GROUP

Vodafone Portugal Customer Operations reduces annual costs with RPA Automation

Automate Fixed and Mobile Telecommunication services activation



5

Automated processes

50%

Cost reduction


We share Vodafone Portugal Customer Operations team experience on the automation journey that we´re having with Ubiquity as a partner to increase productivity and efficiency with a positive impact on our customers.


Repetitive manual processes are slow, inefficient, and prone to errors. They lead to increased employee dissatisfaction and decrease the company’s overall performance.

Before automation, this activity was fully manual and was growing rapidly. We needed to scale up our production capacity without increasing operational costs while maintaining high-quality results and meeting service-level expectations. One of the solutions was to reduce the time spent on each request by automating most of the process.

 

This allowed us to reduce unitary operational costs, increase human production capacity without increasing their effort (the same team can produce more in the same hours of work), and have a scalable solution by easily adding or removing RPA licenses. On average, we automated 50% of each of the 5 processes in scope, resulting in a 50% reduction in costs and duration, which allowed us to release resources in the team without having to recruit new members.


Other impacts were:

• Improved employees’ performance by assigning administrative and repetitive tasks to this RPA. With RPA handling these tasks, employees could focus on more creative tasks that require cognitive efforts and a human touch.

• Optimized processes: Bots don’t get tired, sick, or bored, and they can execute a given action 24 hours a day, every day, and quickly. As a result, RPA agents significantly reduce the operation time of various processes, benefiting both our company and our customers.

• Minimized human errors by following the exact same steps each time, they execute a given task, significantly reducing errors to near zero.

 

There were two major challenges: one technical and the other behavioral.

The technical challenge was to ensure that the RPA had a success rate in the end-to-end workflow similar to that of a human in the same secure environment (Citrix). We achieved this by testing several RPA solutions, setting, and fine-tuning some triggers along the flow.

The behavioral challenge was to change the team's mindset and methodology to incorporate the RPA as a tool with which they had to interact to complete tasks successfully.


In conclusion, to achieve and maximize results, we need to know in detail the activities to be automated and work closely with the RPA partner to leverage the potential of the solution by aligning business needs with technical features. This will impact the percentage of the activity that can be automated, and consequently, the ROI.


The choice and analysis of the processes to automate are crucial to guarantee the success and positive business case of the RPA.


Author

Customer Operations
-  Vodafone Portugal

Published at Share