“We now run highly efficient and fully automated robotic processes. No one wants to go back to watching and fixing robots.”
Klaus Paul, Senior Manager, Simplification
AI-Powered Orchestration and Automated Operations has delivered resilient automations while avoiding significant costs -- ensuring operations keeps pace with O2 Telefónica's growth.
O2 Telefónica in Germany has been building out its RPA resilience for a decade, but it is only since 2019 that it has endured sustainable growth in its robotics. Determined to achieve customer excellence through seamless process automation, one of Germany’s leading telecommunications companies started a comprehensive modernization process and turned to C TWO to overcome some of its biggest RPA challenges.
O2 Telefonica’s road to RPA excellence
O2 Telefónica embarked on its RPA journey in 2012 with a tool that was eventually replaced in 2019 by an enterprise solution, Blue Prism. This was implemented organization-wide in 2020.
O2 Telefónica saw instant value by implementing Blue Prism and RPA started to gain momentum within teams across the organization. As the number of customer and service interactions that the company needed to process quickly grew to over 20,000 per day, the operationalization of bot management became more and more challenging.
To meet the SLAs of each transaction, O2 Telefonica had to manually swap and re-prioritize several times per day according to demand. In addition, the robots were partly suffering from resilience issues. The company therefore had employed four people full-time whose sole focus was to monitor the robot operations from 8-6 daily to ensure SLAs were met and to triage and repair any process or system failures—which meant robots sat idle and were unproductive anytime the team wasn’t in the office, including evenings and weekends.
“We wanted to create more automated processes to become more efficient. Because before, we had four employees providing full-time coverage of tasks that should have been automated, such as monitoring, scheduling, and prioritization, in case of process failure. This was a waste of resources from a commercial perspective, as these team members could have been focusing on other value-driving tasks”, says Klaus Paul.
When failures did occur, each one would take at least 5-10 minutes to rectify. Multiply this out over the course of a week and they were facing significant scheduling impacts. Colleagues needed to reprioritize and reschedule tasks to avoid disruptions and dissatisfied stakeholders.
With the number of daily transactions growing steadily, O2 Telefónica’s RPA team knew they needed to find a way to stabilize and scale their infrastructure at the same time. After significant research and consulting with peers, they chose C TWO.
Seamless automation
C TWO was implemented in 2021, and one of the first resulting actions taken by O2 Telefónica’s RPA team was to retrain the four employees that were previously tasked with monitoring bots as developers, enabling them to add value to other parts of the business. This was made possible by C TWO’s Automated Operations functionality that ensures automations ‘just work’ by leveraging AI-powered tools that constantly check for issues and automatically resolve 90% of L1 & L2 failures. The O2 Telefónica team no longer needed to worry about unpredictable volumes because C TWO dynamically orchestrates work queues to prioritize processes and meet business deadlines.
“We have established a better monitoring process. With C TWO, if something goes wrong or a bot fails and the C TWO system cannot automatically resolve it, we get alerted instantly. This means that we don’t have to task teammates with round-the-clock monitoring. Everything is seamless”, says Klaus Paul.
Although employees do still need to be on hand to support in the event of a major failure, they’re no longer on high alert or in a constant state of troubleshooting. Instead, they’re focused on driving business value by optimizing O2 Telefónica’s RPA processes.
Adding resilience to boost efficiency
Before C TWO, O2 Telefónica needed to handle resiliency issues across the RPA estate. Due to reboots and software updates, weekly downtime would last between 30 minutes and an hour. Furthermore, manual processes needed to be handled.
With C TWO in place, failures occur less frequently and take seconds to rectify rather than up to 10 minutes. Additionally, O2 Telefónica, with C TWO, can automatically incorporate downtime through AI-powered orchestration – using non-peak hours to proactively sweat assets. The team no longer needs to spend valuable time planning and structuring schedules around reboots and infrastructure upgrades.
“We’re in a much better position with C TWO in terms of robot reliability. We can now handle in less than five minutes what previously would have required several hours of planning and execution for system downtime. We have greater control of our robots which has significantly increased our output,” says Klaus Paul.
Overall, the enhancements to both automation and infrastructure made possible by C TWO have increased automated interaction volumes from 20,000 per day to more than 100,000 without increasing their digital workforce or infrastructure footprint. This number is rising by the day as O2 Telefónica has won additional customers over time and therefore deals with more customer requests. They’re also handling more queue items, which rose from around 300,000 per month in January 2024 to more than 1.4m per month from March 2024 onwards.
The RPA team can now grow with confidence in the knowledge that their C TWO deployment can scale with them, seamlessly and without unplanned interruptions.
“With C TWO, we have much more confidence in our RPA. We can automate processes regardless of criticality.”
Exceeding customer expectations
C TWO isn’t just making a difference internally. It’s also helping O2 Telefónica to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
The company processes several thousand customer telephone number change requests each month. Although O2 Telefónica introduced self-service post-RPA implementation, requests were still required to be manually sent to the customer service team.
This all changed with an improved automation process and the help of C TWO’s AI-powered orchestration.
“With C TWO, we can set automated triggers and operate based on SLAs. This means that when a customer sends a change request, C TWO imports the process and immediately queues it for action based on our SLA. No matter when a change request comes in, it’s processed within three minutes. That’s a huge efficiency gain for us”, says Klaus Paul. This is also a win from a customer experience perspective for O2 Telefónica because their customers no longer have to wait several days for their change requests to be actioned.
Ultimately, the C TWO platform has enabled O2 Telefónica’s RPA function to keep pace with its growth and avoid significant costs which can be re-invested into other value-driving areas of the business, all while benefitting from a solid foundation upon which the company can build a robust automation pipeline.
About
O2 Telefónica is a leading full-service provider of telecommunications services for consumers and business customers in Germany. O2 Telefónica serves more than 45 million mobile lines.
Industry: Telecommunications
