guarantee that your agents are self-reporting correctly. Advanced automation, combined with machine learning, can perform post-call conversational analytics. This means that they can log – with high accuracy – all the critical contact center and customer experience metrics that you want to record. Not only is this data very useful, but it also lets your agents go directly to the next call, reducing hold times even more. Lastly, this data can be used to inform contact center agents of real-time trends. For example, if a lot of customers are calling in about the same issue, you can forewarn your agents that they’re very likely to be getting a call on the subject and provide them with answers and instructions that will help them satisfy these callers. This also allows you to create proactive programs to address the problem.

The benefits of RPA software helps solve a lot of ills in the contact center world. For example, 41% of customers say that contact center agents give different answers to the same question, but automation helps to standardize their answers on a given topic. In addition, 84% of agents say that their desktop tools don’t give them the right information, and 26% say that it’s hard to find the right answer to a question. Automation tools help here as well by identifying the issue and pushing the appropriate response.