Robotic Process Automation Takes the Front Office: Automation and Customer Service
The Benefits of Front Office Automation
Customer service is vital to business success. Automating back office processes can offer support to front office staff by easing the burden of high-volume repetitive tasks. However, front office automation can revolutionise company interactions, communications and engagement with customers.
It has been stated by David Brain, Global Head of Process Robotics & Innovations Labs Product Lead of Sutherland Innovative Labs (in an interview with the Institute for Robotic Process Automation), that front office RPA can ‘assist your agent, making them more productive and improving customer experience with lower transaction times, fewer manual errors and avoiding repeated questions for the same information. It can also open up new channels of communication on your existing systems such as responding to customer’s balance enquiries by text.’
Front office automation delivers two main areas of advantage: executing activities that front office staff would usually perform, and freeing up their time for a greater focus on enhancing customer experiences, which therefore helps to encourage repeat business and to retain clients long-term.
In the publication Intelligent Automation Entering the Business World, Deloitte explains more about the additional advantages front office automation can facilitate for the client, stating that many organisations, including banks and insurance companies, are already implementing RPA to fix ‘a lot of attention on the front-end and on improving the customer experience, deriving a single view of the customer and their transaction history, and ensuring that customer’s interactions…are satisfactory regardless of the channel.’
Establishing Robotic Process Automation in the front office is emerging as a powerful intervention to ensure routine tasks are attended to so that staff can concentrate their energies on more vital activities.
Integrating RPA with the Front Office
We’ve made the point that front office automation has the important benefit of cultivating more valuable company-client interactions. How does RPA do this, and what are the specific advantages of using this technology in this environment?
