Virgin Media O2 agents were experiencing high complexity in their customer support operation due to increases in system and multi-screen utilisation to support new complex processes, as a result, agents had to adapt navigation to data mine multiple systems to support their customer requests whilst at the same time operating their agent knowledge base to follow and comply with process. The introduction of a multi-skilled agent support strategy saw an increase in their average handling time with up to 49% of calls being silent time while the agent navigated systems. Customer interactions had become very transactional rather than value-add relationship building moments that matter. First time resolution performance took a dip as actions were missed due to the complexity and human error.

Robiquity introduced Intelligent Automation (IA) which mimics human users to perform repeatable processes and tasks. In this case, we automated 18 high volume, time-consuming processes including Application of Credits, Account Reconnections & Bereavement Disconnects / transfer Responsibility. The newly designed agent journey now encompasses automation that takes away the manual navigation to free up the agent’s time to focus on the customer’ experience. The programme was delivered rapidly over a 9 month period with all 18 processes being successfully deployed into the Robiquity Managed Service team, whilst the analysis workstream created a strong pipeline of Automation opportunities to feed into the CoE.

Agents now navigate to a single dedicated screen to access the Virgin Media O2 knowledge base and are prompted with a series of simple questions, for example Customer Credit amount and Customer E-mail. After all required information has been submitted, the digital worker gathers the data and processes it in all of the other systems, validating that the customer is eligible, making decisions based on data points, and finally sending an automated communication to the customer upon completion. Any exceptions are flagged for agent input and currently digital workers have a 92% success rate. All actions are fully auditable and provide daily reports to the business. This business process transformation has enabled agents to focus on the customer experience which and reduce average call times by 20%. This has been especially important in the context of the Bereavement team, where agents are dealing with distressed customers. Virgin Media O2 have seen improvements in customer NPS scores and have been able to handle an additional 211k calls (over 6 months) using the same resource.