Customer service organizations use robotic process automation (RPA) as a tactical and short-term approach to digitize common agent tasks. There are two forms of RPA: unattended and attended RPA. A task can start with an agent and be supported by attended automation, which can kick off unattended RPA to complete the process.

Customer service leaders use RPA to:

  • Standardize work to better serve customers. RPA automates agent tasks within rules-based processes such as launching apps, cutting and pasting from different apps, and basic computations. This makes agent actions more consistent and increases their throughput. Return on investment is easy to quantify, as brands know what every second of their agents’ time costs.
  • Uplevel employees’ confidence so that they can better nurture customers. RPA automates repetitive, low-value tasks that interfere with core agent activities: call wrap-up tasks, call notes, and data entry. RPA allows agents to focus on adding customer value, solving customer problems, and strengthening customer relationships.
  • Speed up agent work to improve customer experiences. RPA robots can perform tasks four to five times faster than agents, streamlining inquiry capture and resolution and improving handle times and service-level agreements.
  • Deliver actionable business insights to better align with customer expectations. RPA reduces manual errors, which translates to higher-quality data. RPA robots also interact with legacy systems to uncover data that was previously too labor-intensive to extract. This lets organizations mine broader and more reliable data sets to reveal new insights.

Look For Common Tasks To Automate Within Processes

In the contact center, you don’t typically start with an unattended RPA program. Most organizations start by looking at common agent processes. Mine call reports to find top contact drivers. Examine training guides and contact center procedural documentation to identify complex manual tasks that agents must follow. Also, instead of looking at end-to-end customer service processes, you should also look at common tasks within highly divergent processes.

Read our Forrester report, “Use RPA To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences,” for more guidance on how to deploy and get real value out of RPA.