Many aspects contribute to what the public thinks of your business. Branding, marketing, and the quality of your products or services are all significant contributors. How you treat your customers matters, too—customer service interactions can determine how consumers feel about your business. To address modern needs in this space, companies must evolve and grow. Supporting CS teams with Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is one such growth opportunity.

Why bring software robots into the customer service equation? Let’s first establish why this technology is so well-suited to these applications. From there, we’ll explore RPA for better service outcomes in action.

Why RPA?

RPA adapts easily to many tasks related to customer service because it is excellent at replicating human-like interactions with software. Remember, this isn’t artificial intelligence or machine learning but a rules-based solution. In customer service, repetitive tasks are commonplace. You can use RPA to create software robots that replicate and automate tasks to support your human agents.

RPA is conveniently set up and quickly deployed in today’s low-code/no-code environments. That ease of use creates opportunities for “quick wins” in automation so you can start generating a positive ROI in a shorter period. Ultimately, RPA is also fundamental to larger automation efforts. What you achieve with Tungsten RPA can slot into larger intelligently automated workflows using solutions such as Tungsten Automation TotalAgility.

Tackling the Challenges of the Customer Service Environment

Let’s dig deeper into how RPA enables better customer service outcomes. Where are the primary challenges facing support teams today? How does RPA address those issues? Here are a few quick examples to explore.

1. Data Management

Think of the many tasks a customer service agent might have that revolve primarily around repetitive tasks based on software. Capturing data provided by customers, extracting data from documents, pulling up records, making modifications and generating reports—this is hardly an exhaustive list, but the idea is clear. What if a consumer service agent could have a customer’s account information ready in seconds? A software robot can retrieve data and send back modifications, while an agent focuses on delivering excellent service.

2. Accuracy for Good Outcomes

Errors can lead to frustrating problems and poor experiences for customers. In areas such as healthcare, errors in data entry could even impact the quality of someone’s care. RPA slashes error rates and eliminates data entry errors such as typos, especially when paired with cognitive capture technology for document ingestion.

Scale is another area of concern. As you grow, you may need to help more customers more often. You also may only be able to support a few staff members simultaneously. RPA expands what your teams can accomplish in a day—and software robots don’t need sleep, either.

That availability factor supports more than scale. You can use RPA to build basic support chatbots and customer self-service systems. Empower your users to take control of their own support outcomes and provide solutions they can access 24 hours a day, seven days a week—all year long. Though more advanced chatbots exist today, RPA tools remain an excellent choice for primary use cases.

Finally, customer service departments may lack reliable insights into their data. Such opacity could mean missing out on essential details or troublesome trends you should address. RPA can help you automate data collection into actionable formats so you can see where your customers might experience the most friction in your processes.

Case Study Example: The TC/ZIP - Zip & Unzip Module

The Tungsten Marketplace provides ready-to-use solutions across many Tungsten products and supports many industries. Each solution originates from independent experts and seeks to address critical needs. With these solutions, you can accelerate your journey towards using RPA effectively in customer service. Let’s review one example.

Developed by the third-party Tungsten Professional Services team, the TC/ZIP - Zip & Unzip Link Exit module is an excellent tool for extending RPA’s reach. You can automate email attachment extraction (or creation) in standard archive formats such as ZIP, RAR, 7zip, and more using this solution. When customer documents arrive in an inbox, you can use this module to extract that information quickly. RPA can then pass that data into the appropriate systems or serve it to the correct worker.

Consider an insurance use case where customers may frequently send in documents required for claims processing or policy underwriting. This process could include medical records and many other documents. This module keeps that data safe and secure while grabbing important information for downstream processing.

When team members need to send data back out, they can do so with automated security settings. This functionality enables teams to access, move, and modify mission-critical information more quickly and seamlessly. Though invisible to the customer, the results won’t be; customers will see more reliable results sooner. Experienced workers won’t need to spend hours on tedious document manipulation and email handling tasks.

There are other Marketplace solutions to support enhanced customer service outcomes. Additionally, you’ll find many ways to extend the reach and value of your investment in RPA. Through a combination of free and paid solutions, you can build automation into your workflows that make the most sense of your specific use cases.

Put RPA to Work With Your CS Team Today

With software robots, you can augment your customer service workforce and enable human team members to achieve more. Boost job satisfaction and office morale and enhance customer perceptions through better and faster outcomes. With solutions from the Tungsten Marketplace to help you achieve the rapid deployment of valuable tools, you can transform customer service interactions rapidly. Consider what’s possible for your business when you can use RPA to great effect on shorter time scales.