Robotic Process Automation Transforming Customer Center Operations

by Evan Kirstel (Linkedin) & @evankirstel (Twitter)

The effective management of contact/call centers is a core competency for many businesses. Even the smallest companies use contact center solutions for professional customer support and ongoing customer retention. As a company grows, the contact/call center, or, as I prefer to call it, the customer center, becomes the means to scale growth and a key focal point for customer engagement throughout its lifecycle.

An customer-centric approach taken by many companies also sees the customer center as critical for ongoing recurring revenues. As the customer center adopts an increasingly omnichannel approach using forms of communications such as text, chatbots, AI, social media, email, and voice, they must also create innovative ways to respond to its customers at all times. In this milieu, business process management and, more specifically, business process optimization, become key to improved customer communications with agents who facilitate and solve customer issues.

Consider a customer who needs to know how a smartphone connects with a database or app, or how an unemployment claim is processed, or how different service revenues are tracked for different products throughout the supply chain. Managing even simple business processes gets complicated quickly, which is where RPA-robotic process automation comes into play. According to Gartner, "Robotic process automation (RPA) has democratized integration and automation. It is imperative that IT leaders stay ahead of RPA use and market developments to ensure efficacy and business agility." RPA is core to overall business process optimization among many departments including the contact center.

According to UiPath, an "integrated automation solution links the systems and applications in one console, builds a unified knowledge base that delivers relevant data in real time, and automatically sets up & kicks off processes for an efficient post-call wrap-up. Agents are freed from having to process repetitive, manual tasks and can focus on developing their customer-centric skills." Since labor costs of agents, supervisors, call flow managers, trainers, IT managers and leadership are all rising, RPA can be particularly helping in mitigating this consideration.

Organizing all these human resources, along with technical intelligence, is a daunting task. RPA brings new intelligent approaches to formulating a unified knowledge process system including ideas for gamification tools for onboarding and training current agents and others involved in customer center operations. This trend toward implementing business processing automation for customer center work has evolved over the last few years. An RPA approach can be the focal point for current and future customer center optimization, organization and customer service. The key to doing this effectively is the development of AI or machine-based systems with RPA as a major feature set in the future evolution of the customer center.

The task is to expand services outward to the entire organization, field offices, suppliers and others in the supply chain is referred to as digital transformation. These new RPA communications options will allow people a new freedom to communicate and move ideas and documents throughout the corporate network. These RPA task-processing operations represent critical innovative information tools in intelligent environments. They allow customer center management using RPA to be more focused on the growth, leadership, and distribution of decisions. In the case of executives, RPA systems are available to nearly everyone in the organization. RPA also brings about faster communication movement into the arena for the organization to review and evaluate decision-making of both historical as well as future opportunities. As technology plays an increasingly larger role in organizational management, RPA will also play a more significant role and business driver in the enterprise.

Summary: Robotic Process Automation is more than an exciting wave of customer center technology, it drills into critical core business processes that often corporate "black holes" — things that create organizational delays, customer concerns, and rising costs. RPA solutions can identify and resolve complex issues. I would like to thank UiPath for the opportunity to share some insights and ideas on their exciting solutions.

References:

https://www.uipath.com/solutions/process/call-centre-automation https://aiuserforum.com/mindmeld-ceo-ai-merging-of-mental-metal-book/

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https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-raises-568-million-series-d-funding-round