For the past five years, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and conversational AI have gained exceptional popularity, becoming top investments for companies helping to streamline productivity and efficiency in their offices while inviting better customer-employee experiences. Among the other benefits of RPA implementation together with conversational AI are process improvements, customer satisfaction, reduced costs and automating mundane tasks related to the business.
So it’s no wonder that, according to Gartner, organizations will be able to run 25% more tasks without human intervention by 2023. The idea of autonomy is achievable by using automation for front office, critical operations, infrastructure and data processing.
Two Reasons Why You Should Automate the Front Office
Customer satisfaction increases when automation takes place and followed with improved efficiency, effective sales and customer service. Front office automation can help by gathering customer data, responding to and updating customer inquiries or complaints, registration and security checks are often completed by a human, front-office team member.
RPA can complete these tasks with great speed and accuracy, vital for all other operations to serve customers efficiently and effectively. Two intriguing things about automation; it motivates employees to become more involved in their roles and within the business while enjoying the benefits of no monotonous tasks, fewer errors, reduced transaction costs and time plus better customer service experiences.
How Can Automation Improve Front Office Productivity?
1. Enhance Customer Service Experience
Brilliant customer service is essential to your business success and sustainment. Customers depend on and desire a seamless experience across any channel’s communication efforts. They expect you to extend great support, fast responses and simple solutions. With emerging technological advancements, customers these days are fond of quick responses to inquiries. Automation makes it easier to deliver the results customers want. The desire for fast response has led many businesses to invest in RPA and simulate human-customer communication. Automating repetitive tasks helps us achieve faster results, shorter wait times for customers, clear communication and consistency across all channels leading to greater customer engagement and satisfaction, better productivity, reduced costs, fewer errors and faster resolution for customers.
2. Improved Communication and Collaboration
Automation in the front office can encourage better communication with customers and other team members. RPA is deployed and instantly works by sending out automatic alerts or notifications. Companies can preconfigure these reminders or notifications and then employees can follow up with customers when needed or desired by the customer.
With these automated notifications, companies can inform customers of new products, services, or offers/deals on existing products. Excellent communication is vital for understanding customers’ needs, desires and opinions and position an organization to better foster these relationships. When communication is seamless, consistent and in-depth, opportunities arise for all parties involved.
3. Lead Nurturing
Keeping customers informed, happy and engaged across their buyer’s journey is the most challenging yet rewarding part of sales. To increase close rates and shorten sales cycles, it is vital to nurture sales leads with the best and most accurate information to ensure that customers are fully informed and understand the solutions, value and frequently asked questions before the sales team contacts them.
Automating the lead nurturing process ensures that all leads are attended to and followed up, all while delivering the right content. Companies can systematically and automatically track rates of engagements and send out additional content at the critical stage of the sales cycle. Automatic lead nurturing can eliminate some types of sales pressure, enhance efficiency, cut costs and allocate time to more valuable sales process elements.
4. Improve the Sales Order Process
The entire sales order process can be challenging. It involves various stakeholders and departments (including sales, customer service, finance, and analytics/logistics). It can involve
many applications, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, business processes management, accounting software, approvals, and workflow exceptions.
Sales orders are traditionally processed manually, which is incredibly slow, mundane and inefficient. A lot of time is wasted, and unexpected delays can reduce profits and annoy customers, resulting in loss of business. By automating order entry, your company can boost sales and marketing efforts, keep track of business growth and reduce the costs of manually performing these tasks involved in the sales order process.
5. Make Tangible Improvements
Without an implementation strategy, these automations can fall flat. The entire point of automating your front office is not to do things entirely, but to do things better. Employees can save vast amounts of time by not having to do the mundane tasks and can spend time doing more important ones. Front office automation can create improvements in that area first. Automation is incredibly accurate, which streamlines tasks and delivers the correct information to the right person, in the right department much faster. This frees up more time to focus on business growth, revenue, and innovations within the organization.
Communication and collaboration with the back office is vital. If both front-office and back-office tasks are automated, things can be done faster. They can take the customer service experience to another level and unify a business’s customer service protocols. Automation enhances team member engagement and productivity within the company. Improves retention to lower the total cost of ownership and improve a team member’s overall experience. It allows businesses to provide guidance, automatic approvals and coaching or training across multiple channels.
Collaboration between the front office and the back office ensures issues are resolved and experiences are personalized for customers. Automation can shorten the time it takes to address customer questions or concerns and it’s crucial to front office success.
Automating the front office can save your business money, enhance productivity, and improve the customer service experience. By implementing RPA and conversational AI such as a chatbot, team members are spared the tedious tasks and can focus more on customer-facing operations. Discover what a chatbot can do for your constant biz growth, placing a huge impact on customer satisfaction, responsiveness, and smarter customer service. Here’s more info on the benefits they offer.
Source: https://www.druidai.com/blog/how-to-automate-the-front-office-for-improved-productivity
