IA & RPA for Retail Automation

It’s your time to start improving customer experience through intelligent automation. Today, customers expect a personalized experience, with many looking to online retail over in-store visits. Most shoppers are now willing to share their personal data with companies, particularly if they’re assured a top-quality experience in return. Here’s how we can help you improve the consumer experience, increase repeat business and minimize abandoned orders with IA.

Personalized offers

Utilize personally identifiable information (PII) to create personalized offers for your customers, improving the customer experience and results.

Price matching

If your customer finds an item cheaper elsewhere and contacts you, a digital worker can confirm the product, price and conditions through online searches and then email a response to the customer.

Customer returns

Automate returns processing in multiple downstream applications by programming digital workers to use the data entered by your contact center agents via a single web form. This minimizes the risk of transcription errors, reduces the call duration and ensures customers receive a personal experience.

Contact center

Digital workers prepopulate customer details via interactive voice response integration to resolve customer inquiries faster.

Omni-channel virtual agent

Extend the reach of customer conversations for speedier outcomes. Quickly understand what your customers want and connect them with the expertise they need to get things done.

Gain actionable, data-driven customer insights through IA’s ability to analyze shoppers’ habits and use customer insights to predict future buying habits and needs. This forecasting can help you stay ahead of the competition, ensuring you always have the right product available at the right time and the right price. IA turns data into critical customer insight at speed.

Customer experience

Customers expect a proactive, personalized, consistent and outstanding service experience across digital channels, including self-service options.

Data collection

Automate data gathering and aggregating from multiple source systems (POS, loyalty programs, e-commerce, etc.) to create a fast and accurate dataset that can be used for analysis and targeted action.

Reporting and forecasting

Digital workers produce timely insight reports to enable fast action, from advising which day social media influence might be optimal to recommending which products are likely to sell best in a certain area.

Marketing campaigns

Execute data-driven marketing campaigns using digital workers to connect relevant offers to the right customers. Manage campaign peaks without having to scale up your human workforce.

Globally, the retail industry loses billions of dollars each year through fraudulent ordering. As a retailer, you need to act quickly, investigating customer orders held on suspicion of fraud. While fraudulent orders are a drain on retailers, so is the loss of warehouse inventory during transit. IA helps you reduce the risk of fraud, freeing up resources to monitor behavioral trends and subsequently enabling you to quickly adapt to changes in fraud tactics.

Order cross-checks

If there’s a recommendation to challenge an order, a case is created in the CRM system. Digital workers can perform a series of cross-checks on the order via internal and external systems. Suspect orders may then be referred for human intervention.

Order cancellation

Automate order cancellations where fraud is suspected, minimizing the risk of orders being shipped through any delay in action.

Inventory cross-checking

Digital workers check the inventory against expectations and flag exceptional shrinkage, enabling further proactive investigation by their human colleagues.

Anti-money laundering and KYC

Digital workers can monitor customer transactions across all systems to identify money laundering activity. A digital worker receives suspicious transaction alerts from an analytics tool, creates and populates a case file, extracts data from multiple bank records, contacts the customer for information, identifies the suspected fraud and presents the case to your human workers to render a decision.

To keep up with rapidly changing ESG requirements, organizations are looking to IA to reduce their environmental impact, improve customer and employee satisfaction, and keep ahead of the competition with better reporting and transparency. 

Environmental

Produce less waste by utilizing digital workers to allocate resources to the right places at the right time. Digital workers create a smaller carbon footprint than their human counterparts and work efficiently to get more done in a shorter amount of time. IA can update inventory and monitor stock to reduce overstocking, which can be costly and take up space.

Social

IA reduces the amount of tedious, manual tasks, which can boost employee morale and encourage staff retention thanks to job satisfaction.

Governance

Digital workers have 100% accuracy and perform within predefined rules, ensuring your organization stays compliant with industry and company regulations.

Retailers face many challenges throughout the order fulfillment process, from demand planning to inventory management and logistics. The key to effective order fulfillment is having accurate data to enable optimal decision-making – from knowing what products you can sell to what customers want and how you’ll deliver on those needs. Connect systems sales order, ERP and inventory management systems using SS&C Blue Prism for greater visibility across the order fulfillment process.

Order management

Automate customer order management processes to minimize the time from order to acknowledgment and shipping.

Stock-level checks

Digital workers check legacy inventory systems to determine current stock levels and notify retail workers on duty to reserve the product for online customer orders.

Stock tracking

Digital workers pull together data from telematic technology like radio-frequency identification to track items and accurately update their status for improved visibility along the supply chain.

Product status updates

Automatically confirm that a product has been picked and packed, then email the customer that their order is ready to be collected or is out for delivery.

Returned items

Automate and accelerate the interbranch transfer process for returned products. Triage returned goods entering the distribution center or store them using previous returns information or store preferences. Then allocate the stock to an appropriate selling location and raise the relevant documentation for the transfer. Processes are handled quickly, minimizing markdowns.

The retail industry experiences high levels of staff attrition across the board. With multiple employee contract types, various franchise locations and increasing numbers of back-office staff, it can be challenging to ensure employee details and access are correct. IA helps manage peaks in demand and handle seasonal staffing effectively.

Recruiting, onboarding and reference checks

Automate all manual HR tasks related to new hires, updating personnel systems and acting on reference outcomes.

Payroll creation

Generate payroll for new staff without error and in good time, ensuring new employees never miss a pay packet.

Time and attendance validation

Review employee time records daily for accuracy and completion for that day. Notify employees or managers of any missing information to fix defects and maximize payroll accuracy.

Systems and facilities access

Digital workers create new user accounts in sales and personnel applications, as well as setting up the right building access for staff so they can get going from day one.

Onboarding and reskilling

Automate onboarding through self-learning curriculums and identify reskilling opportunities to better support the future of work.

Learning and development administration

Review employee certification status against requirements. Notify employees, managers and compliance teams of certification requirements.