Bosch Service Solutions – 2023 Digital Award Winner, Contact-to-Resolution – Transcript

Irfan Ali:

Technology is binary, but we humans are much more complex. Because of this complexity, it throws in a lot of challenges. How do you communicate to the stakeholders? How do you bring them on board and sell them the vision? How do you ensure you really are bringing the right user experience into these AI solutions? How do you remove friction? How do you bring on board your client’s IT organization to accept and not resist the technology that you as a partner are bringing in?

Announcer:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast^®.” Week after week, you’ll hear from top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to Digital World Class^® performance.

David Ketchin:

Hello again to another one of the Hackett’s “Business Excelleration Podcast.” My name is David Ketchin. I lead The Hackett Group across Europe. And today we’re going to be talking to Bosch Service Solutions about one of their digital implementations. Every year we invite our clients to tell us about their successful digital transformations enabled by intelligent automation – so that could include AI, machine learning, chatbots, RPA orchestration, analytics. And more and more often actually, it’s a combination of all of those different technologies, which makes it more complex, but means that the benefits that are secured are even more impressive.

The entries that we receive are all assessed by a panel of judges, and what they’re looking for is evidence of proven benefits, implementation at scale, and innovation. And the Bosch Service Solutions implementation really covers all of those in significant levels. And so, I’m really delighted to be joined today by Irfan Ali, who is the director of Digital Automation and Innovation at Bosch Service Solutions. Hello Irfan.

Irfan Ali:

Hi David. Thanks for having me over here.

David Ketchin:

Yeah, and great to speak to you again. Obviously, you’ve joined us at the European Best Practices Conference, and it was great to have an interactive session with you there. And I’m really delighted that you’re prepared to again share those learnings and lessons from the implementation today. So maybe I’ll get straight into it. While many are acquainted with Bosch, and, of course, we all have or very likely to have a domestic appliance from Bosch in our houses, it’d be great if you could provide a slightly broader introduction to Bosch and particularly to explain to the audience where Bosch Service Solutions fits within that.

Irfan Ali:

Thanks for having me over. So from a Bosch Service Solutions’ perspective, if I was to introduce that stepping aside than how we usually introduce ourselves, I would say if somebody was to be involved in a car accident while driving the car in one of the German OEM cars, the emergency call that is placed from your car and the emergency service that you receive as a result of that is provided by Bosch Service Solutions. The high probability that it’s one of our team members is providing you that support until the emergency services arrive. Or if you are stuck in an elevator – let’s say in one of the train stations in Germany – when you press the emergency button because you’re stuck in an elevator, there’s a high probability that you’re talking to one of our people from Bosch Service Solutions.

Or if you have a fleet of trucks and you’re looking for a space to park your truck, and when you get onto Bosch Secure Truck Parking and book a spot for yourself and you want to speak to somebody, there’s a high probability that you are talking to one of our people.

Or if you have a Bosch home appliance, if you do have issues and you call Bosch Service Center, there’s a high probability that you’re talking to one of our people.

So we are in the business of a customer experience across industries – across domains. That’s what we do.

David Ketchin:

Great, thanks Irfan. That really helps in terms of setting the scene for the digital transformation that you’ve enabled as well. And as I said, I think a lot of people are aware of the domestic appliance side of things, but not necessarily the automotive side of things, and then the contact center that’s run behind it as well. So perhaps now you could delve into the specifics of the project and highlight what you think sets it apart in terms of the value that’s being delivered.

Irfan Ali:

If I was to tell you about the project, what is really important also is for us to understand what are the statistics behind the project before I get into the project. So we had a client who came up to us and said, “So listen, we’ve got one million interactions that we get, and we receive them across 18 different services – across different service channels such as the phone, email, chat and social media – and we would like you to handle it.” We said, “Of course, we are focused on delivering superior customer experience. That’s what we do.” But they said, “Hey, listen, but also we would like you to do a digital transformation for us in our customer experience aspect of the business that we’re talking about here.” So, we said, “OK,” and as we dug deeper, it became clear that they said to us, “It would be great if over the next five years if you could actually help us digitally transform.” And we said, “OK, what is the KPI?” And one of the KPIs we actually agreed upon with them was we would deliver 12 million automation minutes over a contract period of five years. And that for us was a key driver in terms of the kind of business we would like to do, and help bring innovation and technology in terms of – or transforming – our customer experience business for our clients.

