First impressions matter.

Within the first few seconds that your customer interacts with your business, they form a lasting impression. It’s through the front office that a crucial first impression is not only shaped but maintained, influencing future purchasing decisions and essentially serving as the face of your company.

For that reason, a well-managed front office that consistently delivers a positive, seamless and efficient interaction gives you an unrivaled competitive advantage over your competitors. By leveraging front office automation, you can optimize these crucial elements and create a front office that thrives in today’s customer-centric landscape. You’re able to bridge the gap between your customers and your organization to streamline tasks, enhance efficiency and enable your staff to focus on building long-lasting customer relationships.

Some examples of front office automation include:

• Handling common queries and questions
• Processing complaints and refund requests
• Tracking statuses
• Nurturing leads
• Sales order processing
• Sales team communication
• Analyzing sale processes
• Capturing customer data
• Contact center automation

Keep reading as we dive deep into the world of front office automation and explore its transformative potential for front office roles.

What Is Front Office Automation?

Front office automation is exactly what it says on the tin: automation to transform front office processes. More specifically, it’s using robotic process automation (RPA) to mimic human actions. It acts as an extension of your front office workforce by giving you access to digital workers, which remove the burden of manual, administrative work from staff to allow them to focus on more strategic and creative activities.

RPA can unlock more value for your front office staff when used with artificial intelligence (AI) to create intelligent automation (IA). You’re able to give digital workers more complex tasks. For example, they can handle cognitive processes like speech comprehension through natural language processing (NLP) and responsive communication.

It's important to know that digital workers work alongside front office employees. And while certain points in any customer experience (CX) journey will benefit from a more human touch, such as some parts of sales and customer service, RPA offers many advantages in other areas. It helps solve some of the complex challenges facing the front office today:

• Increasing customer expectations
• Heightened data management policies
• Managing communications across multiple channels
• Surges in workloads
• Frictions in customer relationship when integrating tools and systems

Combined with proper investment in front office automation training, business process optimization and effective management, the front office can work effectively and efficiently to deliver positive customer experiences for your business, every time.

Front Office Automation Benefits

You’ve got a small idea of how front office automation helps address current challenges. Let’s explore a few more benefits of front office automation:

• Improved customer experiences. Ultimately, front office automation benefits your customers as they receive more positive experiences. Their queries are handled faster, the information provided is more accurate and interactions are more personal.
• Improved employee experiences. Customers aren’t the only ones to feel the positive effects. Digital workers free your employees to focus on more interesting work to avoid burnout and give them the opportunity to upskill.
• Reinforced compliance. A digital worker can continuously monitor data and detect and resolve non-compliant activities. Additionally, they maintain accurate records of all activity, which is crucial for audit and reporting purposes.
• Operational efficiency. Digital workers operate much quicker compared to humans. This reduces the time to complete a task without sacrificing output quality. Human workers then have more free time to focus on important strategic operations. All in all, it optimizes resource allocation.
• Improved communication and collaboration. Activities don't sit in isolation. Front office automation can connect the dots between the front and back office, speeding up communication and collaboration to improve complex processes.
• Shorter transaction times. A digital worker can perform a task 5x faster than a human. They enable instant decision making resulting in faster and more efficient transactions.
• Reduced errors and increased reliability. Your digital workforce will be available 24 hours, seven days a week, with no vacation, sick days or dips in productivity. On top of this, they consistently execute tasks with precision and accuracy as they aren’t prone to fatigue or distractions.
• Scalability. Front office automation can be scaled up or down based on your evolving needs. This helps ensure the front office remains agile and responsive to any fluctuations in workloads.
• Reduced costs. Digital workers are more productive and less expensive than the equivalent number of human workers to achieve the same result. While there may be a higher upfront investment to implement, the long-term benefits lead to significant operational cost savings for a business.

Front Office Automation Examples

How does this all look in practice? Let's explore specific industry examples that highlight the application of front office automation.

Healthcare

Front office staff in medical practices are an essential point of contact for patients. They’re responsible for running the frontline smoothly. This includes creating a welcoming and friendly environment, scheduling appointments, collecting payments, answering queries, etc.

