Project Description

About the customer

Vodafone Portugal is a global telecommunications operator that offers a recognized convergent service across the various segments that make up the market. A leader in innovation, brand image, and customer satisfaction, Vodafone Portugal has a nationwide network coverage, reaching 4.5 million homes and businesses with its state-of-the-art fiber network and over 4.7 million customers with its mobile network.

Customer Activation Services Automation

We share the experience of Vodafone Portugal’s Customer Operations team in the automation journey they developed with Ubiquity using the UiPath platform, aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency, with a positive impact on Vodafone’s end customers.

Manual and repetitive processes are slow, inefficient, and prone to errors, leading to increased employee dissatisfaction and decreased overall company performance.

Before turning to automation, the activation process for fixed and mobile telecommunications services was entirely manual and experiencing rapid growth. The Customer Operations team needed to increase its production capacity without raising operational costs, while maintaining high-quality results and service level expectations. One solution was to reduce the time spent on each request by automating this area as much as possible.

This allows us to reduce unit operational costs, increase human production capacity without increasing effort (the same team can produce more in the same working hours), and have a solution that can be easily scalable by adding or removing RPA licenses. On average, we automated 50% of each of the 5 processes within the scope of this project, resulting in a 50% reduction in costs and duration per unit, which allowed us to free up resources to ensure all activities without the need to reinforce staff.

Customer Operations Team, Vodafone Portugal
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Automated Processes
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Cost Reduction

Customer Activation Services Automation

  • Improvement in employee performance by assigning administrative and repetitive tasks to RPA. RPA enabled employees to focus on more creative tasks that require cognitive efforts and a human touch.

  • Optimized processes: robots don’t get tired, sick, or bored, and can perform a specific task 24 hours a day, every day, more quickly. As a result, RPA agents significantly reduce the operation time of various processes and, therefore, are ideal for executing recurring tasks, benefiting our company and our customers.

  • Human errors are minimized since the robots follow the exact steps that have been programmed, reducing errors to virtually zero.

Challenges

Technical Challenge

Ensuring that RPA achieved a success rate in the end-to-end workflow, close to that of a human in the same environment (Citrix), was the technical challenge. This was achieved by testing various RPA solutions and defining and adjusting some triggers along the flow.

Behavioral Challenge

On the other hand, there was a behavioral challenge, which was to change the team’s mindset and methodology to incorporate RPA as a tool with which employees needed to interact to successfully complete tasks.

In summary, to achieve and maximize results, it was necessary to have a detailed understanding of the activity to be automated and to work closely with the RPA partner to maximize the potential of the solution, aligning business needs with technical resources. This directly impacted the percentage of activity that could be automated and, consequently, the ROI.

Customer Operations Team, Vodafone Portugal