So the solution that we implemented was actually in four parts rather. So the first part was looking at all the tasks that were there in the system – in the landscape – and looking at it and saying, does it qualify for the three R’s which are: Is it repetitive in nature, is it rule-based and is it routine in nature? And then quickly automating them using robotic process automation. So, for example, if we identified that a particular email that was sent to us, which was missing an attachment, for example, we said, instead of waiting for the APIs to be developed for them, why can’t you use robotic process automation? So that is how we started with the low-hanging fruits. And once that was done, the next solution component that we implemented was using text AI-based models wherein of the emails that we received from the end customers of our client, what this AI would do, it would read incoming emails, understand the intent of these emails, extract the key information out of them – be it from the body of the email or use computer vision to read the attachments – and then taxonomize the email, and then check, can I answer this email based on the knowledge I have? If yes, then it would send a response back to the end customer. If no, it would hand over this email to the right queue where the agents from Bosch Service Solutions could then take this prefilled information, address it with what humans are really good at – which is with empathy and with their own superior knowledge and understanding of the process. So this was one subsolution that we had.

The other subsolution that we implemented was having voicebots not just in the service hours, wherein the voicebot would welcome the end customer and answer the call and say, “Hi, what are you calling us about?” understand the intent of the email – see if it can answer the question or the query from the caller. If it did, great, hangs up, creates a ticket. If it’s not able to answer the query, then what it does is it actually creates a ticket with the transcript – with the intent of the caller – and then hand it over to the agent so that the agent at Bosch Service Solutions does not need to ask you, “Hey, can you repeat what was the issue again?” That is what we are doing in service hours with the voicebots and out of service hours is where we actually capture the calls that come after the closure of business wherein we try to see if we can answer the questions of the caller, or see if we can schedule appointments for the following day when our agents or the technicians are available.

So that’s the solution that we have implemented end to end for our client, and this is what we are also improvising and building upon as new technology comes about. Now, given the light of what has been made available in 2023 and 2024 – large language models and Gen AI – this is what we implemented way back in 2020, 2021 and ‘22, going on from there. So now we are using the latest technologies to actually make these solutions better.

David Ketchin:

You mentioned 12 million automation minutes over a span of five years as well. I mean, that’s clearly a really significant volume of activity, and maybe we can talk a little bit about that a little bit later. But something else that I’m particularly interested in as well is how did you go about navigating this project? Was it a meticulously structured plan, or was it more a kind of dive right in and develop as you go approach?

Irfan Ali:

So if I were to say the way we started off was KPIs, keeping the specific KPI in mind, and like they say KPI drives behavior as well, so we knew where we wanted to go, but we also told ourselves that “Hey, this is really, really nice that we have this goal and that we are really helping our client really transform the business.” But we had to also be aware of what kind of technology we would like to use. I mean, are we going to just use a hammer and find everything as a nail and go about hammering it? So what we told ourselves is let’s take a step back. Let’s not focus on the trees but rather on the forest. And that’s when we came up with a blueprint for how the contact center of the future should look like – what we refer to as a digital contact center.

So the way the DCC – or the digital contact center – works is more like LEGO blocks wherein we have three phases and this three phases – or these three DCC1.0, 2.0, 3.0 – could keep adding as we add more in the future as well. But the way it works is 1.0 is all about getting your foundations of digital operations right. That is saying getting the right CRM, ensuring we have the right telephone system and interaction systems in place, and then once you have that, focus on the low-hanging fruits, with automation, with RPA. And in the ethos of this particular first LEGO block is all about focusing on building client and organizational trust and getting a discipline for data. So that’s the first block.

The second LEGO block that we focused on was, as we were generating data and there was digital operations in underway, we took it to implementation of AI solutions – be it with respect to text AI for smart inbox mail management, or it could be for voice for handling of queries and also building new services. Or be it with the introduction of computer vision. So that’s what we looked at. And with this actually, we were able to cover a large spectrum of operational processes that we had. With that in mind, we are slowly transitioning to the next version and the next version of the digital contact center, which helps us scale along with the client, scale along with emerging technology, and also scale along with amplifying benefits. So our focus was more on eyes on the long term – execute on the short term.

