Whether you’re running a business-to-business venture or a business-to-customer venture, every organization has two major factors in common, workforce, and customer base. Engaging employees efficiently and creating a lasting experience in the mind of customers are critical factors for business survival and growth.
Science and innovative technologies are on the front burners regarding development in every sector of this century. From pharmaceuticals, aviation, electronic gadget, farming, and food processing, there is no sector without critical development. Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the frontier innovations employed forward-thinking businesses.
One of the most dramatic and surprising results to businesses that have implement RPA is the marked improvement RPA brings to both employee engagement and customer experience. Here we will share the 10 reasons customers and employees absolutely love RPA.
Employee Engagement
The concept of employee engagement is; getting the best of employed personnel in order to promote systemic efficiency in an organization. These days, employees may often initially often feel threatened by innovations and inventions that once understood become inseparable in their daily work
It is a popular but untrue notion that AI and RPA models are designed to eliminate the activities of human beings in the labour market. In fact, RPA and AI are designed by HUMANS to help HUMANS become more productive. Naturally, repetitive processes kill creativity in human beings as compared to random and innovative methods where human discretion can best be utilized. Unlike humans, robots love repetitive processes.
To gainfully engage employees in any organizational setting, below are some of the proven tactics in today’s business climate:
- Adequate training and information:
Depending on the role of an employee, the use of absolute discretion can be dangerous. Specific training on tools, software, equipment, organizational culture, and other information needed to perform daily will go a long way in improving the quality of output from an employee. These training and information will also help promote standardization and avoid unwanted variation in production output.
- Adequate equipment:
Employing the person with the right degree isn’t the end as there is still a need to equip your office or production plant with up-to-speed technologies adequately. The popularity of AI and process automation using robots means every organization has to be in tune with industry best practices and upgrade from time to time.
- Targets and Appraisals:
Setting process/project deliverables for employees, a known yardstick to measure their performance, and a merit reward system are also vital to get the best engagement from employees.
- Employee safety:
In a work area, the safety of life and property should always be paramount. If employees feel secure with equipment, tools, co-workers, ergonomics, and processes around the work area, it naturally translates to confidence in the system, which boosts efficiency.
- Welfare:
Some employees are assigned to interact with the product; some are assigned to deal with other employees, while others are assigned to deal with customers and stakeholders. Regardless of the type of employee, welfare is always a great motivator that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
- Feedback system:
Engaging employees in every regard can only lead to positives. From understanding them personally to getting their first-hand perspective on work-related issues, a sound feedback system is golden.
Employee engagement will help foster the right atmosphere to groom committed employees who are ready to give their 100% to the organization and build a career alongside.
Customer Experience
Consciously or subconsciously, every product or service consumed by an end-user creates an experience, some more lasting than others and some, more pleasant than others. Brands employ different strategies to create their desired experience to customers, but nothing beats RPA models.
Customers are the soul of any business because their patronage is what defines any venture as a business. Brands use different strategies in acquiring and retaining customers. Creating a top-notch product or service experience for your customers can give you access to the most effective and free customer acquisition model, customer reviews. Recommendations, referrals, reviews, and brand association from happy customers will take your business to the next level.
The installation of RPA models has been the mainstay for successful brands in the area of customer experience. RPA solutions boost productivity, which can cater to the demand of any magnitude as long as it is built to the expected capacity. Great attention to detail, standardization, ease of improvement, cost efficiency are a few among numerous advantages of RPA installation, which results in pleasurable experience for customers. Below are some of the major contributing factors to positive customer experience:
#1. Engagement:
1. Being interactive with your customer base is a jewel of unknown value. Public product launching, social media presence, toll-free lines, interactive product, and service delivery are a few of the many ways to engage a customer base.
#2. Support:
1. Customer support, whether before or after-sales, is a responsible tactic to create a valuable customer experience. The idea that it cost too much for businesses to provide support for their customers is fallacious because not providing proper support is more calamitous.
