Swinton initiated a large-scale transformation project focused on streamlining workflows and ensuring the contact center teams are both high-performance and engaged.
This initiative was intended to move the contact center away from operating several in-house, customized software platforms for its processes toward a single market-leading, comprehensive third-party workforce management (WFM) solution. Swinton set itself the ambitious target of accomplishing this in the record time of nine months.
The company’s numerous bespoke business processes were expected to pose a challenge for standard WFM functionalities. This was exacerbated by the constrained timescale in which to deliver. Therefore, the team heading up the transformation program decided to resolve the issue by improving, simplifying and automating processes.
In order to achieve the automation and simplification, Swinton adopted a robotic process automation strategy. This included the deployment of both attended and unattended robots to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks in the various contact center workflows.
THE SOLUTION
Swinton implemented attended automation to provide agents with assistance in handling new processes and to guide them through customer journeys. This was particularly important in light of the transformation program the company adopted for greater coherence and consistency. It facilitated improvements in quality, compliance, and time spent addressing customer issues.
This freed agents and managers from routine tasks that took up time and ensured greater consistency, by eliminating the risk of human error.
While the automation program assisted the contact center agents, the results were not meeting the company’s business goals. After examining the process and drafting lessons learned, Swinton took several steps to improve the outcomes.
Upgrading and Understanding
The first step Swinton took was upgrading to the latest version of NICE Advanced Process Automation (APA). This resolved some of infrastructure issues and extended the toolkit available to provide solutions for the contact center.
The next step was to improve collaboration with the frontline staff to ensure that the customized APA solutions met real-world needs. To this end, the company assigned contact center representatives to work directly with the development team to help build, test, and learn. They worked with their colleagues to identify needs, gather ideas, promote attended automation workflows, and drive and embed training.
The feedback helped continually improve the development of the revamped automation program. It was launched with a phased, bi-weekly approach across the contact center. Moreover, the release cycle allowed additional customization based on implementation, further tailoring the automation for Swinton employees.
Eventually, the new automation program was given an in-house name in a contest among the employees. It was christened “Winston” - a creative play on the name to form an anagram of Swinton.
A Great Success All Around
The results of the extensive customisation were both impressive and evident. The effects were felt by customers and employees, as well as manifesting as business savings and measurable performance improvements.
With attended automation, contact center agents were given the right information at the right time along a customer’s journey. This reduced hold and wrap time, shortening calls by over 50 seconds each on average. New business sales calls were almost 3 minutes. Financially, this equated to cost savings of 40 FTE. To put it another way, the contact center capacity was increased to handle an extra 7,781 calls per month.
The contact center employees expressed positive feedback regarding the attended automation. Swinton also saw increased engagement among its employees after implementing the NICE APA-driven automation program. The company CEO also praised the program in his updates to colleagues.
Customers also provided positive feedback, in the form of an increase of 11% in NPS (from 32 to 43). The improvement was clearly linked to agents having the right information and next-best-action guidance at their fingertips, as they were able to focus more on the quality of their interactions, rather than on procedural issues and finding basic customer information.
Enhance and Add Customized Automation
Swinton’s APA-driven automation was praised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the regulator for financial services firms and financial markets in the United Kingdom. The FCA noted its positive effect on the frontline personnel at the contact center.
Swinton is planning to continue engaging its contact center personnel, ensuring the automation remains valuable and relevant for them. The company intends to enhance its contact center further by adding additional automated features that will help its agents deliver outstanding customer service.
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ABOUT
Swinton Group is a United Kingdom-based insurance retailer established in 1957, with a network of branches across the country. It offers a wide range of insurance products, including vehicle, home, commercial, taxi, and more, as well as services such as coverage for road service and the like.
The company operates a contact center in Manchester, England, employing 450 frontline agents (out of over 1,000 employees overall). The agents handle an annual contact volume of about 2.4 million.
