A large Canadian telecommunication company recognized an opportunity to improve its contact centre with automation. The telco already had a successful automation program focused on back-office processes with over 40 processes in production and close to 700,000 transactions. However, striving to innovate and increase the reach of automation within their organization, they identified the contact centre as a critical area that hadn’t fully benefitted from automation. Some of the key challenges faced by the client’s contact centre included:
Significant and highly variable call volumes,
Manual and highly repetitive activities leading to significant amounts of after-call work,
Challenges with First Call Resolution (FCR),
Poor customer experience leading to customer frustration and churn.
The Solution
Burnie Group had previously designed and built an automation centre of excellence for this client, with over 40 resources and dozens of processes in production. For this initiative, Burnie Group conducted a contact centre automation assessment and identified three high-volume workflows ideal to pilot as a foundation for future automation work. Blue Prism’s Service Assist technology was selected for this initiative as it allows for the automation of high-volume, near-instantaneous human-in-the-loop transactions. Over six months, automation for the three processes was designed, built, and put into production, and the newly designed automated workflows were rolled out across the organization. Burnie Group also trained the client’s automation developers on Service Assist and oversaw the identification and development of additional use cases, which are now being implemented. This pilot was the first North American enterprise-scale implementation of Blue Prism’s Service Assist.
The Result
Average handle time reductions for the three workflows were an immediate and significant improvement. In total, average handle time across the three automated processes was reduced from an average of 5 minutes to an average of 30 seconds, a 90% reduction. In addition, employee satisfaction and engagement increased significantly due to the new, simplified workflow and gave frontline employees more time to spend with customers to address issues and sell add-on products. As a result, benefits delivered through this initiative were well in excess of initial projections.