#3. Standardization:
1. One of the significant advantages of RPA integration in any business is the ability of robots to repeat exact processes, creating the same output over and over. Maintaining quality, quantity, and safety standards are essential in increasing marginal utility and product/service customer satisfaction.
#4. Uniqueness:
1. Everyone makes cola drinks, but Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola; the same applies to iPhones. Product/brand distinction, even in a saturated market, is critically important for success. An automated robotic process can help you derive a consistently unique product or service.
Numerous other factors help enhance customer. However, implementing the above listed can help encourage brand loyalty and increased patronage among any clientele.
RPA pros on Employee Engagement and Customer Experience
Business Trinity. RPA installation, employee engagement, and unique customer experience are directly proportional to each other. These three factors work hand in hand to create an efficient and profitable business model.
Below are some of the direct impacts of Robotic Process Automation on employee engagement and customer experience:
#5. Turn-around-time:
1. The time required from raw material to finished product or from order to delivery is known as Turn-around-time (TAT). RPA affects TAT positively as output is faster, leading to quicker conversion.
#6. Product price:
1. The price of a product remains one of the most significant deciding factors for consumers. Owing to reduced turn-around-time from RPA and production cost efficiency, manufacturers are able to set competitive prices.
#7. Profit increase and overhead reduction:
1. Since RPA helps reduce the overhead incurred from manual labour, wasted man-hours, etc. it enables profit made per unit product or service rendered increase.
#8. Employee efficiency:
1. Rather than exhaust man-hours and brainpower on tasks that are easier for robots, employees are trained and drafted to better participate in a business. Supervision of robotic processes and innovation of new ideas and strategy are human forte, RPA affords to focus on these.
#9. Customer Satisfaction:
1. Owing to the impact of RPA, products/services are cheaper, product performance is standard, and employee energy is channelled rightly. To this effect, customers are mostly satisfied and happy. The customer automatically becomes loyal to brands they love and unpaid ambassadors.
#10. Job satisfaction and employee commitment:
1.RPA aids increased revenue, reduces human error, aids customer satisfaction; in turn, employees will be satisfied and committed to their jobs. Job satisfaction serves as a good motivator for any employee to grow on a job, give their best, and be willing to develop themselves.
RPA affects a business positively, as long as the right model is installed and maintained correctly by adequately trained personnel. There are numerous other pros to the use of RPA and its direct effect on employees and customers. Engaging the right partner is also a critical success factor for any automation journey.
RPA cons on Employee Engagement and Customer Experience
As impactful as RPA installation can be on businesses, a few strong pessimistic opinions surround its use. Below are a few of their points:
- RPA works against human labour: The essence of RPA is to complement human effort, afford humans more capacity to create, and focus on more innovations.
- RPA is expensive to install: There are many cost models available in the RPA market. With the right partner, SaaS, Pay for Performance, OpEx or CapEx models can be leveraged. The long-term benefits are RIO are enormous, so finding the right cost structure will speed your returns.
- RPA is expensive to maintain: As compared to the impact and cost reduction benefits, RPA models are quite cheap to maintain. Capability building with the right RPA vendor provides you and your staff with the skills to maintain your RPA resources. This creates an environment whereby all future changes or updates can be managed inhouse or with a partner to manage cost most efficiently.
There are a lot of other points raised by those who aren’t convinced about the impact of RPA, especially as it relates to employee engagement and customer satisfaction. However, most of these claims stem from misinformation. The facts and impacts of RPA on both employee engagement and customer service are indisputable. Countless deployments of RPA show both employee engagement and customer experiences appreciate marked improvements, contrary to some misconceptions that RPA is solely deployed to reduce staff. In reality, RPA provides significant savings while engaging staff in more creative, productive, and valuable work that hit the business bottom line versus monotonous, repetitive work that stifles staff engagement.
Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is designed to boost systemic efficiency, a system in which employees and consumers are a part. There are AI or RPA solutions for virtually every business niche, and the investments leading organizations are making in RPA has outpaced cloud infrastructure to now be the number one investment area of many businesses. Every serious business venture ought to utilize RPA in engaging employees, and creating a lasting experience for customers, translating to business prosperity.
