Process automation can directly influence a company’s customer experience, much more than we imagine.
To better understand this relationship, it’s necessary to remember that organizational processes are a series of activities that are related to each other and are carried out by a company or organization.
Process automation refers to the process of making something automatic with the aim of facilitating or optimizing the day-to-day activities of organizations.
Therefore, process automation encourages organizations to reflect on their processes, especially those related to customer service and experience, identifying points that can be automated to improve and even speed up customer service.
Market Behavior
The Covid-19 pandemic has interfered with many aspects of social life and customer behavior. This meant that companies from all segments needed to look for more effective and agile solutions to meet market needs.
Technology has entered the relationship with the customer for good and isn’t going away anytime soon, furthermore, it’ll expand more and more. Everything that previously needed to be resolved in person has now been resolved digitally.
Consequently, the organizations’ processes also needed to be revisited in order to find improvements.
And, if you also think that improving the customer experience is synonymous with gigantic ideas and transformations, follow the rest of this article, as you need to remember to do the basics well.
How Can Process Automation Change the Customer Experience?
To improve your customer experience through process automation, you need to start by reviewing all processes and also mapping the Customer Journey.
In this process you must also make optimizations considering the points at which returns to the customer are taking longer than they should. Or even consider which steps accumulate the most customer complaints due to delay. Isn’t there a step in this that can be done in an automated way to speed it up a little more?
This is where things come in that seem like small details to us, but to customers they’re decisive factors for a good experience.
For example, to request a document, you must fill out an online form. This may seem very fast, but if the rest of the process isn’t automated, it’ll slow down document issuance.
And you might be wondering what the rest of the automated process would be. Therefore, we have separated more examples of processes:
A customer requests a document for your company using an online form. This form can be received by email, through your system notification or you need to manually access the requests spreadsheet daily to check new requests.
In this case, let’s supose that you need to access the requests spreadsheet daily and identify new requests, without any notification or warning. It’s necessary to have very strict control to differentiate new requests from old ones.
You need to include this in your daily activities and also forward it to the sector responsible for issuing the requested document, which receives requests by email.
There is no need to finish describing this example, as you will certainly get tired just reading it, imagine the client who is waiting for the document…
With automated processes, all of this can be much faster, software can start a process automatically upon receipt of the request and, according to the previously configured parameters, send it to the responsible area for issuing the document, along with an alert through the email and notification.
This can also be done with many other daily activities that impact customer satisfaction. In addition to optimizing time, it speeds up delivery and improves customer satisfaction, which directly impacts the company’s results.
And what else?
Although this is more than enough, the advantages of process automation don’t stop there.
It provides more efficiency, ensuring that tasks are carried out quickly and accurately, reducing the time needed to complete them.
As the parameters are already configured and reviewed in advance, it impacts the reduction of errors, reducing the chances of human errors, such as forgotten information, typing errors, among others.
You can serve more in less time, after all, it is easier to manage a large volume of requests simultaneously. Automation can filter requests according to urgency and demand, ensuring greater agility.
BPM is a powerful ally
The greatest ally of processes is, without a doubt, BPM or Business Process Management. And automating processes to improve the customer experience is no different. The methodology can help both in process design and in the Customer Journey.
With this in mind, Interact created Interact Flow, a free solution that covers everything from flow modeling to maturity analysis in Process Management. The tool is fully aligned with the BPMN notation and also with the Customer Journey mapping method, developed by Gart Capote.
Access Interact Flow, sign up for free and start your Customer Journey and mapping your processes now with the aim of optimizing them.
And, if you’ve already done this, but need a tool to manage processes, get to know the Process Management solution.
Author:
Bianca Wermann
Journalist, Communication and Marketing Analyst at Interact Solutions.
