Two years ago Chorus Network Protection introduced an automation system, allowing 50% of our requests to be fully automated with no human touch, responding to our customers faster than ever before! Next came a solution for the more complex cases that still required the skills of our team. This reduced the time spent on repetitive tasks and allowed us to focus on the quality of the information and the interactions with our customers.

Each of these projects also allowed us to capture more information about the requests we were receiving and how we were responding to them. By analysing the data, we were able to quantify something that we knew happened, but not how often.

We often receive requests from several customers who are digging in the same geographic area, but responding case-by-case meant that we were duplicating our effort – sometimes even on the same day.

BeforeUdig requests in the same area over time

By “investing” in data, we realised that we could reap benefits in the future, and like all investments we needed to choose how much to contribute.

We needed an approach that would give the team flexibility to focus on our customers’ requests, but continue to grow long term automation volumes for faster response back to our customers.

We chose Option 2 that transitions into Option 3 once we’ve got ahead of the workload.

With the help from our CTO team who knew just what we needed. The core of what we needed was in place from the previous projects, so only minor incremental changes were needed. We’re already working on improving our efficiency and customer experience while preventing damage to our network.

The challenge now is to balance our customer response time (a short term priority) with what is most efficient in the long term (the bigger picture).

With the team learning so much from each incremental change, I’m sure you will be hearing from us again……. So watch this space!