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Since starting in 1994 with a team of five, The Unlimited has strived to “make a difference” to its clients. Now the direct marketing and financial services company has over 600 000 customers, and Deloitte has awarded the business its “Best Company to Work For” three years in a row.
During peak months, the customer care team of 30 were spending up to 70 hours a month on manual processes to update customer bank details and manually send a confirmation SMS to the customer. After seeing the success of using Warewolf to quickly integrate into existing systems, and systemise business rules for automation in another part of the business, IT recommended Warewolf for the job of automating the many manual tasks for the agents.
508%
faster Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
6x
faster development time
$639 000
additional revenue over three years
"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."
Mandy Roberts
Head of Customer Care at The Unlimited
Inbound call volumes had grown 33% in the last 12 months, with 60% of them being from customers who wanted to update their banking details. While the processes for updating the bank details were good, there were many manual steps and it was very time consuming, as well as prone to human error.
On average, it took a customer care agent an additional 11 seconds per customer to manually capture the updated information and add the customer details to the bulk SMS queue for confirmation. Four full-time resources were allocated to updating bank-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.
In order to address growing call volumes, and maintain their customer satisfaction levels, Customer Care faced a challenge: grow the number of customer care agents, at a huge expense of time and resource, 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 like this could be very costly in both time and money, typically taking several weeks to document, develop, test and finally implement.
The Unlimited had seen the recent success of using Warewolf to enhance the systems in another area of the business. A small task team was put together to run with the project, outside of day-to-day IT operations.
The head of Customer Care, along with a Business Analyst and a Developer met to understand the process, business rules and how the existing systems could be leveraged and integrated with.
Using Warewolf at the centre of the project, IT were easily able to use system generated information to capture the reason for the call or request, integrate with the queuing technology, see the changes off the queue and use a simple web API to get the customer details and update them accordingly in the custom CRM.
A Warewolf service was built to trigger an instant, personalised SMS via the existing SMS provider. By using existing tools and services from inside Warewolf, they were able to check for a customer email address and integrate into Exchange Server to email the customer a notification of the changes – an easy and quick value add for the business.
After less than a day, the Warewolf-built system was ready to be tested and prepared for implementation.
By integrating existing systems and hooking into the processes and infrastructure already in place, Warewolf was able to remove 3 steps from the agent, saving 70 man hours per month within the team.
The fully tested and implemented solution took 12 hours to complete from concept briefing to going live in the Customer Care environment. Professional forecasters estimated that the same system, because of extra documentation, time to develop and change, would have taken approximately 61 hours to complete, using traditional software development. Including Warewolf licensing fees, the project was delivered at 32% of the cost.
The net effect of increased agent capacity, number of customers saved, saving on agent salaries and successfully collecting on the customer subscription each month has meant an additional $639 000 revenue over the next three years for the company.
The future potential of Warewolf in this organisation is endless. The ease and speed of systems integration and delivery of systems means the organisation will potentially save millions in process automation and value add.
| Step in SDLC | Traditional Development | Warewolf Development |
|---|---|---|
| Requirements gathering and analysis | 4 hours | 2 hours |
| Design | 8 hours | 2 hours |
| Implementation or coding | 24 hours | 4 hours |
| Testing | 8 hours | 2 hours |
| Deployment | 1 hour | 1 hour |
| Maintenance (2 changes) | 16 hours (up to 8 hours per change) | 1 hour |
| Total | 61 hrs, or 7.6 days | 12 hrs or 1.5 days |
Ntomba Radebe
"As a non-developer, I loved having visibility of the process that was being followed.The development process was 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 – the test coverage could be done seamlessly."
Senior Business Analyst, The Unlimited
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