Automation for Customer Relationship services

When talking about automation, there are three ideas that come to mind for those who are not familiar with the concept: that it is expensive (and, therefore, many companies cannot afford it), that it is complicated to manage and that it dispenses with people and can put them out of a job. However, nothing is further from reality. RPA was born with the aim of simplifying processes and automating repetitive tasks. Although it seems like a relatively new concept, the term was coined 15 years ago. Until now, most of the companies that lead this type of implementation are large entities, while only 17% of European SMEs have managed to successfully implement this type of technology. And it is that there are those three points of resistance or beliefs that Spanish companies must banish.

Jose Luis Sanchez, Commercial Director of Atento, one of the leading global contact center and BPO services companies, is closely familiar with the benefits of this technology and highlights among them increased productivity, reduced errors, increased security, minimization in response times, flexibility… being the greatest benefit for the final client and the workers themselves.

“At Atento we have always understood technology as an ally to be more efficient and improve the Customer Experience. In this context, about 5 years ago we wanted to specialize in RPA for the benefits of implementing this technology in our services and freeing people from repetitive and boring tasks, but which are necessary. Customer relationship centers have a high potential for automation, and we have helped our clients to develop projects that have brought them great efficiencies in a very short time”, assures José Luis.

The key to any automation project lies in thinking of the customer first and putting it before the process

Regarding the difficulty of implementing RPA technology, José Luis assures that it is low code and simple to program and implement: “Anyone who is willing and enthusiastic can work with this technology. In fact, at Atento we have promoted 46 telemarketers as developers and we are currently training more than 120 people in RPA. This gives an idea of ​​how simple it is. At Atento we have realized that what is really important to successfully automate a process has nothing to do with the most technical part, because the software catalog is extensive and versatile, but rather with the knowledge you have of the processes and the people’s motivation.

But in addition to RPA technology, there are other tools that allow automation, and applying it to customer relationship services, José Luis tells us about Xtrabot, the multi-channel conversational assistant that is developed by Atento and that in the last year has resolved more than 32 million queries. “Xtrabot allows users to be served automatically without human interaction regardless of the channel they come from. In this way, requests made through the telephone channel can be combined with those of instant messaging applications, social network chats, or chats embedded in web portals. At any time, conversations can be forwarded to a human agent if necessary. It is the perfect proposal to combine automation and omnichannel. Thus, you optimize all service channels and unite them in the same conversational flow for the end customer that is complemented by natural language processing”, José Luis highlights regarding the potential of this solution.

“Without a doubt, the key to any automation project lies in thinking of the customer first and putting them before the process. There is a lot to do in this regard, and automation is the opportunity to do a review exercise that puts us in a position to transform our operations to adapt them to the new generation of Customer Experience”, he concludes.