RPA and digital workers in healthcare help relieve some of these front office tasks from workers so they can better focus on their patients, especially regarding one of the most time-consuming processes for healthcare providers: patient scheduling and appointments.

With IA and RPA, patients can take care into their own hands and access self-booking systems to confirm, change, update patients records and appointments. Staff no longer need to spend hours coordinating administrative work, printing and scanning documents or re-entering data sets. Instead, they spend that time providing imperative frontline care, improving patient satisfaction and enhancing the overall efficiency of healthcare delivery.

Hospitality

Hospitality staff are responsible for communicating with customers but also act as a liaison to all other departments, such as housekeeping, security, maintenance, marketing, etc. They face several challenges in their day-to-day work, but one of the most significant is adequate support and effective shift scheduling.

IA and RPA can assist in this aspect as it automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks. This allows staff to focus on providing personalized guest assistance instead of being bogged down in administrative paperwork. Digital workers handle data entry, document processing, guest inquiries, restaurant bookings and more to reduce the burden on frontline staff.

IA can also optimize staff schedules through analyzing availability, skill level and business demand to reduce conflicts and ensure adequate coverage during peak hours.

Banking and finance

The banking front office is a primary contact point between financial institutions and customers, facilitating key interactions like customer onboarding, advisory, transaction processing, wealth management and more. Staff can be easily overwhelmed when dealing with all the intricacies and manual administrative work, affecting their ability to nurture customer relationships and increase cashflow.

Here, IA and RPA can reduce manual banking processes. Digital workers can fulfill mundane tasks such as data entry, background checks and document verification. You can also automate the lead nurturing process, leaving front office workers to focus on proactive upselling. With IA, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards is much simpler. Digital workers can detect suspicious transactions or patterns and analyze threats in near real time. Records are also securely stored and well maintained for accurate, no-fuss audit trails.

Front Office Automation vs. Back-Office Automation

Front office automation and back-office automation play distinct yet connected roles within an organization. As we’ve learned, front office automation focuses on solving customer-facing processes. Using automation software frees employees from monotonous administrative work to focus more time on customers to ensure they are engaged and satisfied.

In contrast, back-office automation focuses on the internal operations behind a business. This can include customer data management, document processing and data validation. Automation here aims to help back-office employees optimize workflow and reduce the manual effort it takes to operate. Often it helps alleviate pressure from administrative tasks that slow a business down.

The true secret ingredient here is integrating them. With both, data easily flows between customer-facing processes and internal operations to ensure that customer interactions at the front office are accurately processed, managed and fulfilled by the back-office. A seamless integration eliminates manual handoffs, reduces data errors and proves response times. Ultimately, this improves productivity, operations and consistent delivery of services to customers.

Common Front Office Automation Tools, Software and Strategies

You’ll need to invest in the right tools and software, so your front office automation drives efficient and effective interactions. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE). This team of skilled knowledge workers will embed automation best practices in your organization. A CoE helps coordinate the right skills and ensure that technology teams are ready, and allocating resources effectively.
• Using a low/no-code automation solution. In many cases, your frontline workers directly handle and operate automation. Providing them with no or low-code automation support means it’s easy to use, they aren’t reliant on IT teams and they’re more flexible to customer needs. IA is a business-developed, no-code automation that pushes RPA to deliver more value. Learn more about how IA achieves this.
• Running automation on the desktop securely. Many front office workers must use their desktops to carry out repetitive and routine tasks. Using a solution such as SS&C | Blue Prism® Desktop deploys digital workers to support your employees on the desktop, alleviating errors, ensuring compliance and giving them more time to spend with customers.

Improving Front Office Operations

To sum up, front office automation is helping businesses like yours revolutionize their operations. By leveraging RPA, IA and AI technologies, organizations are enhancing customer experiences, improving efficiencies and positively directing productivity. Front office employees can now focus on higher-value tasks while digital workers handle repetitive administrative work.

Embracing front automation is not only helping you stay ahead of the competition; it’s also empowering employees, improving customer satisfaction and driving sustainable growth for the future.