Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate and streamline repetitive, manual tasks and processes within an organization. In customer service, BPA can help businesses improve team efficiency and productivity by automating routine tasks such as responding to common customer inquiries, routing conversations to the appropriate teams, and tracking customer interactions. This allows your customer service teams to focus on more complex and important tasks, such as resolving complex customer issues and improving the overall customer experience.
According to McKinsey - 31% of businesses have already fully automated at least one function. As more leaders get into automating their business processes, it’s important to understand where they should start and which trend to follow. Some of the trends in the field of BPA include
1. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning:
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is becoming more common in business process automation, allowing systems to learn and adapt to new situations and data. This can help businesses track team performance and agent productivity, give real-time insights on team performances, identify patterns and trends, which can help businesses make more informed decisions and improve their processes.
2. The integration of multiple channels:
BPA is being used to integrate multiple channels, such as phone, email, chat, and social media, to provide customers with a seamless and consistent experience across all channels. With multiple channel integration businesses can leverage messaging channel automation such as WhatsApp automation to respond to repetitive customer queries and provide them with self-service options. Also, integrating multiple channels help businesses manage customer data more effectively, allowing their support teams to access and analyze data from multiple sources and gain valuable insights.
3. The use of chatbots:
Chatbots are transforming the way businesses communicate with their customers & prospects. According to CNBC, by 2024 75-90% of queries are projected to be handled by bots. By using chatbot automation businesses can automate repetitive customer inquiries, provide instant responses and improve the speed and efficiency of customer service.
4. Process improvement and personalized service:
Business process automation is being used to analyze customer interactions and identify opportunities for process improvement, allowing businesses to provide better and more personalized service to their customers. Businesses can also use automation to send personalized offers based on customer’s purchase history and preferences.
1. Improved team efficiency and productivity:
Performing repetitive tasks manually is a waste of your team’s time. BPA tools can help your business automate routine tasks and processes, allowing employees to focus on more complex and high-value tasks. This can help businesses to improve their overall efficiency and productivity.
2. Enhanced customer experience:
BPA tools can help businesses provide faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries, make customer-related information available to the agents and help them resolve customer issues quickly. This can improve the overall customer experience and lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Reduced costs: Using chatbots and making self-service available to your customers can improve your customer satisfaction score and serve your customers 24x7 across different regions and time-zones without needing to scale your support team. This helps your business reduce the amount of time and resources your team spend on routine tasks, allowing you to redeploy resources to more valuable activities.
4. Improved operational efficiency: BPA tools streamlines the operational workflows by performing tasks such as automating the query assignment process, prioritization of queries and ultimately reducing the effort required to execute a task. This helps businesses ensure that all processes are carried out in the same way, resulting in high-quality and consistent performance across channels.
BPA tools can provide a wide range of benefits to businesses, including improved efficiency and productivity, enhanced customer experience, reduced costs, increased consistency and accuracy, and improved compliance. But there are several best practices to leverage these benefits for your businesses. Some of the key practices include:
1. Identify the right processes to automate: Before implementing BPA, it is important to identify which processes are suitable for automation. This can involve analyzing processes to determine which ones are repetitive, manual, and time-consuming, and which ones have the potential to benefit from automation.
2. Involve stakeholders in the process: BPA can have a significant impact on various stakeholders within an organization, including employees, customers, and partners. Therefore, it is important to involve stakeholders in the process of implementing BPA, to ensure that their needs and concerns are taken into account.
3. Ensure the quality and accuracy of the data: BPA relies on high-quality and accurate data to function effectively. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the data used for BPA is up-to-date, complete, and accurate.
4. Monitor and evaluate the performance of BPA: After implementing BPA, it is important to monitor and evaluate its performance to ensure that it is meeting the desired objectives. This can involve tracking key metrics, such as productivity, customer satisfaction, and cost savings, and making adjustments as needed.
5. Continuously improve the BPA system: BPA is not a one-time process, but rather an ongoing effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes. Therefore, it is important to continuously improve the BPA system by incorporating feedback from stakeholders, tracking performance metrics, and making adjustments as needed.
Freshchat offers a range of features that can be used to automate business processes and improve efficiency. Here are some ways you can use Freshchat for business process automation:
1. Automate customer interactions: Freshchat allows you to build chatbots that can automatically respond to common customer questions and requests. This can help reduce the workload on your customer support team and ensure that customers get the answers they need quickly and efficiently.
2. Integrate with other systems: Freshchat can be integrated with other business systems, such as your CRM, helpdesk or customer support platform, to automate processes and improve communication across your organization.
3. Use Freshchat's messaging channels: Freshchat integrates with popular messaging channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, allowing you to communicate effectively with your customers directly through the channels they prefer. This can help automate customer interactions and make it easier for customers to get the support they need.
4. Use Freshchat's automation tools: Freshchat offers a range of tools, such as proactive messaging, campaigns and assignment rules that allows you to automate tasks and processes within the platform. For example, you can use triggers to automatically send a message to a customer based on their activity, or use rules to route incoming messages to the appropriate team member.
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