Case Study: TIM Brasil (TIM)

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

With a focus on investing in innovation and in the quality of its network, services and customer support, TIM has been automating certain kinds of processes at its contact centers for some time. However, in-house automation development was limited to those elements of the workflow that could be easily represented in plain code.

The practical limitations were due to the fact that TIM was automating with open source solutions. This placed significant demands on the company’s development teams to create execution flows and basic decision logics that were both feasible and promoted actual efficiencies.

Within a short time of implementing limited automation solutions, the company’s business and technical teams noted many additional opportunities to increase productivity and reduce errors with more extensive automation. TIM identified a high demand for robotic process automations (RPA) both in the back office and the front office, but did not have the tools to provide sufficiently flexible, fast and comprehensive solutions.

THE SOLUTION

With a focus on investing in innovation and in the quality of its network, services and customer support, TIM has been automating certain kinds of processes at its contact centers for some time. However, in-house automation development was limited to those elements of the workflow that could be easily represented in plain code.

The practical limitations were due to the fact that TIM was automating with open source solutions. This placed significant demands on the company’s development teams to create execution flows and basic decision logics that were both feasible and promoted actual efficiencies.

Within a short time of implementing limited automation solutions, the company’s business and technical teams noted many additional opportunities to increase productivity and reduce errors with more extensive automation. TIM identified a high demand for robotic process automations (RPA) both in the back office and the front office, but did not have the tools to provide sufficiently flexible, fast and comprehensive solutions.

Easier to Develop and Test

The NiCE Desktop Automation (DA) development environment makes designing an end-to-end automation faster and easier. The built-in Workflow feature uses visualization of tasks and rules, rather than coding and educated guesswork, allowing TIM developers to better see their proposed procedural changes in context.

End-user interface design is also easier, with an embedded feature of the NiCE DA solution providing WYSIWYG or HTML coding options. This approach, simpler than the previous plain-code-based method, speeds up the customization process and improves the utility of the end result.

A related design process optimization within NiCE DA is its sophisticated screen capture. This allows TIM developers to instantly see what visible elements of the application screen can be changed, and what behind the scenes effects those changes would have.

With those advanced design features, the TIM team was able to implement a number of small pilot runs of the NiCE DA solution. This allowed them to test different capabilities and deployment possibilities on a controlled scale, ensuring that the broader implementation would perform as desired and expected.

TIM ultimately deployed an unattended automation for its contact centers. The customized robot integrates data from a workflow platform for judicial cases and automatically creates files (“tickets”) in the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) program.

More Accurate Work in Less Time

With NiCE DA, TIM designed and deployed three robots into its judicial case workflow. The company quickly found that a single robot produces the same work product as six employees executing the same activity. In practice, this means that the three TIM robots have been processing 1,100 case tickets daily, which is the equivalent of what 26 full-time employees could theoretically handle.

Another way to look at it is that case handle time was reduced by 60%, from 10 to 4 minutes. Moreover, the robots need no breaks or time off, helping TIM achieve 24/7, year-round case processing.

In addition to the increase in productivity, the automation of routine processes has led to a 10-point reduction in errors. Initially, up to 13% of the judicial case files shared with TIM for CRM processing were missing information and led to rejection of the associated tickets. This lack of precision on the part of third-party law firms was responsible for an increase in the back-office workload at TIM that could cause a loss in team productivity of almost 10 percent. After a period of adjustment, ticket refusal rates decreased to 2 or 3%.

With reduced errors and greater productivity, TIM realized a baseline annual savings of almost $300,000 (US) just from the single, limited deployment of NiCE DA robots.

Built-in Benefit for Future Initiatives

Another benefit of the NiCE DA process, which will serve TIM well going forward, is the consolidated, enterprise-wide alignment of applied business rules. The completely scalable and customizable nature of the NiCE robots will allow for expanding automation while maintaining coherent policies across all company activities.

As of now, TIM has already begun total or partial automation of other steps in the judicial case processing workflow. There are also several initiatives on the table to automate more areas of both the back and front office at all the TIM contact centers.