RPA for customer service – Benefits, use cases, and future scope

Going by the modern-day requirements, customers are constantly shifting their inclinations in every aspect, including 24/7 automated customer service. Sensing this prospect as an opportunity, companies have recently begun to follow a customer-centric approach, thus prioritizing the convenience and availability of multiple channels, like live chat, social media, and mobile apps, to receive high-quality customer service. Hence, this is a transformational swing from a completely manual approach to automation. However, organizations that fail to adapt to these changes risk losing customers who demand a seamless and efficient experience.

‘RPA for customer service’ helps companies meet these customer expectations by automating routine tasks, freeing human agents to focus on more higher-value tasks and providing a personal touch to customer interactions.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology that deploys and manages software robots that mimic human actions when interacting with digital systems and software. Software robots, like humans, can understand what’s on a screen, complete the correct keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and perform various defined actions. However, software robots can perform tasks faster and more consistently than humans without standing up, stretching, or taking a coffee break.

Why do you need RPA in customer service?

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) improves customer service by reducing administrative and back-office workload. Customer service is sped up by software robots that gather information and documents from various systems, handle service requests, and update customer records.

According to EdgeVerve, by using AssistEdge Engage, customers’ query resolution can be improved by 15%, thus proving the faster customer service it promises leading to a better customer experience. By utilizing robots to perform routine tasks such as processing customer service request changes, our clients were able to free up their customer service agents to focus on customer interaction rather than manual work. Implementing RPA also enabled new service models for their customers, which benefited other departments, such as the Finance Department.

Another primary reason for using RPA in customer service is that the traditional approach has some challenges, which become a tedious task for contact centers to confront manually.

Some key traditional customer service challenges are:

Benefits of customer service RPA

RPA customer service tools provide numerous advantages, the most notable of which are as follows:

Top RPA use cases in customer service

Assist customer service representatives: According to Salesforce research, 66% of customers expect service representatives to understand their specific expectations and needs, including what they have purchased. RPA bots solve this problem by retrieving the customer’s data, such as purchases, demographics, previous tickets, or complaints, and delivering it to customer service personnel ahead of time to help them research customers’ inquiries and resolve the issue quickly.

Make a customer account: In the business CRM database, each customer has a personal account that includes their customer ID, name, credit card information, contact information, and purchase history. Customers typically create an account by interacting with a customer service representative or a bot in a recorded chat.

The bot automatically extracts relevant information from recorded communications, fills out forms to create the customer account, validates the payment mode against bank information, and notifies customers of account details once they are finalized.

Control customer refunds: RPA bots extract customer refund inquiries from ticketing systems, emails, or texts and begin refund processes without human intervention. The bots also send notifications to the user via text or email when the refund is complete.

Resolve rule-based problems: RPA bots collect and store issue information in the ticket system. They connect to the ticket database and automatically resolve customer queries like the text to inform:

Refresh CRM data: RPA bots automatically pull data from business databases (for example, interactions with customer service employees, past purchases, documents and reports, cold calls, and emails) and update it into CRM data (for example, lead scoring, order history, contact history) with information from new texts, emails, filed reports, or online surveys.

An automated workflow for issue resolution is created based on the assigned priority level, and the customer is notified of the refund decision.

Future scope of RPA in customer service

Using RPA when gathering data reduces the possibility of human error, improving customer satisfaction. Hence, the use of RPA enhances customer service by minimizing the back-office and administrative tasks. The solution does accelerate customer service by collecting data from multiple systems, implementing service requests, and reviewing customers’ records simultaneously and quickly.

Thus, by automating mundane tasks, customer service firms can involve their representatives in some productive tasks, such as client engagement, rather than tedious processes. Therefore, automating customer services can simplify many complex business jobs, thus enhancing customer experience as a whole. Finally, the threat of human error is considerably lessened, resulting in elevated customer satisfaction. Considering all these benefits RPA can generate in customer service, it becomes imperative for companies to implement RPA in the times ahead.