You’ll often hear people talking about laying the foundations for future growth. Often they’re talking about how they’re using cloud, or doing security.
For Blair Woodbury, Chief Financial Officer of Kiwi telco wholesale disruptor Devoli, it’s Robotic Process Automation which is providing the foundations as the company eyes a future of deeper reliance on artificial intelligence.
Devoli has had a deeply-held value of ‘Automate Everything’ since its inception. But recently they’ve revisited and ramped up their commitment, working with Quanton to improve their Automation Centre of Excellence, with the in-house skills and expertise they need to guide them into the future.
Blair tells us he’s looking at what comes next. And next for him is AI – but first he wants the RPA foundations in place.
“You can’t use AI properly unless you have RPA in the background,” he says.
While AI, or at least large language models, can answer questions and provide basic information, it’s RPA that can help companies execute on things.
“When the two are plugged together, you can not only make interpretations and decisions, you can execute on them in a robust and reliable way.”
Reaping the benefits now
Of course, Devoli isn’t only looking to the future with its automations.
The company is already reaping the benefits, having deployed four automations across its Customer Success and Billing teams. One automation, dealing with fault logging, has enabled the company to make its Customer Success team of 11 feel exponentially larger, effectively improving their 24/7 support to feel like that of a much bigger company.
It’s a classic example of a fast-growing company which had two options: throw more people at the problem or throw in some bots. By putting in the bots, they’ve relieved pressure on their internal team and laid the foundations to enable them to grow further while still providing excellent customer service.
Achieving excellence in intelligent automation
But there’s a lot more to the Devoli story than the tactical deployments, even with the fantastic benefits they’ve experienced (over $20,000 of annualised savings in effort from one bot handling 922 tickets in the first three months, with much greater savings still to come!).
The company is striving for the best in intelligent automation, and partnered with us to build the critical processes which will provide them with significant workflow and productivity gains internally, as well as to train their internal team.
That upskilling of teams is so important. As their skillset grows, they can do more and more. We are helping them with best practice and to ensure they have world-class expertise from us, but they’re also building that world-class expertise internally.
Equally, Devoli has been implementing the right governance and prioritisation frameworks, in conjunction with Quanton. We’ve been leveraging our QLOADTM framework to ensure world-leading capability, providing a strategic approach that ensures they’ll get the strategic benefits.
In today’s world, your toolbox needs to be more than the nails and hammer – it needs to include screwdrivers, bolts, spanners… the works.
With RPA, Devoli has bolstered its toolset – the RPAs in place are complementary to the company’s core automation platform – and can continue on their automation quest.
If you’d like to hear more about Devoli’s use of automation and its RPA journey – and successes – read our case study here.
