Transcript
If you're on the fence about bots, I would say this, if you're sick of doing repetitive tasks manually, automation bots are the way to go. The concept of bots in an automation sense, we got when we partnered with Avanti and implemented the whole digital experience platform for neurons. We started simple, didn't try and change the world, just tried to cut that task out of our list of manuals. The list of manual things that we do, replace that, do the next one, do the next one, incorporate that one with that one, and that led to other people within the IT teams seeing certain people create bots, asking what that was all about, because they could see some value in automating some of their tasks. Especially the third level infrastructure teams with some of the server tasks that they do over the period of 12 to 18 months, that's grown into the 150 bots that we have today. Since the introduction of bots is a reduction in the amount of time taken to resolve issues, lawyers, fee earners, as we call them, bill in roughly six minute increments. They have to really account for those periods of time. Anything that's going to save time is a benefit to the firm. One of the things that we realised as IT, we could help facilitate that and reduce that need for the interaction or the time taken of an interaction with IT to sort of eat into those sort of six minute billing increments. So that's the one, the sort of the key driver I think that got people excited about using bots. We can run those seamlessly while the fee earner is essentially still working. Especially around things like add-ins, where you have to go and select each add-in, enable, you can build all that within the same bot. So we can do a number of tasks within the same bot and thus just reduce the amount of time. By the use of bots we've been able to reduce the amount of billing increments it takes. Also it means the fee earners not having to shut sensitive documents ahead of the IT support person remoting in, so that saves even more time and just provides a much more seamless experience. An example of a bot that we deemed really useful and would really add value was the battery health of our laptops. We run a bot that scans the laptop, reports on its battery health and if the battery health is under 60% it sends an alert to the service desk, generates a ticket, the level one team will then order a battery replacement and the first time the lawyer gets to know of the fact that we're even going to do something to address the issue is when the battery, the replacement battery, has already arrived. We'll then contact the lawyer to say look, a bit of proactive approach to the support. We're going to replace your laptop battery and then we just book an appointment with them at their convenience for them just to pop up and have the battery replaced. That's been a good example of some proactive support that we're able to do with the use of automation bots. We've also had an impact on the service desk and one of the things we've noticed is a massive reduction in the number of incidents. We would get roughly 200 tickets per day and I would say at least 80% of those now are service requests. We had one day, I looked at one day's data and only nine of our 204, I think it was, tickets were actual incidents. Everything else was service requests. Automation bots are the way to go. They've saved us time undertaking laborious repetitive tasks and enable us to free up our tech teams to get into a bit more interesting work. They've helped us on our customer experience journey and hopefully they can help others do the same.
