Agents working in a call center are required to perform a wide range of tasks associated with customer care. Many of these tasks are repetitive and easily reproduced, making them ideal for automation. Robotic process automation (RPA), essentially a software “bot,” can tackle these tasks, freeing up employees to focus on customer engagement. In fact, The Harris Poll found that 46% of customer interactions are already automated, and they predict that number will be as high as 59% by 2023.

How RPA for Contact Centers Works

RPA in contact centers can perform both back-office and front-office tasks. When it comes to back-office tasks, the RPA bots are unattended, which means they can run without human intervention. These bots run continuously in the background, taking care of back-office tasks 24/7.

Bots that work on front-office tasks are attended bots. That means these bots are launched by a human agent and work alongside them to perform tasks that make the agent’s job faster and easier and allow them to put their focus on the customer.

Tasks RPA Can Perform for Contact Centers

RPA can be programmed to perform individual contact center tasks or groups of related tasks that ensure the end-to-end automation of entire processes. These can include:

The Difference RPA Makes in Contact Centers

With all these tasks and processes being performed by RPA bots, agents are able to spend significantly more time in direct engagement with the customer. In addition, these tasks and processes can be completed by RPA in a fraction of the time it takes a human to perform them, ensuring faster call resolution and decreasing call time. The result? A significant increase in customer satisfaction as they:

Use Cases for RPA in Contact Centers

With such a range of tasks that RPA can perform, there are many uses it can be put to. Here are some examples of use cases for RPA in a contact center.

Identify a customer in the system

When an agent gets a call from a customer, they must identify that customer in their system before they can do anything else. This requires the agent to navigate multiple systems that are siloed from one another to pull up the required information, from the customer profile to information related to their order, shipment or support ticket. This is a tedious process that takes time, leaving the customer waiting on hold while the agent does their work.

With RPA, the process of customer identification can be automated. The RPA bot can go into the required systems and pull up all the relevant information in just seconds by doing things like launching apps and making field entries. Meanwhile, the agent is able to stay on the line with the customer.

Update customer information

Once a call comes to its end and the customer issue is resolved, their order placed or relevant changes made, the customer’s information must be updated accordingly. This is another area where the customer has to wait for the agent to do these updates manually.

With RPA, the agent just has to enter these changes once. The RPA bot can ensure that information is integrated across every system that is relevant to the customer’s call. This is all done quickly and with minimal agent intervention.

Create summary scripts

These days, it is common for a summary script of a call session to be created and emailed to the customer for their records. For an agent to do this takes a significant amount of time during and after the call.

When RPA is given the task of creating the summary script of the call, the agent is freed up to really connect with the customer during the call. And since they don’t have to worry about finishing and sending the summary script after the call, they can move on to the next call more quickly, increasing their overall productivity.

How to Implement RPA in Your Call Center

RPA is a powerful tool in your toolbox when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and your ROI. As such, you want to be sure you approach implementation the right way. This requires you to first identify your business and operational objectives and the tasks and processes that would make the most impact when it comes to reaching those objectives.

Once you have done this, you can then implement RPA and train the required bots to perform their tasks. This will involve bringing onboard an RPA partner who can help ensure you have the right bots that are programmed using a variety of tests cases to ensure they work as they should. These bots can then be brought online in a way that fits with your current systems and workflow.