Robots speed up the customer experience at Leeds Building Society

Tom Clark, CIO at Leeds Building Society, describes how robotic processing has improved his business

Robotic processing is helping to speed up certain processes at Leeds Building Society, according to Tom Clark, the organisation's CIO.

Speaking to Computing today, Clark explained that the new robotic processing automation functionality has helped improve the organisation's agile capability.

"We've improved our agile capability through robotic processing," said Clark. "That enables manual processes to be automated. We've used it to reduce customer turnaround times [the time taken to turn an initial customer query into a full package].

"So rather than a piece of work ending up in a queue for someone to work on, a robot can work on it in the background."

The Building Society uses Blue Prism for its robotic process automation, which Clark said on a basic level does the work of moving data and workloads between systems.

"So if you have a legacy process taking data from one system and keying it into another, we'd use the process automation," he explained.

But this automation hasn't resulted in any job losses, Clark explained, stating that it has instead freed staff up to work on more valuable strategic work.

"It's more about allowing colleagues to work on more value-add stuff for customers," he said, adding that staffing levels across the business have increased significantly since he joined four years ago.

"In terms of numbers of staff, when I joined we had about 800-900 people, whereas we're now at around 1,450," said Clark.

He added that it's also part of the bi-modal or 'two-speed IT' model at Leeds Building Society.

"It's part of the bi-modal piece, we need some processes to happen now, we can't just make everything wait on the big transformational work."