Business process automation can be approached in many ways. In the case of Santander and its Multichannel Communication Center (MCK), we decided to automate a step that occurs in many processes, namely sending correspondence to customers – confirmations, documents, attachments, etc. Thanks to the automation of a common part of many processes, the bank saved a lot of time and money on handling them.
Santander Bank's Multichannel Communication Center is a remote customer contact center. The team handles phone calls, video calls, Messenger, e-mail, chat, and the Santi chatbot. They communicate with individual and corporate customers in Polish, English, Ukrainian, and sign language. Every day they handle thousands of cases that require relevant documents.
The changes began when a new specialist joined the banking team and observed that sending documents was not sufficiently automated. She learned about Eximee from colleagues responsible for the architecture of the IT system at Santander, who had been using the platform for quite some time.
Goal
The bank wanted to:
To achieve the goal, we structured and automated a step occurring in many business processes, namely sending documents to customers.
We configured the Eximee Dashboard to the bank's specific needs. The system now prompts employees on:
We started with research and analyzing the needs of staff who handle sending documents to customers on a daily basis. Next, we mapped the requirements and planned their implementation in particular iterations. In each subsequent iteration, we addressed the client's current needs.
We spoke with the bank's business and platform users, gathered feedback from advisors, and reviewed ideas and prototypes with them.
The Eximee team works under a continuous discovery approach, which means that once the system was launched, we gathered user feedback to make improvements (in agreement with Release Management at the bank, of course).
In consultation with the bank, we decided we would not automate an MVP of the end-to-end process because the problem lay in a step common for many different processes, i.e., sending documents.
Unifying identical steps occurring in many processes is a good practice. One of the advantages of this approach is a significant cost reduction – the repetitive step is automated once, so the teams responsible for particular processes do not duplicate the work, which also prevents siloing.
The document distribution process was tested in different contexts, scenarios, and all channels.
One of the biggest technical challenges in the project was compiling the sets of documents that should be delivered to a customer in a given process. Currently, the second iteration of the configuration mechanism is implemented in the bank, and we are working on the third, as we see room for improvement.
Any mistake in a document sent to a customer (e.g., lack of information on the monthly card maintenance fee) can be grounds for challenging the terms of an agreement with the bank. Therefore, it was critical to ensure meticulous validation of documents and the variables they contain.
Another challenge in the project was to aggregate case status information from all channels in one place.
The MCK incorporates various channels such as phone calls, video calls, and chat. A customer can communicate with the bank about their case using the channel they find most convenient at a given moment. Therefore, a consultant who serves the customer must have an overview of the entire history of interactions in all channels.
On the one hand, this solution provides a consistent experience for customers and improves the quality of service across channels, and on the other hand, it has a positive impact on the employee experience.
Eximee Case Repository collects information from all channels and applications, including external and third-party systems. The acquired data on customer cases feeds screens for bank employees (e.g., views in the Eximee Case Management module or third-party applications) and for the customers (e.g., in mobile banking). It allows the bank to keep statistics on traffic in particular channels, the popularity of each product, etc.
The Eximee platform can integrate with any bank or third-party system thanks to its API and open architecture. This project required integration with systems such as:
Eximee modules we used:
We successfully completed the first phase of the project in Q1 2023. The process functions in the Multichannel Contact Center and will be extended to the bank's branch offices.
The subsequent phase could involve automating specific customer instructions, with priorities established through the analysis of data on automated document distribution. These priorities would likely be customer instructions generating most work. Automating such processes would significantly reduce the workload for bank employees.
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