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_{About Devoli}

Devoli is New Zealand’s wholesale telco disruptor, providing telecommunications solutions and support to customers and their end users. The company’s customers include leading retailers such as Contact Energy, Nova Energy and Pulse Energy, managed service providers and IT resellers.

Having grown rapidly to revenues of more than $100 million a year, Devoli provides a powerful, class-leading telco enablement software platform and high performance network to more than 350 service providers, supporting more than 140,000 user connections across New Zealand and Australia. Its operating model allows businesses to bundle telco services easily, and enables new market entrants to scale quickly.

Telco disruptor doubles down on RPA CoE to elevate customer service and ensure success with Automation

_Background

When Devoli was first established, the team knew the only way it could compete effectively and grow fast was by using automation. With a goal to ‘automate everything’ from the get-go, Devoli’s team of 12 delivered more like a team of 50.

Sixteen years on, it’s still using technology to grow, drive great customer experience, and improve efficiency and productivity.

“Devoli was doing RPA before RPA
became popular,” says Blair Woodbury,
Devoli Chief Financial Officer. “Then as we
grew, we realised we couldn’t keep using
robotic process automation as bits of
string to hold things together, so we
invested in developing a classic platform
solution.”

The platform evolved to meet future customer needs, but Woodbury is open that over time, Devoli’s RPA expertise had declined.

“We needed to rebuild it in a structured way, so it wasn’t just one or two individuals, but an organisational capability we would use to deliver great outcomes for customers. We wanted to get back to that multiplicative effect and make our current team of 50 people look like 500.”

So the company called in New Zealand automation and artificial intelligence specialists, Quanton.

Devoli had three key goals. Number one was to make the Customer Success team of 11 feel like a team of 100, using automation to manage repeatable tasks and freeing up humans to focus on more complex, thought-based work – something that would also improve customer experience. RPA was also to be used in the background for back-office processes, including finance tasks – something Woodbury says was purely cost-savings based. The third goal was to invest in upskilling their team. While Devoli has classic software capabilities, the company wanted to add in more automation capabilities such as RPA and AI.

“As a former consultant, I know a lot of consultants are contractors who will come in, do a job and fix it. However, when they leave you haven’t got any skills, or processes, so you have to get the contractors back or hire someone to fill the role.

“Quanton is a bit different”, Woodbury says. “While they can do that if you want, their preferred model is to lift the capability of the organisation, putting in the skills and capabilities which will exist once they leave. That’s why we’re happy to work with them.”

Quanton deployed a typical coaching model, Woodbury says.

_{Bring in the bots}

Under Quanton’s guidance, Devoli has deployed four RPA bots across three processes within its Customer Success function, and one in Billing.

As a telco wholesaler, Devoli provides broadband services from local fibre companies (LFCs) such as Chorus, Tuatahi First Fibre, Enable and NorthPower, to retailers such as Contact Energy, Nova, Pulse and Simply Broadband, and managed service providers. When customers of those retailers and managed service providers experience a broadband issue, they contact their provider who does the initial troubleshooting. If the fault lies with the LFC, a call needs to be logged with them via Devoli’s platforms.

“They would previously call us out of hours to have us log faults, but in certain circumstances there could be a delay until the next business hour for us to do so, and potentially a charge for urgent resolution” says Leah Middleton, Head of Customer Success at Devoli.

“With automation they’re now able to log faults through the system as they happen, whether it’s 2pm Saturday, or 1am Thursday, and that secures the next available tech, rather than them waiting until LFC business hours resume and going into the queue for a tech.”

There’s an added bonus for Devoli staff.

Middleton had a staff member assigned to check for tickets logged on every public holiday and weekend over Christmas – including Christmas day itself.

“Now it’s all automated and we don’t need anyone logging in – they can enjoy their family celebrations instead.”

An automation running for one LFC – Tuatahi First Fibre – processed 922 tickets in its first three months, freeing staff from having to assist the ticket through the process.

“That’s stopped a human having to touch 922 tickets, and has also removed a delay in the communication that a tech is coming to the site or has identified an issue, or whatever needs to be communicated. That equates to time savings worth around $20,000 annually.”

A second RPA process is helping identify correct addresses for setting up broadband connections, enabling ONT serial numbers to be emailed into the ticketing system with the bot running a search and identifying the exact address for the order.

A third RPA is being designed around the high-volume task of porting voice services.

“It’s all giving back time within the team so they can go and learn more interesting stuff, or come up with different processes and things like that, rather than sitting there bashing through thousands of repetitive tickets,” Middleton says.

“But what is really important is that we’re improving outcomes not just for ourselves internally, but for Devoli’s customers.”

_{Elevating Devoli’s Automation Centre of Excellence}

“We’re helping Devoli with best practice and providing our world-class expertise, but we’re also helping them build that expertise internally,” Garry Green, Quanton Managing Director and Founder says.

Devoli has harnessed Quanton’s QLOAD framework for Leveraging Optimisation Automation and Digitisation to deliver operational excellence and transformation. They also looked to Quanton for expertise around governance, identifying the key benefits the company was looking to achieve and using that to drive future automation projects around productivity, customer experience and new ways of working.

“When organisations grow as rapidly as Devoli has, they often get pain points that need to be addressed rapidly,” Green says. “You can either throw people at the pain points, or you can throw bots at them.

“Devoli have chosen to double down on bots because it relieves the pressure on people and lays the foundations so they can grow further and still provide excellent customer service. They’ve enhanced their 24/7 customer support without making people work overtime or shifts, or adding staff, and have seen enhanced customer service, massive productivity gains and no increase in human FTE cost.”

_{Future Ready}

Woodbury says the recent automation work is also laying important foundations for Devoli as it looks to an AI future. While AI can provide answers, RPA can execute on things. “You can’t use AI properly unless you have RPA in the background.

“If you really want to use AI effectively, rather than just have it as a defense mechanism for conversations with customers, you’re going to need to plug it together with RPA. That way, you can not only get interpretations and decisions, but execute on them in a robust and reliable way.”