4 Gold Reasons to Take a Hard Look at Automation – Today.

If you’ve read the news or spoken to any colleagues over the last decade, chances are you already know something about Robotic Process Automation (RPA). You could be living in a cave and still have heard of it, with all the attention it has gotten recently. RPA, Automation, Robotic Automation, Robots, Bots – all are common names for a powerful business paradigm shift that is happening right before our eyes.

Robotic automation is worth taking a hard look at not only because it is changing the world but also because it can do great things for your contact center. Just as importantly, it’s turbocharging your competitors: Nearly three quarters of companies are planning to automate labor functions or have already begun automating low-level work, according to a recent survey . Don’t wait for tomorrow – consider a few key reasons that your organization should be pursuing Robotic Process Automation today.

1. The automation wave is washing over everyone

Automation is more than just hype. Its rise in financial services, insurance, telco, healthcare, BPOs and many other industries attests to its vast and enduring capability to transform the business world as we know it. Many developers are selling RPA in various flavors to enthusiastic audiences. It’s likely that many of your customers, partners and competitors are already using these tools to automate processes and complete a range of operations in the workplace. The growth curve in this space is exponential, and it’s not too late for you to catch the wave too.

2.The money question

RPA lowers labor expenses (think dollar cost averaging, not FTE cuts) by enabling your agents and back-office teams to optimize their time doing higher-value work, rather than wasting minutes and hours on routine, mindless tasks. In a review of IT outsourcing services, researchers found that productivity and profits rose significantly in organizations that implemented automation, “Cost savings range from 26 percent to 66 percent, depending on the service tower, with 14 to 28 percentage points of these savings directly attributable to automation,” according to the report. “This higher level of savings compares with typical cost savings of 20 percent to 30 percent from traditional labor arbitrage and process improvements alone.” No matter how competent your agents, they are always susceptible to basic human error. By automating those tasks, you can reduce errors to next to zero.

3. Escape from boredom

If you were to monitor the daily work of your front- and back-office teams, you might find that they spend much of their time on simple, repetitive tasks. They are constantly copying, cutting and pasting, switching between systems and entering duplicate content into multiple applications. It’s like entering your account number three times for an IVR when trying to pay your utility bill – and then doing it over and over through the course of the day.

Take a moment to step away from your managerial concerns about profits and efficiency and look at the customer-facing, in-process employee experience. Would you want to work like that?

Automating these repetitive tasks alleviates the boredom and frustration of the day-to-day grind. In some cases, according to Forrester, the use of RPA can lead to the creation of higher-skilled positions, and 64 percent of respondents in a recent survey said their companies were using automation because it freed staff to do other tasks.

4. Scaling with ease

Fine-tuning your staffing requirements can be nearly impossible when you’re relying solely on human labor. Call traffic changes from day to day, hour to hour and even minute to minute. Bringing in team members or sending them home at a moment’s notice is not a sound business practice. It’s also difficult to hire and train skilled employees to keep up with growth.

Robots, on the other hand, can scale up or down whenever needed. There’s no risk in adding more of them, and they deploy faster than any human can. They save money, too: Robots ramp up your capacity without the normal cost associated with staffing up. Robots can also be programmed to be “multi-skilled,” which makes staffing your organization with the right employees at the right time a cakewalk. It’s a scalable way to simplify daily tasks and grow your enterprise in the long term.

These goals are frequently key benefits of automation in the contact center. Your proactive exploration and problem solving can keep your business pointed in the right direction and reassure leadership that you and your team are up to date on best practices and the newest technologies in the contact center.