Let’s face it – RPA, or robotic process automation, is a practice that is becoming widespread in many industries. For those of you who don’t know, it is a process that optimizes an organization’s normal, repetitive, and operational activities. With RPA, you can boost your business’ operational productivity by automating rule-based processes – to complete each of them in a more accurate way.
When it comes to RPA implementation, there are plenty of ways you can automate tasks and enjoy the benefits of robotics automation. In most cases, the process automates tasks done by employees, allowing them to focus on more important tasks, which in turn helps a business save a lot of money on high-volume procedures and comes with loads of scalability benefits. When compared to manual processing, RPA is known for its amazing speed and accuracy. But what happens when RPA steps into a contact center environment?
RPA In Contact Center Environments
Contact centers or call centers are environments where robotic process automation (RPA) gives plenty of essential advantages. For instance, the process delivers answers to difficulties that are based on service, procedure, and technology. In that manner, RPA directly contributes to improving customer satisfaction, which is a key performance indicator (KPI) for any firm.
In such environments, employees often speak to people in an attempt to sell, upsell, cross-sell, or provide personalized and quality customer care. In most cases, they deal with software that holds them down and requires them to use slow and sophisticated programs when interacting with consumers.
Therefore, call center automation is something that is on the mind of managers as one of the proven ways to avoid the concentration of repetitive tasks that plague contact center representatives but also improve the overall productivity, client satisfaction, and revenue. The agents that are slowed down by processes such as frequent authentication for networks, can all benefit from RPA in a way that it can ramp up the efficiency and help them save time. Below, we are talking more about the best practices of using this technology in a contact center environment.
Top Implementation Practices Of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) In Contact Centers
Looking for ways to adopt RPA in your contact center and automate tasks while saving time and money, and freeing up your agents to do something more important? If yes is your answer, you need to focus on the best practices for RPA implementation in a customer service environment:
1. Start small:
Instead of deploying a gigantic RPA plan, you should start small and work with one or a couple of capabilities at first. Aside from testing the grounds better that way and being able to measure your results better, you will also see the direct benefits of each capability you choose to automate.
2. Go for an attended RPA solution:
Another best practice worth mentioning at the start is to go for an attended RPA solution instead of moving with fully automated tools. Doing this will help you work with a light infrastructure, get fewer security concerns, expect a faster ROI and adapt your employees more easily. Attended RPA bots offer tremendous benefits and are the perfect bridge to fully automated RPA solutions.
3. Focus on agile RPA development:
Agility should happen at the core of an automation program. In contact centers, RPA should find inaccuracies and mismatched functionalities at an earlier stage, which is why taking feedback and adapting the necessary changes into the system is necessary if you want a robust and effective robotic process automation (RPA) solution.
4. Make sure your users follow the documentation:
We know that paperwork can be boring, but in contact center environments, documentation only works when it is fully integrated into the process and used effectively. So, when designing things, make sure that documentation supports your vision and can help you increase buy-in on the final solution.
5. Don’t try to automate everything:
Trying to automate every path of a process will only confuse you. In an ideal scenario, RPA implementation should be done with the 80/20 split rule between automation and attended processes. If you are working on a short timeline, you can even try a 20/80 rule and only benefit partly from automation.
6. Be realistic about RPA:
Finally, you should be aware of what robotic process automation (RPA) is and why the top contact centers use it. You shouldn’t expect wonders from the start – the process is most beneficial to businesses once they start understanding it at its core and testing more of its capabilities.
Take some time to evaluate the things you are looking to automate, problems you want to solve, and challenges you want to prevent. If you identify the most important aspects of your business that act as its roadblocks, chances are that you will see greater benefits in terms of automation and improving your customer experience down the road.
As you can see, the major benefits of RPA as a practice in the contact center environment come down to the following:
- Automated interactions
- Minimal human error
- Improved first call resolution
- Reduction in average handle time (AHT) and call duration
- Higher returns for businesses
- Better satisfaction of employees and customers
- Optimized usage of resources
On the other hand, the top RPA use cases for contact centers include the usage of the process in data management environments, transaction implementation, preparation of reports, customer interaction, optimized services, data modifications in the system, workforce automation, reimbursement of customers and the handling of recurring calls. In these instances, RPA can bring plenty of cost savings, improve the assistance to support representatives, enhance the customer experience, and obviously, allow for effortless execution of tasks.
Want To Implement RPA In Your Contact Center?
If you are ready to implement a contact center RPA, you first need to determine the procedures in the business that are monotonous and require minimal decision-making. Once you do that, you can create a map for every process and set specific guidelines on where RPA will be used.
Need help? Contact us today to discuss your RPA plan with our experts and see what we can do for your contact center!
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info@vraimatic.ai