Can RPA help you improve the customer experience for your brand?

January 25, 2021

The answer to the question in the title is “Yes.” Automation of several customer-facing tasks improves #business efficiency, hence customer experience.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the fast-growing segments that drive innovation across marketing, streamlining CRM, and improving every Customer Experience.

Great User Experience is the key to any business success. As business technology RPA automates the highly repetitive and routine tasks generally performed by the knowledge workers. The employees’ free time can be used for more value-added and user-facing tasks. For example, American Fidelity reduced huge human hours of manual tasks through RPA. The drag-n-drop features of RPA solutions like UiPath motivated employees to complete tasks they never wanted to.

Most companies see a positive return on investment within 18 months of RPA deployment.

The improvement areas:

Streamlines Marketing Operations:

It reduces human error by eliminating copy-and-paste mistakes from entering the same data into multiple systems involved.  The bots complete tasks faster resulting in:

1. Operational excellence
2. Cost optimization
3. Competitive edge

Increases Customer Engagement:

AI-powered process mining helps the sales force to have customer historical data at hand resulting in:

1. Increased response time
2. Streamlined service
3. Accurate reporting/content
4. Enhanced productivity and decision making capability in coordination with the bots.
5. Improved turnaround time
6. Maximize the customer lifetime value

Improves Order Processing:

1. Common fields capture: Customer contact information, invoice totals, and items ordered are captured and stored in a database.
2. Notifications: Responsible person gets a notification on fulfilment, follow-ups, etc. This ensures the speed of processing and customer acquirement.

Improved workflow: 

RPA in combination with machine learning helps companies to perform higher-order tasks with Artificial intelligence (AI.) The rule-based decision making capability of AI and standardised workflow removes silos and improves user experience. The improved efficiencies and transparency and reduced dependencies (in case of attrition) empower teams to bring in solutions to any business problem. For example, RPA with machine learning helped Fidelity emails tagging and rerouting to the proper channel. The processing speed was decreased from 45 hours to just 3 seconds.

What are the results?

• Enhanced productivity and decision-making capabilities of customer-facing staff. They are all in sync with information, historical data and have quick access to reporting, forms, etc. in real-time. They will no more have to tell the customer that they will get back later with information, therefore the turnaround time for all tasks (quotes, follow-ups) are quicker.
• Improved accuracy of reports that are no more created manually and thereby is without human errors.
• Improved WOM (Word of the mouth) or direct customer communications like answering queries and better engagement with customers.
• Better customer focus as employees is free of repetitive tasks they dislike and can give personalized attention to customers and with quality service.
• Enhanced efficiency because the human workforce can be trained with soft skills and for more strategic work to provide value-added service. Refined Customer communication management (#CCM) adds to business growth. For example, Safe-Guard Products, a North American based insurance company reduced the time to process a claim by 75%. The overall productivity and capacity to handle claims were increased by 30%.
• Greater ROI because of the speed of RPA effects in that more time spent on face-to-face customer interactions and the development of soft skills for better communication and customer satisfaction.

A good RPA solution can help you identify the requirement and implement it as per your business need.

Interested to discuss more, please feel free to contact the author at ashish.bhalla@dbp.com.sg

About Ashish Bhalla

Ashish has almost 30 years of industry experience in a wide range of business solutions primarily focusing on end-to-end customer experience management. He is the founder and CEO of Digital Business People (DBP), an omni-channel customer experience management company headquartered at Singapore with it’s development and delivery centres in India.