Rising Profits & Steady Costs: How to Increase Margins with A.I

Increasing sales and the customer base for a specific product or service is a key strategic objective for the majority of today’s businesses. But achieving this goal often results in increased costs in areas such as customer service and maintenance, which can diminish returns and prevent the product from delivering as much profit and value as it is capable of. 

To overcome this challenge, businesses must look for ways to reduce and stabilize the internal costs associated with meeting the demands of an increased customer base. One way to achieve this is by minimizing the time and resources spent on manual tasks, which can be achieved with a combination of Process Automation and A.I. – also known as A.I. enabled process automation.

But how can A.I. enabled process automation help businesses to reduce their maintenance costs to be as low as possible, while increasing their profit margins? Let’s explore. 

Tackling ownership costs

A study by Harvard Business Review has revealed that for businesses to avoid stagnation, they need to reduce their operating costs by at least 8% and up to over 25%. The overall cost of managing the manual tasks carried out by an ever-increasing number of human workers can reach significantly high levels.

That’s where A.I. enabled process automation comes in. 

By automating the tasks carried out manually by workers to meet their consumer’s demands, it can remove the need to employ more human workers entirely and reduce processing times by a significant amount, all while helping businesses achieve a high ROI and increased profit margins. 

The MetTel Story

We worked with MetTel, a Telco company providing telecommunication and network solutions to enterprise businesses and government agencies. They offer an SD-WAN service to their customers which enables optimal performance for demanding applications from one cloud-controlled branch device.

The demand for this service caused an increase in customer maintenance requests, which MetTel operators managed through a ticketing system.

This was resulting in a linear growth in costs for servicing SD-WAN as they were manually handling the majority of their trouble ticket resolution process, which included repair work, triage, alarming etc. 

They wanted to automate as much of this incident management process as possible to reduce the amount of time and manual work spent on each ticket. Overall, they needed to create a wider margin between their revenue gained and the cost of maintenance to generate more value for their business. 

We created an A.I. enabled process automation solution called Ticket Next Best Action (TNBA). This is an automated ticket resolution which uses programming techniques to automate each task, and A.I. technology to automate decisions within the incident management process. This means the next best possible action for the majority of tickets can be identified and executed without human labor. 

By implementing A.I. enabled automation for their process, MetTel was able to dramatically reduce the number of people needed to carry out the trouble ticket resolution task. 

Recently, their TNBA solution was recognized by Gartner in their 2020 Magic Quadrant report, highlighting its ability to enhance customer experiences and drastically reduce levels of manual labour from IT departments, which can be applied across all industries dealing with triage and customer support. 

Without TNBA, if MetTel were to double their number of SD-WAN users, they would need to significantly increase the number of people required to manually carry out this call-center triage process. But with automated ticket resolution in place with TNBA, they will now be able to achieve the same results with only one person in place to monitor the system, resulting in huge cost reductions. 

With a much larger gap between their revenue and costs, this A.I. ticketing system has enabled MetTel to enjoy a more competitive position in the market. 

Deep dive into the full success story to learn more about this automated ticket resolution and how it is enabling MetTel to achieve more with less: