Discerning shoppers of luxury clothing, shoes and accessories peruse the hottest fashions at a European online retailer. The company offers selections from hundreds of the world’s most coveted designer brands and delivers a unique shopping experience to millions of shoppers each month through various channels. The retailer’s innovative spirit is reflected in both their product offerings and business practices. To help deliver a premium customer experience, they partnered with a team of SS&C Blue Prism digital workers running in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

The Challenge: Inefficient Customer Return Process

The retailer ships luxury goods to more than 150 countries. Each shipment includes the item, a receipt and a return label — and the customer must present all three for item returns. Customers often lose or discard this paperwork, so they contact the customer care team to help facilitate the return. Reprinting paperwork is a labor-intensive process. Employees must access multiple platforms and spend 10 minutes on each request; this is time-consuming, considering thousands of requests come in each month. Employees juggle multiple tasks, so a backlog often builds up, which leads to a delay for customers.

Since shoppers are buying luxury brands, they expect luxury service. The company wanted to deliver a superior customer experience without hiring teams of temporary staff to handle spikes in volume.

The Solution: Deploy Digital Workers to Quickly Respond to Customer Requests

The company set out to improve operational efficiency using intelligent automation (IA). They aimed to quickly reduce employees’ repetitive tasks, so they needed to rapidly scale their IA program. The AWS cloud environment offered them the best possible solution due to the ability to add resources in a fraction of the time it would take to do so in their own data center. The automation team got their IA program up and running very quickly. With SS&C Blue Prism running in an AWS environment, the team is self-sufficient and can allocate additional resources in a matter of weeks, rather than waiting months for IT to complete the work. They have the flexibility to quickly replicate runtime resources and aren’t required to go to IT for sign-offs or approvals.

Digital workers are now tasked with completing the return label process. They receive return requests and quickly issue duplicate labels to customers. They’ve eliminated the backlog and helped the retailer exceed their service level agreement (SLA) to customers. Employees are focused on building valuable customer relationships and solving complicated queries, rather than reprinting return labels. And the company no longer needs to hire temporary staff, which is a significant cost saving.

Next, the company plans to further unify its workforce, blending digital and human workers seamlessly. They’d like to increase AI chat capabilities to help reduce human-in-the-loop requests.

The company keeps a close eye on its infrastructure, utilizing Amazon System Manager and Amazon EventBridge for health and configuration monitoring. They plan to use these tools to help the network self-heal and access Amazon’s machine learning (ML) capabilities to help process unstructured data.