BLUE PRISM: Intelligent automation in telecommunications

Jann Gorske is Blue Prism’s North America Senior Director , Practice Leader  Telecommunications and Utilities, with a heavy focus on contact centre transformation. 

Blue Prism is known as one of the founders of robotic process automation (RPA) and the company is leading Intelligent Automation (IA) innovation with the digital workforce in terms of a source of labour, which really attracted Gorske to join the cause. 

Not only did the pandemic provide amplified urgency of accelerated reinvention, but it provided a blueprint for a faster,  leaner new operating model made possible rapidly shifting behaviours. 

According to Gorske, Telcos have put every aspect of that human interaction front and centre: “As so much of it moved online and forced their staff  to work from home, we supplemented that human workforce with our digital workforce to transform the end to end workflow including handling of manual repetitive tasks. Blue Prism have formed strong partnerships with Telcos including Telefonica and Bell Canada, leaders in their respective geographical areas of Spain and Canada. 

Gorske added in regards to Bell: “When its end customers contact Bell Canada, it's a moment of truth, right? We've begun automating those manual taks , that allows agents to handle more complex interactions and focus on selling additional services. Those efficient, shorter transactions positively impact the customer experience and ultimately impact shareholder value.” 

Contact centres are a key driver in terms of how they build their brand recognition.

“How do we actually change that interaction so that we can meet customers where they're at? It's the old logistical approach of the right person , right information at the right time, as a key differentiator in terms of customer satisfaction ). At Bell, we focus on that agent experience to increase its speed to proficiency, helping to build their  confidence to deliver exceptional customer experiences,” said Gorske.

The industry has been hit by labour shortage, coupled with historical agent burnout in contact centres, with limitations in training.

“The pandemic became a forcing function, not just from the instant shift to a full remote workforce, to which all businesses had to adopt, but the larger driving force was the need to recruit and onboard agents to meet the volume increase that occurred.”

“What we've done from an intelligent automation and implementation perspective, is to significantly reduce training time from weeks to days. In addition, developed a ‘single pane of glass’ user interface, which provides the agent with a 360 degree view of the customer. This is where we're really focused and seeing significant results back to our customers,” he said.

Blue Prism is focused on taking back office features and functions and bringing them to the front office. By creating that access to data and in an intelligent way, usable data, the technology is able to eliminate repetitive tasks and human error.

“It is not just thinking about how to solve the question as quickly as possible, but how do I answer the question the first time and not just solve a problem, but actually move the customer forward?”

By creating that circle of continuous improvement, intelligent collaboration tools are trending within these same contact centres to meet the needs of connecting agents, colleagues, and supervisors.

In response to the question of IA replacing staff with things like chatbots, Gorske suggests that: “IA has created a platform to re-deploy human assets and transform how business is down today. ”

When it comes to a successful automation journey, Gorske insists Blue Prism is grown by business leaders who understand the existing operational challenges, the workflows and demands, and can tell where automation will have the greatest impact to deliver business outcomes.

“The strategy and the vision need to be aligned to align to the wider business needs, rather than just focusing on short term tactical type of activities to remove and develop efficiencies. We provide a pivotal and sustaining, enterprise-grade scale programme. We call it a ‘centre of excellence’,” concludes Gorske.