“Agents love it” – the inside story of an automation-powered contact center

One clean view

 For Zainab, an Operational Excellence & Intelligent Process Automation leader at Finastra, automation means more than just time savings - it’s leading to a more zen-like experience for the contact center. Gone are the notification-filled screens of eight different contact center application screens, with UiPath everything is unified into one clean, automated view.

Zainab is responsible for optimizing processes and implementing sustainable improvement solutions within the operational effectiveness team at Finastra. Their call center educates millions of customers about financial literacy.

“Our agents don't even need two monitors anymore. Of course, they have them so they can utilize them. But we can technically now have a conversation with a customer within the one monitor, which was not possible prior to the automation.”

Finastra’s contact center sees their new automation-powered sidebar as a helpful companion that makes agents’ workdays easier.

“Agents are loving it”, she adds.

"It's like a one stop shop for calls”

The Finastra team used UiPath Apps to create a UX-friendly interface for their automations. This unites the various contact center applications which previously spanned two (or more) monitors.

Since introducing the automation-powered app in 2023, Zainab reports that:

• Hold time has gone down by over 20%

• Eight different application features now housed in one clean app

• Employee experience for both new and tenured employees has improved

Speaking of employee experience, automation also impacts onboarding times. “We're continuously adding new hires every year. Before the automation, our onboarding time was 8-12 weeks. As the new hires start using the automation tool, it will allow them to become more proficient a lot faster and quicker.”

Prior to automating, “finishing” a call wasn’t just a matter of wishing the caller a great day and hanging up. Agents had to process the interaction in one application, add mandatory notes in another, and report it in still another system. Not to mention several applications agents must sign in regularly.

“Sometimes throughout the day you need to restart your computer. You need to reopen, resize everything again. You need to restate everything again, put your passwords in again. So that's your day to day experience. All of that can now be done with that one tool.”

As the agent and automation work in concert, the latter adds each new transaction “to the UiPath queuing system, logs into its own virtual machine, and completes the transaction on behalf of the agent. So essentially what you need is your main loan servicing application and your RPA sidebar tool. And then the virtual phone for the call to come in. As soon as the call comes in the agent can now enter everything on the sidebar.”

Top-tier (10+ year) employee retention gets even better

 The stereotype about contact centers is that the average employee tenure is less than a year.

But Finastra bucks the trend: “In terms of retention, our average tenure is 11.5 years. So employees in general have loved being here. Now automation is helping them and making their life a lot easier. Over 80% of agents say that their experience is even better using the tool.”

 While Finastra is always focused on enhancing the customer experience, Zainab is quick to point out that doesn’t happen without a positive employee experience.

“At the end of the day, a seamless employee experience translates to better customer conversations. With UiPath we can look at how the human and digital workforce can work together and how we're able to utilize intelligent process automation as a digital assistant.

“The whole mindset is, how can we leverage digital assistants or robots to manage manual workload?”

“When it comes to our business transformation journey, our focus is on handling the complex scenarios that require human cognitive function. And then you can take care of the easiest tasks automatically in this one digital assistant. Now, agents can solely focus on what's truly the most important, the complex scenarios.”

What department is next?

Given the contact center’s automation success, it’s no surprise that Zainab has been flooded with other departments asking to consider them for automation opportunities.

“Can we do it within the reporting teams? Can we do it within our IT teams? Can we incorporate this tool for other contact centers within Finastra? For the back office team? There are a lot of ideas and a hunger to do more with this.”

“Everyone's doing it. You're only going to be left behind if you're not part of those innovative solutions.”

Typically when AI-powered automation is introduced, employees may view it skeptically. After seeing the contact center’s success, “You know that it's not to replace. What we have works really well in conjunction with our human workforce.”

Using UiPath has also made it easier for Zainab’s team to stay resilient amid new business requirements.

“There's a new application coming into place this year. If it wasn't for UiPath, that's another application the agents would have to get used to. Now because of the automation tool, we can integrate both of them together. I love that it's not that complex to add things or to connect applications to this tool.”

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