A telecommunications provider believes that a connected life is a better life. They’ve been connecting customers across multiple regions for 160 years. Today, the company’s 25 million customers enjoy access to premium communication and entertainment services. When customers need to upgrade or change these services, they often contact a call center — and the complexity of the calls generates a large backlog of work. To speed the resolution of these requests, the telco has connected employees with SS&C | Blue Prism® Interact.

Challenge

The telecommunications provider aims to minimize operating expenses and reduce time spent by the customer service team on repetitive tasks. They are a busy team. To change a service or resolve an issue, customers often contact the company’s call center. A “first-line” customer service agent enters key customer data into the CRM system. If the request is simple, the first-line agent resolves it quickly. If complex, the request is sent to “second-line” agents for resolution. Forty thousand requests are sent to these agents each month — some requiring 90 steps and 25 minutes to resolve — so there was a constant backlog. Customers were left waiting as employees diligently worked through each request. To keep up with the backlog, the telco regularly hired more second-line employees, which was unsustainable.

To make matters more complicated, the company was in the middle of a digital transformation program — moving from legacy systems to enterprise software platforms designed to modernize the business — which had the unintended consequence of making some tasks, like processing customer requests, more cumbersome.

Solution

The company already had a team of SS&C Blue Prism digital workers on staff. To help the second-line agents, the customer delivery team added a tool — SS&C Blue Prism Interact — to the agent’s toolbox. Interact is a collaborative automation platform that easily addresses complex processes requiring human input and helps facilitate work between human and digital co-workers. And it offers employees a simple, seamless form that delivers structured information to digital workers.

Second-line agents spend a few minutes reading the unstructured information in the CRM, go into Interact and select “order”, and provide additional details in drop-down menus. Once completed, the order is sent to a digital worker who accesses each of the company’s back-end systems, finalizes the order, and logs back into the CRM to note the status. Digital workers add value by checking to make sure the order doesn’t get stuck. If an issue arises, and the order cannot be completed, digital workers notify agents via the CRM.

Digital workers process each customer request in just 53 seconds — a 67% improvement — and have helped clear the backlog. Since Interact has standardized the order data, errors have been eliminated, and orders move through the system more quickly. Customers benefit too. Instead of waiting weeks to have their request resolved, they now have a resolution in a few days.