If you have ever worked in a contact center, you will agree with us that it is a tough task to be a customer service representative (CSR) today. A CSR performs a range of duties – from helping the customers on the phone while juggling between different computer systems to ensuring compliance with the regulatory laws that keep on changing, and boosting the sales of the company by upselling and cross-selling – a CSR has a lot on their shoulders.
Although a CSR handles various challenges daily, the biggest challenge for them is to meet the rising expectations of today’s customers who expect quick customer support. A study conducted by Microsoft in 2018 revealed that 75 percent of respondents expect their CSR to already have an insight into their recent purchase and previous engagements.
Around 95% of users look for customer service as important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand. 61% of our customers have switched brands due to poor customer service, with nearly half having done so in the past 12 months.
Challenges Faced by Contact Centers
Although the global contact centers market is booming and is expected to hit $481 billion by 2024, the industry is still plagued by a range of critical issues including:
- Ever-rising customer expectations
Customer expectations do not seem to take a back seat. More and more customers expect their customer service representatives to be proactive. This is creating enough pressure on the teams to meet the demands. - Keeping employees happy
As a manager, it has become tough to keep the employees happy. Employees are made to do the same boring and repetitive tasks which not only kills their motivation to work but also interferes with their productivity. - Legacy computer systems
Various contact centers still make use of legacy computer systems. The customer support representative has to cope up with multiple slow machines which is a big task in itself. On the one hand, customers want a quick resolution to their problems, and on the other hand, the legacy computer systems which won’t function properly. All this creates frustration at both the ends.
But this is not all. Various other issues are prevalent in the contact centers. These include entering customer data manually by referring to multiple systems, redundancy and inaccuracy due to manual information, delayed responses, and increased average call duration and turnaround time.
How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Can Help?
RPA or robotic process automation is all set to streamline the contact center market. According to IBM, 85 percent of customer interactions will take place without a human agent by 2020.
For starters, RPA makes use of robots or virtual agents to take care of routine tasks which are otherwise handled traditionally by call center agents. That said, a well-built RPA is not only capable of handling routine tasks, but it can also trigger various intelligent automated processes from system events.
Here are just a few of an array of ways in which an RPA can help:
- Easy data integration and workflow
RPA helps you in integrating data easily and contributes to a smoother workflow. The CSR no more needs to switch between different applications to procure the data, but this can be now automated with just a few clicks with the help of RPA.
This reduces the overall turnaround time and the customer service agents can help their customers more efficiently and conveniently.
- Easy uploading of data
More often than not, a customer support representative either needs to upload new information to the system or needs to create a new ticket to resolve the problem of the customer. For this, they need to navigate through various applications. All this slows down the process, and further makes it prone to errors as all the data is entered manually. This could also degrade the quality of the data stored in the system.
This is when an RPA helps out by enabling auto-fill, and other similar related features. This reduces the human intervention drastically, while also ruling out any chances of errors.
- Repeat calls
Let’s admit, most contact centers pass the incoming calls from one agent to another to resolve the queries of the customer. This is because of poor routing of calls which are not transferred to the specialized team in the first place. This frustrates the customers, kills time, and also hampers customer relationship because of repetitive questions which are asked by every agent the call passes through.
RPA handles this situation fairly well by routing the call automatically to the specialized and concerned team based on the customer profile. This improves the functioning of the contact centers manifold.
The Wrap Up
As is evident, RPA can revolutionize the contact center industry and enhance the customer service offered by the customer support agents. Flawless integration of RPA can shorter the average call duration, rule out any errors, enhance the communication by providing the agent with quick customer history, help with judicious use of available resources, generate an automated response with the help of existing knowledge base, and provide better reporting and analytics.
Although an RPA solution seems to be the end of everything that is wrong with the contact center today, not all RPAs will be the right fit for your requirements. Thus, it is highly recommended to analyze your requirements perfectly well. AutomationEdge RPA has a wide experience to handle contact center process automation. Know more about AutomationEdge request a demo request a live demo