Customer service is an important sector where businesses spend a lot of money. However, with the introduction of chatbots, there was a huge relief as the bots handled a significant amount of queries. Even though chatbots were able to bring down costs and labour force for businesses, the incorporation of RPA in customer service is yet another revolutionary step in this sector.
WHAT ARE RPA AND CHATBOTS?
RPA or Robotic Process Automation is the process of using software robots to automate various business operations that are repetitive in nature. This helps in reducing the number of employees, errors, and costs. The automation increases the speed of the process and allows for a better allocation of resources.
You might have often noticed a popup message in some corner of most web pages. They are chatbots that are designed to answer your queries. Apart from websites, all major businesses, banks, applications, etc., are leveraging the power of chatbots for better customer experience and saving costs. In some cases, the chatbots can also be an effective medium to drive conversions.
THE EMERGENCE OF RPA BOTS
When we merge the cognitive intelligence of chatbots and the automation potential of RPA, the resultant technology is more intelligent and more productive.
When chatbots interact with customers or employees, they need access to data from different enterprise systems. It would be impossible for the bot to retrieve information without any modern API in place, and this is where RPA comes in.
BENEFITS OF RPA BOTS
BETTER CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
RPA bots can offer a great experience for the customers as well as employees. While it provides faster responses to customers in real-time, it frees the employees from the monotonous back-end activity and also fetches the required information for the employees quickly.
REDUCED BUSINESS COSTS
With the incorporation of RPA in customer service, the businesses can easily reduce their workforce and re-allocate their resources for more productive operations. This reduces the cost of operations for businesses and boosts productivity.
FASTER PROCESSING
With the integration of Robotic Process Automation, the chatbots can easily navigate through the legacy enterprise systems to fetch the required information. When the RPA handles the back-end, the process becomes much faster as compared to the case when an executive is involved.
BETTER ALLOCATION OF WORKFORCE
As discussed earlier, with RPA bots taking the lead in customer service, the need for human interaction rises only for handling complex queries or requests.
Thus, the companies can allocate their skilled customer service employees for other departments that could directly affect the growth of the company. The same is applicable to other resources like furniture, lighting, money, computers, etc.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
With the incorporation of RPA bots, the companies can easily offer better customer service, and this, in turn, will help them stay ahead of their competitors.
USE CASES OF RPA BOTS
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Usually, customer engagement starts with the customer asking trivial questions and then leads on to specific queries or request. RPA bots are well suited for both purposes.
LEAD GENERATION AND DRIVING CONVERSIONS
When it comes to RPA bots, they can easily generate leads and drive conversions. Whenever a person visits the website, RPA bots can interact with the visitor to record their information, and so the marketing team can handle it later.
PERSONALIZED CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Chatbots can offer customer support through all platforms, be it Whatsapp, Maps, Google’s search page, etc. This enhances the customer experience a lot, and with RPA bots taking care of the customer support, the executives can focus on customer requests.
HOW TO INTEGRATE CHATBOT WITH RPA?
RPA integrates with a chatbot to enable it to complete several business processes, access data, and store information with legacy systems that do not have APIs. There are multiple RPA providers that could be integrated with chatbots depending on the use case. Some of them are UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Prega and google Dialogflow.
Source: https://www.zenesys.com/blog/automate-customer-service-with-rpa-chatbots