Digital Workers Help Renew Millions of Customer Contracts Each Year at Telefónica

Telefónica is Germany’s largest telecommunications company, currently servicing more than 42 million cell phone connections. Many of those connections are made possible through a contract. And contracts need to be regularly renewed. Telefónica is updating thousands of contracts every week. Optimizing this process was a priority. 

Challenge

Telefonica has 23 million customers with fixed-term contracts, and renewing millions of these contracts on a regular basis is an operational challenge. When customers called in to renew their contract by phone, agents took the customers’ information and then talked through various options. Once this conversation was complete the agent signed the customer up to a new or updated contract. However, this was only half the process. Agents then had to manually input the information into the system to create the new contract. 

Solution

Telefónica deployed a Blue Prism intelligent digital workforce to handle the back-end contract information entry. This freed up agents to spend more time with customers discussing their renewal options. After speaking with the customer, the agent simply enters the customer feedback into a web-based form. Digital workers take it from there, switching between different applications, and completing the contract renewal. 

The time to renew a contract has been slashed in half. In fact, on average, Telefónica is saving three minutes per renewal. Extrapolated over thousands of renewals per week, this represents more than 150,000 minutes returned to the business every month.