The challenge

A global telecommunications company builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets voice, mobile, internet access, pay television and other products and services for consumers and business clients. It wanted to improve cost efficiency in its contact centre without risking the quality of the customer experience.

Our solution

As a 15-year contact centre partner, the client engaged us to find innovative ways to improve operations and reduce costs. Automation was a natural option, but it needed to be done the right way. Which parts of the experience should be automated and in what ways to maximise calls? To answer this question, TTEC Digital and Engage worked together to find a solution via intelligent automation.

TTEC Engage’s proactive solutions team researched all aspects of the customer experience during calls to identify areas that would have the most significant impact on speed and resolution to reduce costs. Due to its long relationship with the client, the team knew the client operation inside-out and had unique expertise to spot the most impactful opportunities in the customer journey.

The team determined that several back-office functions could be easily automated to greatly improve the time it took to resolve issues and eliminate friction without any negative effects on the customer experience. The team prioritised four specific back-office tasks—address verification, call notes, excess billing charge identifiers and reclassing pre- to post-paid subscriptions—to generate the quickest wins. Address verification was a manual process that applied to 80% of all calls, for example, so the team knew that any time reduction in that process would result in substantial efficiency gains.

TTEC Digital’s automation experts partnered with the proactive solutions team to implement the recommendations within just a few weeks. It was a team effort where the proactive solutions experts designed the ideal automated experience and TTEC Digital technical experts implemented the vision via attended robotic process automation (RPA) on the Pegasystems platform already in place at the client.

The results

The combination of TTEC’s human experts and innovative technology created immediate results that reduced costs and improved customer experiences. After automating just four call-related processes, the company saw results immediately. Within four weeks, the client reduced the average time to complete the four selected processes by 59%. The time savings also had a positive impact on calls—average handle time (AHT) decreased by 5.2% within 4 weeks.

These results were just the beginning. The proactive solutions team identified another set of processes to be automated to drive further efficiency gains, and TTEC is partnering with the client to execute these new automations to benefit the business and its customers.