One of the most blogged about, talked about, and debated topics these days revolves around artificial intelligence and robotics and the myriad ways it’s going to change our lives.
Automation frees your staff to focus on customer interactions
One of the most blogged about, talked about, and debated topics these days revolves around artificial intelligence and robotics and the myriad ways it’s going to change our lives.
But whether the talk is about the latest voice assistants at work or how robots can improve our everyday lives, this much is true: the more that things can be automated, the easier our personal and business lives will be.
For more than two decades, there’s been an undeniable push to automate as many business processes as possible. In fact, we can look toward workflow automation as an initial entry point into trying to ease our everyday workloads.
Workflow automation software, for instance, can improve order processing by capturing common fields - think customer contact information, invoice totals, and items ordered - translating them into a database, and then notifying those responsible for fulfillment. Not only does automating these mundane tasks speed the process, but it frees your employees to focus on more important, value-added activities.
Initially, the goal of automating processes was to improve order fulfillment rates. By eliminating the need for manual data entry, businesses could increase their speed, efficiency, and accuracy – and, of course, profits.
Fast forward to the early 2000s and the emergence of Robotics Process Automation (RPA). RPA is a capability (software and services) that allows a virtual workforce, aka “bots,” to transact in any of a company’s systems in the same way a human would, performing complex, rule-based activities.
RPA software allows users to establish automation and manage workflows using drag-and-drop features in a visual way that can be entirely independent of coding knowledge. In fact, the beauty of RPA is that it allows employees in a company to easily configure a “robot” to reason, collect and extract knowledge, recognize patterns, learn, and adapt to new situations or environments.
7 ways RPA can improve the customer experience
So, how does this new world affect the customer and the customer experience? At Auxis, we have witnessed the multitude of ways that RPA can be a game-changer - not only for our clients but also for the customers of our clients.
Let’s take a look at several examples of how organizations are seeing ROI gained through the enhanced customer experience enabled by RPA implementations:
- Superior return on ROI. The velocity of RPA means that more time can be spent on face-to-face customer interactions and/or the soft skills of the customer experience.
- Enhanced word of mouth for a business. RPA integrations can improve response times to customer queries, resulting in less complaints and more positive WOM (Word of Mouth).
- 24/7 attention to customer needs. Higher quality of work outputs streamlines the ability to be more attentive to customer needs around the clock.
- Improved accuracy of manually-created reports. Less margin of error means that customer satisfaction reports will be more accurate. Thus, consistency in processes can help a business better meet customer expectations.
- Enhanced productivity and informed decision-making for customers. By having quicker access to better reporting, the customer can benefit in real-time, rather than after the fact.
- Improved turnaround times. Faster turnaround times on quotes to customers.
- Sharpening your focus on value-added activities. Your human workforce can be redeployed to more strategic, value-added activities to support your business growth, thus freeing up more time for customer-centric activities.
RPA: delivering a competitive advantage for your business
The nature of automation removes any inherent human error or bias from repetitive backoffice processes – guaranteeing a consistent customer experience. It also frees your staff to focus on the customer-centric activities that matter most.
In this age of digital transformation, it’s become increasingly evident that the more time your company can spend interfacing with a customer, the more positive the customer experience and the better the outcome can be for all parties. That holds true both at the time of the customer engagement and in the future.
As Auxis’ clients can attest, RPA can transform how enterprises do business on the backend in order to increase efficiencies, productivity, and, ultimately, the customer experience. Companies that use this technology to enhance customer interactions will be able to generate a definitive competitive advantage.
And as more and more processes are automated to free up time with the customer, the better the customer experience will be in the long run.
To find out more about how RPA might benefit your organization, feel free to contact us for a pain-free evaluation of what you can expect from an RPA implementation from Auxis.
