Webbeds are one of the largest bed banks in the world. They dominate the B2B travel accommodation space globally, marrying Hotel vendors with travel agencies across APAC, Europe and The Americas. Throughout the Covid pandemic, Webbeds, like all travel businesses were hit extremely hard and subsequently lost hundreds of staff, particularly across customer services. Throughout 2021 as travel volumes began to increase, Webbeds turned to Technology, specifically RPA, to help backfill the lost headcount and meet the growing capacity requirements.

Robiquity were engaged to help determine the automation potential within Customer Services across c350 staff. We delivered an Intelligent Automation Assessment, identifying £Millions in savings and cost avoidance against future hires. This included several high-priority opportunities to be considered for automation. One of the high-priority cases was a complex data mapping process which, if successfully automated, would have significant benefits including revenue generation potential. This was a process that Webbeds had tried to find an automated solution to for over 10 years with various different mapping specialists, however it was believed to be impossible to automate due to the lack of standardised inputs.

We took a different view, rather than try to fix the entire problem, we decided to build a solution which combined RPA, Machine Learning and Human In The Loop, creating a “supervised learning” solution which over the course of 6 months, grew in capability from around 25% to 96% of cases fully automated. The business impact was c60 FTE capacity generation and £M’s in revenue generation. This was a significant win for Intelligent Automation and opened up the eyes of all stakeholders to the art of the possible. Since then, we have built an additional 12 automations across customer services as part of phase 1, the impact on customer services has been phenomenal. We have now entered Phase 2 which is a very exciting part of the journey. We are, again, leveraging multiple automation technologies including Microsoft Power Platform and UiPath to build a customer facing Portal, for clients to self-serve on, where UiPath robots can transact actions against core internal legacy applications this is game changing for both Webbeds and their customers.