Illinois-based Discover Financial Services opened a Customer Care Center and technology hub in the Chatham neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side last August and one of its main mandates is technology upskilling, including a program to teach current employees RPA.
Contact center agents working at the facility who have an interest in technology can become an apprentice in one of four tracks: Cybersecurity, RPA, Salesforce or ServiceNow. After training in one of the disciplines, graduates of the program can transition into full-time roles.
The RPA team, which currently comprises one lead and three apprentices, automated 46,000 hours of work within eight months, according to Joe Mills, director of transformation strategy and automation at Discover.
“A team of four was able to produce that while they were learning on the job and coding,” Mills said. “Those processes are in production now, so every year we maintain production, we save those hours.”
The company is looking at the Chatham facility as a company-wide model for site selections, hiring procedures, customer service experience and community development.
“It improves all of us as an organization when you can provide that opportunity for us to document how we work, improve it continuously and be able to open the doors to collaboration,” Mills said. “What that creates is this continuous investment in learning and that’s how we’re all succeeding together.”
