TKE fine tunes its customer service

Since 1984, TKE is a leading supplier and operator of people transport systems in Spain. With over 70 branches and 2,700 employees throughout Spain, TKE provides full life cycle support for urban mobility projects, from the installation of new vertical transportation equipment through to service, maintenance, and modernization.

Companies are increasingly turning to process mining in order to streamline communication and deliver the best possible customer service experience. Accurately visualizing all the steps in the process, alongside customer contact points, helps businesses to pinpoint issues and inefficiencies that can have a major impact on the experience of both customers and employees.

TKE knew it needed to analyze how efficient its support service really was, from the opening of service tickets through to dispatch of the materials required to fix problems with elevators. The analysis would allow TKE to improve its response times, currently set at 48 hours, providing a faster and more satisfactory solution to its customers and helping it stand out from the competition.

“All complaints must currently pass through different company departments. To further improve the response time from 48 to 36 hours, we need to improve the ratios or redefine the process,” explains Roberto Gil Mateos, Head of Process Engineering at TK Elevator Manufacturing Spain. “We need to know where the bottlenecks are, where repetitions occur, and identify any aspects that can be automated.”

The Fujitsu process mining team approached the TKE supply chain management department to introduce them to the process mining method and showcase the potential benefits of its implementation for supply chain operations. However, it was the TKE process engineering team that spotted the opportunity to use the technology to reduce response times for customer dispatches.

The Celonis process mining platform was used to extract the digital footprint for the process, using information on new tickets generated on the TKE website and the SAP® support module. The company’s experts and Fujitsu designed a project to analyze a number of areas, including the alignment of the process with the internal definition, deviations and their causes, the ‘lead time’ from receipt of support tickets, bottlenecks in the support response time and their causes, the workload distribution, the handling of items by staff involved in the process, and the internal influence of the process for order consolidation. The overall aim was to identify improvements to make the process more efficient.

Applying process mining to the services support area made it possible to identify the main inefficiencies and their impact on TKE’s support SLA with its customers. It provided granular information on which types of tickets stayed within and went beyond the service average, as well as grouping them by item or elevator type.

The trial allowed the identification of the sources of friction in the process that provided opportunities to streamline the transfer of ticket information from the TKE website to the SAP module.

Another key requirement was calculating the average real cost of each ticket, based on time spent and staff involved, with respect to customer SLAs.

“We are delighted with the results. Implementing this solution will help us to further stand out from our competitors, especially in an area like time scales, which is increasingly important to customers,” explains Gil Mateos.

“Even if we already have tools to calculate times and other indicators, allowing us to work to eliminate ‘waste’ in our processes,” remarks Gil Mateos, “process mining has shown that it’s possible to obtain even more accurate and useful information.

“The initial effort is repaid over time: when we repeat the analysis, it’s easy to incorporate new data,” concludes Gil Mateos.“Process mining has given us an extremely flexible and comprehensive view of the process, from start to finish. It gives us the clarity we need to focus our work and make the necessary changes.”