David Ketchin:

OK, Irfan, that’s really interesting to hear all of that. One of the things that I’m really interested to hear as well is when you were undertaking the project and thinking about it end to end, what were some of the biggest hurdles that you needed to overcome in order to deliver the solution and deliver the benefits?

Irfan Ali:

If you look at technology, technology is just zero or one. It’s binary. But we humans are much more complex. It could be anything in the minus, like a billion gazillion, but also can be in the plus as well. So it could be anything. What I mean is, because of this complexity, it throws in a lot of challenges. The challenge is how do you build a vision? How do you communicate to the people – the stakeholders? How do you bring them on board and sell them the vision? So that’s No. 1. No. 2 is how do you ensure you really are bringing the right user experience into these AI solutions? We all had that experience where we actually wanted to stop using the chatbot or voicebot because it just wouldn’t get you or wouldn’t answer your questions.

How do you remove that friction in interaction with AI – what we refer to at Bosch as AI experience – when you marry AI with user experience, a happy marriage, so to speak. The third key challenge for us was how do you bring on board your client’s IT organization to accept and not resist the technology that you as a partner are bringing in? That was the third big challenge for us.

David Ketchin:

Great, thank you. So really a lot of that was about bringing everybody with you. You talked about creating a vision internally and externally that everyone can understand and buy into, bringing real focus on the user experience so that people can see how they’re going to interact with it, and then making sure that people are on board and are going to accept and not resist the solution. So really interesting and good top tips for everyone out there, I think. You mentioned also your DCC – digital contact center – how important that is in powering customer experience. Can you lay out for us a little bit more about the tangible benefits that were realized from the initiative?

Irfan Ali:

If you look at the tangible benefits of digital transformation, it’s more a 360-degree view. So I’m going to cover some parts of it. One part was, of course, with automation minutes meant higher efficiency, lower average handling time of the processes, which was a win-win. There was one more bigger win, which was quite unanticipated, I would say, was the ability of using these solutions that we had to generate revenue with respect to, I can give one example there, the example was the way we were able to use voicebots to generate revenue by ensuring that the calls that came after office hours that we had a voicebot, which could address and also schedule appointments for our technicians to generate more revenue, which otherwise would’ve been a dead zone where we usually would have people calling in and the IVR would say, “Sorry, you called us outside office hours. Please call us back tomorrow morning.”

But now because we have a voicebot, it’s able to capture those opportunities and transfer them into leads that our agents then have it prequalified, and the agents can call them the next day, or whenever the call is scheduled for.

David Ketchin:

That’s really interesting, and it was certainly one of the aspects of the Bosch implementation that was really interesting to the judges. Very often, the implementations that we see are driven around efficiency, and that’s the way that a lot of people approach the opportunity for digital transformation. But we’re always really interested where an implementation is driving the effectiveness of the function, and the fact that you managed to open up an entirely new revenue stream, it really should encourage people to be thinking very broadly about how they look for use cases for intelligent automation. So really interesting to hear that. And Irfan, obviously you’ve enjoyed significant success with this implementation and with your agents. Very excited about Clerobotra as well that they can interact with. But where do you go from here? What future plans do you have for the deployment of similar solutions and specifically AI solutions as well?

Irfan Ali:

Like I mentioned to you, we had various versions of the digital contact center. I wouldn’t say versions, but steps or LEGO blocks. The next LEGO block that we are already implementing is about how do we use abilities of large language models of generative AI in the contact center. That is what we’re implementing at this point of time. Because like I said, once you had the discipline of data, which we did in 1.0, once we had digital operations through AI generating more data, we are able to leverage that to build our own, I would say, customized large language models that address the needs of the client. So that’s what we are working on right now, plus looking at how can we integrate predictive analytics into customer experience operations.

David Ketchin:

Great. Thank you very much. Well, Irfan, again, thank you very much for taking the time to share your story with us. It is a really impressive story. As I said, the judges were really impressed with the benefits that had been delivered, so thank you for sharing Bosch’s journey with us today.

Irfan Ali:

Thank you so much, David, to you and the team for having me on this, and also for recognizing us. It means a lot to the team – to me – so thank you.

David Ketchin:

Thank you very much.

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