These days RPA remains an integral part of customer service operations. RPA stands for “Robotic Process Automation,” and it is used to automate redundant agent tasks. RPA assists in recruiting agents quickly, improving their confidence, and increasing their productivity. It allows them to deliver a better quality of service. Nowadays, RPA has been one of the numerous technologies that assist customer service organisations in finishing their tasks. We will look into this further by exploring three best practices to implement RPA for customer service departments.
Use Different-Mode RPA
Generally, customer service departments apply attended-mode RPA, where customer service agents request these bots to enhance their quality and productivity. The only drawback is that implementing these automated processes can launch unattended bots for claims or invoice processing issues. Remember that RPA is deployed via rules-based, and machine learning is not used to enhance outcomes. RPA’s biggest strength comes from automating repetitive work. Assuming that the process would stay the same, agents can build bots to replace unimportant human hours. Typically it is labelled as “swivel-chair” tasks, meaning that without the help of RPA, agents have to switch tasks in between to complete repetitive tasks.
It is also important to note that RPA’s objective is not to make user experiences more user-friendly or usable. People seem to assume that RPA is like any other digital adoption platform that assists agent’s tasks such as easy onboarding and in-app user guide. However, that is not the case since RPA’s main job is to automate agent tasks without improving agent experience.
Automation Strike Team and Formalise Collaboration
Let’s face it. Any customer service organisations are fast to embrace AI technologies and emerging automation, including other areas or departments within that organisation. This outcome will lead to automation silos, defined as an unstandardized method since each department would govern and apply different execution techniques. The solution is to standardise the RPA application within one organisation by setting up a strike team that liaison between business leaders and traditional IT. This team is responsible for the whole company’s framework, automation delivery, and administration. Ultimately that would prevent poor results when the strike team works together with IT and customer service organisations. For best results:
Strike teams should work at a standardised level, meaning they should apply the framework to the whole company structure, not just one department. Contact centre staff should use automation candidates, test automation, and communicate its value to agents and team leaders. Another benefit is that RPA doesn’t need APIs. Instead, RPA functions via existing desktop applications to imitate human communications with machines. Thus bots will be exposed to application changes. To be successful, agents should implement RPA in applications that receive minimal changes/updates and tasks that don’t change constantly. Ultimately, strike teams have to collaborate with IT to make RPA part of application release cycles to prevent risks of automation breakage.
Train your Agents in Mastering the Automation Strategy
Nowadays, there is always a constant change in demographics at the contact centre. According to a study, almost half of the operations will be executed by millennials and a new generation of workers (Gen Z) joining the workforce. Since these generations are digitally savvy, they would look forward to desktop technologies to assist them in focusing on work that is a high priority. It implies that they want to use automation to reduce the workload.
Always brief them on reinforcing corporate strategy and how automation can support them in achieving goals. Two things always appear within an organisation: Transition and Disruption, and both are difficult to overcome. When customer service staff know how RPA connects to their company’s overall strategy and how it benefits them, they will be more interested in following the changing structure of an organisation.
Tao.Net is a software company in Malaysia with more than 20 years of software implementation and integration expertise. That includes proficiency in enterprise application development in Java. The company is now offering Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that can leverage your business to the next level.
