“It’s like going from paper to computers” – How Fiserv’s contact center halved average handle time with UiPath Apps

From great automations to awesome automation apps

It started with a simple idea for Sharbs: Fiserv’s automations are good, but how can we make them great?

Sharbs Shaaya is the Director of Intelligent Process Automation Solutions Architecture at global financial technology services provider, Fiserv.

A long-time UiPath customer, their contact center already used UiPath Forms to considerably improve average handle time (AHT) for Fiserv’s customers and call center agents.

“So, the initial solution was attended bots along with forms, and it did help a lot. It reduced it (average handle time) upwards of 50 to 60%”

Things were going well, but a new opportunity emerged in 2019 when UiPath Apps, a tool for helping automations teams build beautiful interfaces for their automations, launched.

“When Apps became available, we started looking at that. And once we built our first app, we quickly decided to shift everything off Forms, put it in Apps, and then execute processes there.”

According to Star, a Contact Center Agent at Fiserv, the impact of UiPath Apps was immediate:

A very lengthy process was automated. I compare it to the 90s when we had no computers and everything was documented on paper. Life before this automation was tedious, extraneous, and tiresome. But just like in the 2000s when the transition to computers cut out the lengthy process of paper documentation, when we received the bot, it was like going from paper to computers all over again. The bot and app cut my work in half, which allows me to have more breathing room, focus more on serving our clients, and handle other daily responsibilities.

Results

For Fiserv’s automation center of excellence (CoE), Apps unlocked new use cases to engage the broader business.

More than 100 agents benefit from automation at Fiserv today, including Curtis, an agent who's worked at Fiserv for more than two years.

“Before the bot came along, note taking in the system was time consuming. There was a lot of ACW [after call work] due to having to make cases for each exception. Overall, the app is a great system to work with as it helps customers’ turnaround time when it comes to processing payments and unfreezing profiles."

Nobody wants to log in dozens of times a day

The new automation-powered app made agents significantly more productive.

So it's really efficient for them. They go from one case to another quickly. And we've seen that in the metrics as well, right? One person before automation, maybe they were doing maybe 20, 25 cases a day. Now they're doing 40, 45, 50 cases. So the number of cases that they handle went up, the time it takes to process them went down and customer service improves.

This drive for efficiency isn’t just a buzzword; it has very practical implications on the work lives of agents.

“The problem that we solved initially was that for every call agents have to take account information and payment info.

And while they were doing that, the customer's waiting on the phone for them to finish. So that was the initial problem—that call was taking anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, and a lot of that was just wasted time transferring data from one place to another.”

Even password management, which at first glance might seem trivial, became easier for agents with UiPath Apps.

“Agents have a lot of user names and passwords. All these applications, they're not all connected through the same domain. They don't all go through Active Directory. Agents had to navigate three or four applications, log into that app, figure out ‘which username is this again? Which password is this?’”

Note-taking also saw improvements.

“Instead of jotting down the notes of that account on a separate page or a notepad, agents put those notes in the app itself. Once they fill the app out with all the required information, the next steps are for the bot. At that point, the agents just make sure the payment goes through.”

Elevating the agent and customer experience

Typically, when people hear about automation, their first concern is job security. But at Fiserv Sharbs reports that agents want more automation.

We don't get much negative feedback, which is a good thing. It means the technology is working for them.

Imagine opening a window, minimizing it, taking that data, opening another app, maximizing it, putting data in there, minimizing that window. Some agents could do it in two minutes. Some would take ten. But it was very manual. Many windows, many logins, it was just a pain.

Automation is even having an impact on how Fiserv trains and retains talent. While there were always a few agents who knew keyboard shortcuts and could seemingly move at the “speed of a bot,” everyone had their own way of doing things. This made training new staff on best practices and standardizing how work gets done difficult.

 ”Prior to automation, training meant showing your shortcuts and how you shift from window to window…how you personally save your user name and passwords. With automation, we just show them how to log in to the tool UiPath Apps. They don’t have to learn any particular shortcuts. The training is much simpler, there’s a lot less information to process as a newcomer.”

Fiserv’s citizen developer program “lifts off” with Automation Launchpad

Fiserv is also leveraging UiPath Apps to grow a community of citizen developers. Built atop UiPath Apps, Automation Launchpad is a solution for CoE leads who want to help their teammates navigate automation training, news, and rewards.

So, the purpose of Launchpad wasn't to automate a business process. We wanted to provide a single landing page for users that are interested in learning about RPA and learning about our CoE. Some learners may need attended bots that other people have built automations for, or maybe they want to build something for themselves.

Having that single location for the CoE didn’t really exist before Launchpad. We had emails, names, you could reach out to a mailbox. That works, but it's not very pretty. It requires someone on the receiving end to take that and schedule a call and get that content ready.

Launchpad helps us get to those people and make the automation program more marketable and memorable. It made it pretty, nice, and simple.

Fiserv uses Automation Launchpad to build momentum for their automation community.

“Our learners can get best practices on how to ideate, review, and publish automations. Launchpad is where you get all the information. These are the requirements, this is how the program works, this is maybe the cost associated with it, and here are some examples, right? Success stories, demos, things like that. Once you go through that training you can now submit an automation idea. And start building things. And there’s an integration with Launchpad and Automation Hub. You can put in your ideas in Automation Hub, the metrics around your process, your use case, etc.

We can also start saying, ‘we see that maybe you’re working with ServiceNow, right? Hey, we've built such and such UiPath automations involving ServiceNow. Here are some tips and maybe some code that you can reuse.'”

Leaders also love Launchpad because it gives them a one stop shop for keeping up with the automation program’s progress and identifying/rewarding key stakeholders who are driving the initiative forward.

“Launchpad is for leaders as well, right? I know a lot of risks and questions that come to mind for leaders like security. Like how do you govern, how do you keep automations from going out of control? And the answer is Launchpad. It gives leaders that governance visibility as well. We're showing things like top users in Automation Hub for people that submitted the most ideas. We have things from the Orchestrator such as processes with the highest number of jobs executed.”

What's Next for Fiserv + UiPath?

With the success of UiPath Apps in the contact center and Automation Launchpad for growing a citizen developer community, Sharbs is looking forward to training more people how to not only use apps and automations, but also build them.

For Sharbs, automation is integral to building delightful experiences for both customers and agents. “What gets me excited is innovating and solving large problems throughout the organization.”

We can’t wait to see what Fiserv builds next!