This article was published in the Business Review section of The Star, Mercury, Pretoria News and Cape Times newspapers on 30 August 2017.
Durban-based software development company Dev2 has helped The Unlimited realise an additional R8.3 million over three years to its bottom line through a quick call centre process automation.
The Unlimited which markets products like insurance directly to the public, said prior to the automation its customer care team of 30 would spend up to 70 hours a month on manual processes during peak hours – updating customer banking details and manually sending a confirmation SMS to the customer once they had changed bank details.
Challenge
Additional to that, “we were faced with the challenge of increasing inbound call volumes which had grown 33 percent in the last 12 months”. “Of this volume, about 60 percent of the calls were from existing customers who wanted to update their banking details” said Mandy Roberts, Head of Customer Operations at The Unlimited. The company’s information technology department recommended Warewolf software to ensure quick integration into existing systems. The only South African resellers of the Warewolf software, Dev2 worked with Roberts to understand the process, business rules and how the existing systems could be leveraged and integrated with. And 12 hours later, a system built using Warewolf could achieve the following:
- The reason for each call or request was captured at a prompt generated by the existing system
- Send an instant, personalised SMS to a customer once they join as a member of The Unlimited family, enhancing customer service.
- Check for customer email address if available and integrate it into the exchange server to email the customer a notification of the noted changes – an easy and quick value add for the business.
- Linking to processes and infrastructure already in place, Warewolf was able to remove three steps from the agent, saving 70 man hours per month within the team.
To fully test and implement the solution took 12 hours to complete, from concept briefing to going live in the customer care environment. Professional forecasters estimate that the same system, because of extra documentation and time to develop and change – would have taken about 61 hours to complete, using traditional software development. Including Warewolf licensing fees, the project was delivered at 32 percent of the cost.
Prior to automation The Unlimited team would spend up to 70 hours a month on manual processes.
- The net effect of increased agent capacity, number of customers saved, and successfully collecting on the customer subscription each month has meant an additional R8.3 million revenue over the next three years for The Unlimited.
- The ease and speed of systems integration and delivery means the organisation will potentially save millions in process automation value add. Roberts said, “In my entire career I have not seen a systems related project be delivered so quickly and with such accuracy. I used to have to spend hours on non-value adding documentation and spec writing instead of being on the floor where I am most productive. Using Warewolf to automate our processes has completely changed my world and that of our customers”. Roberts said while the processes for updating the banking details were functional, there were many manual steps and it was very time consuming, as well as prone to human error.
So, four full-time resources were allocated to updating back-mandated changes, as well as loading bulk SMS. Unfortunately, the manual process only allowed for a generic, bulk SMS to be sent out at the end of each day. To address growing call volumes and maintain their customer satisfaction levels – customer care needed a solution.
Expense
Their options were: to grow the number of customer care agents who would come at a huge expense (time and resources) or simply automate some manual, tedious tasks to allow agents to service more customers in a work day and remove the stress of making mistakes. Process automation seemed the obvious choice, but projects such as this could be very costly in both time and money, typically taking several weeks to document, develop, test and finally implement.
Senior business analyst at The Unlimited Ntomba Radebe said, “As a non-developer, I loved that it’s simple enough for a non-technical person to understand. I could see the rules straight away and could instantly add value from a business analysis perspective. Seeing the system work once live, with no comeback from business was such a highlight for me – that the test coverage could be done so seamlessly”.
Dev2 was founded by Wallis and Barney Buchan in 2011 and is made up of a tight-knit team of developers that are passionate about building the best solutions for business.
The Dev2 team is focused on systems integration for select clients using Warewolf.
According to The Unlimited, this project development with Warewolf was measured at each step of the software development life cycle against professionally forecast development time using traditional software methods.
Read the full case study here: https://warewolf.io/case-study-the-unlimited-process-automation.php
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