9 Reasons Why RPA is a Boon to the Call Center Industry

The Call Center industry is booming. It is expanding by leaps and bounds and almost every industry is now embracing its potential to grow business faster. But to serve its core business objectives, this industry requires ‘multitasking champions’, who can engage in various tasks simultaneously. Research shows that complex multitasking degrades productivity and impacts the final outcomes of the service as well. So what is the solution?

The answer is RPA – Robotic Process Automation.

This leading-edge technology provides agents the much-needed support to resolve a significant portion of their customer service tasks automatically and enable them to invest their focus & energy to perform core contact center functionalities. It results in a win-win situation for all three key stakeholders – Agents, Customers, and Enterprise. How?

Let’s dive deep to understand this. In this blog, we have covered those special use cases of RPA in the call center industry to help you convince better – Why RPA is Good for the Contact Center Industry?

In the call center industry, the first thing an agent needs to do is to gather customer data. The customer care executive requires details like order status, shipment ID, order number, etc. But to extract all such vital data, call center agents need to

• Do multiple logins into different applications
• Refer and make manual notes
• Ask multiple verification questions to the customer

It not just consumes valuable time but also adversely impacts call resolution time (CRT) and degrades customer experience. While on the other hand, implementing RPA in the call center industry helps enterprises to integrate different applications and execute a workflow to autoload a detailed customer profile with a single click. As a result, the customer does not need to wait long and thus improves the customer experience.

Customer service agents often need to manually enter a lot of data into various applications – Before, During, or After the call. Filling data into several fields spread across various applications makes the job of agents tedious and error-prone. Moreover, it soaks their valuable time and distracts their attention from resolving the primary concern. Implementation of RPA in the call centers enables enterprises to tackle these challenges at ease. RPA software easily provides you the option to autofill the same information that needs to be updated in different forms with minimum human intervention. Further, it mitigates the potential risks of data errors and gives agents a piece of mind. Integration with CRM and many other third party tools further saves their valuable time.

Many times, a call needs to be passed to various different people at the contact center until the issue is resolved. While transferring the call, customers need to explain the whole details – again and again. It frustrates the customer and often leads to disengagement and even abrupt disconnection of the call. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots help resolve this concern easily. Call center automation records all details in the first interaction, saves those concerns, and passes them to the next agent without information repetition. It is one of the gravest concerns pertaining to call centers where customers feel disillusioned. But robotic process automation (RPA) can help you address this remarkably and help boost customer satisfaction significantly.

In the contact center industry, an agent needs to go through rigorous product/service training, whose duration many times goes beyond 90 days. Skilled trainers, time, and significant cost are involved to complete the training part as per the standards. Moreover, as the attrition rate is very high in the call center industry, companies are overburdened with training costs throughout the year. With the help of RPA, contact centers can simplify a significant segment of the training part and enable new joiners to learn the basics through automation. It helps in various ways, like

• RPA reduces complete dependency on trainers.
• Through compelling graphics and animation, RPA-based training modules can reduce training time and thus make agents ready much faster to serve on the floor.
• Promotes cost-beneficial training approach.
• No batch-size limit, any number of agents can get trained simultaneously, even from remote locations as well.

• According to a leading research, it is found that a company usually takes 4 to 16 days to complete invoicing work. In today’s fast-paced digitalized world, this is too time-consuming. Not all clients have that much patience to get their dues cleared in over stretched time. Interestingly, most of the back office work required to process invoicing can be automated using RPA bots. Moreover, advanced RPA solutions can further add some parts of decision-making capabilities to provide pace to this business-critical work.
• Call center agents often come across one common task i.e. to process REFUNDS. Be it any industry, refunding is a normal process. But what is not normal is the amount of time required to allocate refunds. Delayed refunds can significantly dent your company’s reputation and make you lose important customers. RPA in the call centers helps you create a robust workflow as per your business requirements and enables management to streamline refund work while decreasing manual work and time. Remember this mantra – Faster the refund, greater the customer experience would be.

In the beginning of the telecom revolution, interactive voice response (IVR) was introduced to the call center industry to help customers pick their preferred language through a pre-recorded system. Later, more functionalities were added like ‘Press 1 to track order, Press 2 to cancel an order, Press 3 to book an order, Press 4 to check the status of refund…and so on’. The idea there was to save agents’ time for more high-value customer service work. Now with the passing time and ever-expanding telecom connectivity, there has been a surge in subscription base and it is really becoming challenging for contact center operators to handle large volumes of customers every minute. But RPA along with AI and NLP can help resolve more customer queries through IVR and assist in saving precious time of the agents and faster query resolution.

RPA in the call center (Call Center Automation) empowers enterprises to

• Broaden the scope of IVR
• Embed an array of queries
• Introduce text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversation
• Understand the intent and context of the call
• Process enormous queries through IVR simultaneously
• Transfer critical call to concerned department as well

Ticket closure time is one of the most critical KPIs in the contact center industry. The faster the closure time, the better it would be for the enterprise. On an average, it takes 8 minutes to open, close, and update a ticket. Interestingly, this does not include the time required to identify the core reason for the inquiry, collecting basic information from disparate systems, analyzing the scenarios, and stop-gap arrangement throughout the call. Put together the time required for all such things and you will encounter inefficiency of significant magnitude. RPA bots empower you to tackle these challenges quite easily. RPA enables you to integrate various systems altogether and provide the exact information needed to close the tickets faster. Using RPA, you can ask for customer feedback after the call as well to further save the agent’s time to switch over to the next call without wasting any more time.

Contact center runs a range of operations to process customer queries. Several of the jobs are highly repetitive, high-in-volume, mundane, and rule-based. Utilizing skilled manpower to execute such menial tasks is not just a waste of talent but also a waste of time and money. Every man-hour incurs a significant amount of cost to the company. Therefore, using RPA in the call center to do such routine tasks like data entry, data processing, data migration, data backup, report preparation, etc., is a cost-beneficial idea. It helps employees to utilize their time in critical tasks where strong analytical and decision-making skills are required. Moreover, as the significant percentages of repetitive tasks are automated, you require less manpower to run your daily contact center operations. It helps you save money further.

RPA along with AI and machine learning capabilities empower contact centers to process past data of customers at various digital touchpoints. Software bots scan, retrieve, process, and analyze piles of data to find meaningful insights. Using powerful intelligent automation, RPA software enables agents to predict what a customer may want next or do next. Such predictions help in executing much better, informed, caring, and genuine conversations with customers. It helps agents to understand customers’ needs better and assist them to address concerns in a timely & personalized manner. As a result, you get better customer satisfaction.

The enablement of RPA in the call center industry brings reformative changes at various levels. Employees feel more satisfied, customers experience positive engagement, and call center owners are priced with greater profitability. This technology automates various functions but gives the best outcomes when used along with skilled call center executives. So, embrace it smartly to attain great business results as RPA is touted to play a defining role in the vertical growth of this flourishing industry.