Etisalat
Robotic process automation for a telecom call centre. Sixteen bots taking the repetitive work off the agents, handling value-added services and the system hopping that used to sit between a customer and an answer.
Overview
Etisalat is the UAE’s first telecom operator, headquartered in Abu Dhabi and serving millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of businesses across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The group rebranded to e& in 2022, with the UAE business trading as etisalat by e&.
Sphinx Solutions built the robotic process automation for their telecom call centre operation.
We came to the work through one of their vendors rather than directly, and the brief was specific: reduce how long a customer waits, take the repetitive handling off the agents, and make the process behave the same way every time.
Our RPA team built sixteen bots for their customer support operation, using automation tooling alongside machine learning where the decisions were not purely rule-based.
With 16 years of engineering behind us, the value here was less in the individual bots than in understanding a call centre process well enough to know which parts of it should never have been done by a person.
Etisalat came to us through a vendor wanting to streamline the call centre: shorter response times, better customer satisfaction, smoother operations. Their support process had accumulated problems for years.
They needed the interactions handled across several different systems at once, with validation and business-rule exceptions taken care of properly rather than escalated.
Delivering in the time available was the first challenge, and several other RPA providers had declined the work on that basis. Our team went through the process step by step, found what was redundant, and built to the deadline without trading away the quality.
Validation and business rules were the second. Without a proper validation strategy a bot performs badly and produces outcomes nobody wanted, and a business-rule exception, where the data a process depends on is missing or incomplete, stops a bot mid-execution. Both had to be designed for rather than discovered in production.
The third was the interesting one: a bot and a human agent both needing the same browser at the same time. Etisalat had put this to several vendors and none of them had an answer. We solved it, and without a large investment to do it.
We automated the parts of the operation that reward machines and free the agents for the parts that need a person. Five things carry it:
We also automated adding, deleting and recharging value-added services, which is high volume, entirely rule-based and exactly the sort of thing an agent should never have been doing by hand.
“We are lucky to have Sphinx Solutions as our tech partner. Our entire team is amazed by the dedication and professionalism they showed on our project. They helped us solve critical problems that had cost us resources and time for years, and the support and service they offered went beyond what we expected. Their solutions brought real improvement and we have had a great deal of appreciation from our own customers. We look forward to working with the team again.”
Tech stack
What people usually ask about Etisalat and about building something like it.
A telecommunications operator headquartered in Abu Dhabi, and the UAE’s first. It serves consumers and enterprises across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The group rebranded to e& in 2022 and the UAE business now trades as etisalat by e&.
By taking the repetitive work off the people. Data entry and validation, call routing and prioritisation, retrieving records and scripting, scheduling, logging and documentation, payment processing, workforce reporting: all of it is rule-based, high volume and better done by a machine.
By finding what is genuinely repetitive rather than what merely feels tedious. Map the process, identify the steps that follow fixed rules and run often enough to be worth automating, then build for those. The mapping is most of the work, and skipping it is why RPA projects fail.
Connect with us
