Customer service is not a game of hits and misses: not when you have powerful digital transformation tools at your disposal. There are many channels of engagement that help you reach the customer first but the important question is how to keep them engaged for the long-term? That means strengthening your customer service and every process that helps you meet customer expectations.
Order processing and order fulfillment are key processes in the journey to impress the buyer. Making these processes efficient can help enhance your customer service game. A good portion of the jobs along the order processing chain involve handling transaction and customer support documents like sales order forms, invoices, packing slips or waybills, etc. Efficient processing and management of these documents ensures smooth operations along the order fulfillment chain and timely customer service. Mismanagement of these documents can result in order processing delays, billing or shipping errors, re-processing costs, and sloppy customer service.
Efficient document processing is very important for timely customer service. Apart from your efforts to maximize customer engagement through, say, various sales and marketing initiatives, you also want to focus on optimizing document-intensive processes that help with customer fulfillment. The returns from improving document-based processes are cumulative and long-term, as we’ll see in the case of one industrial manufacturing equipment supplier who elevated their customer service game by transforming the way they handled packing slips and related order processing documents.
Herrick Industrial Supply is a second-generation family-owned business that supports manufacturing facilities with supplies for day-to-day operations. They were looking for a better way to handle packing slips and related customer documents, which they had to routinely access in order to address customer calls. Whenever a customer called with a grievance or query, the staff at Herrick Industrial would have to sift through hundreds of packing slips and other customer files that would often get lost in the big filing cabinets where they were shelved. While the customer waited for a response, Herrick personnel would be performing endless searches to find the right customer records that they could refer to, before actually getting back to their primary duty, which is customer service.
Decidedly, they needed a better way to handle packing slips and documents that support customer service, and contacted Artsyl. Artsyl’s intelligent process automation platform, called docAlpha, captures and processes transaction documents including vendor invoices, customer sales orders, packing slips, receipts, credit memos, etc. docAlpha combines digital transformation technologies like AI, machine learning, intelligent data capture, and recognition software like OCR/ICR/OMR with robotic process automation.
So, what you have is a dedicated RPA feature that does all the heavy-lifting in terms of added workload, but with the decision-making needed to implement complex document-processing tasks. For Herrick Industrial, this became the perfect solution as it digitized packing slips and related customer documents, and exported it to their DocuWare system, from where they could easily search and retrieve any file, when required. The best part is, they completely eliminated data entry as docAlpha automatically scans and extracts packing slip details using machine learning, making sure to capture all kinds of customer documents, regardless of the document type or structure.
Extracted data is automatically sorted and classified. The data is then validated for correctness and routed for verification by a staff member, If all the details seem adequate and in place, the approved data is automatically exported to DocuWare, where it is filed and archived. By performing a simple keyword search, Herrick’s staff members are able to quickly access any packing slip they need during a customer call.
docAlpha is a highly scalable software and Herrick now captures almost 3000 packing slips every month. Where previously, they spent hours searching for packing slips from one of their big filing cabinets, and mostly ended up never finding it, now they are able to retrieve any customer information in a jiffy. This system has elevated their customer service and greatly improved their response times to grievance calls.
The big advantage with docAlpha is that users can see the immediate benefits of the software; for Herrick, this includes:
- Instant access to customer data
- Highly responsive and efficient customer service
- Zero manual data entry
- Highly scalable and capable of processing any number of packing slips at a time
- Free-up talented staff to focus on more growth-oriented tasks
Intelligent process automation helps accelerate the pace with which you perform routine, repetitive tasks but most importantly, improves business outcomes and your ability to meet customer expectations.
