Capita
International professional services company streamlines a complex, multistakeholder process, saving 750 labor hours in a single year.
The challenge
Capita, a leading provider of business process outsourcing in the areas of customer care, consulting and digital services across Europe, faced a unique challenge. Every year, a customer, a German utility provider, would send their own customers product change offers by way of a postcard. If the customer elected to make changes, they would mark those changes on the postcard and return it to Capita, who then processed the change request.
Capita employees scanned each postcard and placed change requests in the utility provider’s system queue. From there, customer service staff manually entered the product change into the appropriate SAP system, checking if the offer was valid or expired. Customer service activated valid offers in the SAP system, completing the product change.
Even though all the necessary information was already available in the system, and the only thing customer service had to do was compare each postcard with the SAP data record, this was a time-consuming and challenging process. Furthermore, process volumes were unevenly distributed, which caused severe resource bottlenecks at peak times. In the worst-case scenario, order changes negatively affected the SLAs of other customer service processes.
Capita wanted to solve this challenge through automation, but also needed to maintain postcard distribution, since many older customers did not have email addresses or access to the online customer portal. In addition, their customer, the utility provider, used different types of product change cards and recognized them all as valid, which increased the average handling time of product change requests.
The solution
Capita reached out to Hyland to help them find a solution. Working together, the two companies developed a robotic process automation (RPA) solution to help Capita automate much of its paper-based order change process. RPA is an ideal solution for business processes that require human intervention because it replicates many of the activities done by human workers. For example, data entry, data validation and ticket routing can all be completed by software robots. When RPA is combined with a product that intelligently captures paper-based data and converts it to structured data, the entire data intake process can be automated.
As a first step to automating order change processing, Capita’s marketing team introduced a standardized product change card. Now, Hyland RPA scans the incoming product change card and parses the content using OCR, verifies the customer, transfers the change data to the correct SAP service and, depending on the result, closes the ticket or routes it to an employee in case of an exception.
Since the process runs across departments, Capita’s IT department also created an SAP service to receive the required information from the RPA solution, activate the product change and send a response back to the solution. This process increased performance and reduced errors.
Learn more | Business Process Management
RPA integration is part of our transformation strategy, which enables us to offer the right mix of services with the right solutions and capabilities for each specific need and case.
— Ronak Patel, Transformation Manager, Capita Europe
The benefits
Simplified complexity: A complex, multisystem, multistakeholder process was streamlined and brought into a single workflow using RPA. Capita could then view the performance of the RPA solution from a single dashboard.
More efficient use of data: During the implementation, large data streams were pulled into more efficient handling processes, dramatically increasing the speed with which order changes were processed.
Time saved: As a result of the automation of order change processing, Capita saved an estimated 750 labor hours in its first year of implementation.
Error reduction: As part of the streamlined and improved process, Capita recorded a lower error rate in order changes than previously experienced.