The Problem

Being a digital native tech company that provides solutions in the area of streamlining operations and eliminating overhead by hyperautomating core business processes, they decided to automate the majority of their internal processes to out-compete incumbents and grow profitability.

Areas of Interest

• Account management and Internal CRM. With a complex on-boarding process for new customers, they needed to automate account creation and have a central management solution for new users, temporary users (troubleshooting), and new accounts with access to information about each account (including which systems customers use, how many users they have, and contractual information).
• Billing and business dashboard. They decided to automate all of their billing and created a dashboard to aggregate software usage across different domains and providers. To compete with companies that have more resources, they needed to spend less time on billing and needed a dashboard that displayed trends and helped identify issues.
• Ticketing and customer support. They wanted to automate customer ticket tracking and triage based on the issue noted, the project manager involved, and the level of support specified in the contract.
• Lead qualification. They needed an automated system for managing website forms that would notify the team when lead submits a form and follow up with the lead (place them into a drip campaign specific to the form they filled out and their status as a lead).

Solution Identification

• Leaders discussed how internal processes could be automated and coordinated across teams, with an emphasis on building better experiences for employees and customers. With so many complex processes, they wanted a unified platform where the majority of their team could be trained and create solutions quickly.

Vendor Selection Criteria

• Highly configurable. They needed a highly flexible and configurable platform since they intended to create custom billing dashboards, host CRM data, perform trend analysis, and connect these systems to their existing software (including giving it access to their own product and data they created).
• Open architecture. With the amount of processes and departments involved, they needed completely open architecture that allowed them to create their own integrations and connect with any other solutions (for current solutions and future-proofing their purchase).
• Truly Omnichannel.
• No-code with a focus on User Experience. They needed a platform that could enable everyone in the company to iterate, irrespective of ability to write code or technical prowess. They also wanted a solution that prioritized UX with best practices baked in.
• Ability to modify roadmap. They were looking for a platform that offered configurable components so that their developers could build improvements, integrations, automation, and logic without having to wait on the vendor’s roadmap.
• Open to Bake-Offs. Irrespective of their own domain expertise, they needed to be sure they were evaluating vendors that could help them see and experience firsthand that their platform could be used by non-developers and quickly to solve their problems.

Vendor Selection Process

• They had a long list of requirements for automating core processes, and decided to quickly narrow the list and start testing and building. So that they conducted co-creating sessions with top 3 vendors and requested Bake Offs and POCs.
• The team participated in the co-creations, presented their findings to senior management with department heads present. The recommended vendor selection was a clear winner because many platforms were unable to deliver this scale and flexibility, while meeting all of the criteria.

Rollout

• Performed agile planning to start with small scale acceptance. Their plan was to enable iterative adoption across the organization, so they started by training most of the company on the platform. Employees were encouraged to submit requests and consider how it could be used in their department.
• Created teams within business units. They created department based scrum and scrum-of-scrums teams to bring all of the pieces together across departments.
• Started with small initial prototypes. Started with small, simple bots specific to individual departments, and then improved by allowing bots to communicate across departments (e.g. the billing bot needed to access contractual information from the account/CRM bot).

Current Status

• 6 solutions in production that they refer to as their “core bots” as their business is run on these solutions.
• ~30 solutions being used by various teams.
• Department bots initial rollout complete and now they are working on interdepartmental bots.
• Core bot team (10 people) overseeing rollout with flexible resourcing and weekly meetings to share progress.
• They estimate that using OneReach.ai has automated the work of around 10 full time employees.