How Brink’s improves customer journey management with Diabolocom

World leader in security and cash-in-transit, Brink’s has chosen to integrate the Diabolocom contact center solution into its IT Service Management Servicenow platform to support its diversification strategy. 

A look back at an ambitious project that places customer relations at the heart of the Group’s transformation.

Brink’s, a global security player in the throes of transformation

Brink’s, known for its historic cash transportation and security activities, has embarked on a profound transformation of its business model in recent years. The American group has begun to diversify by developing new activities linked to cash management.

This strategy took concrete form in 2019 with the signing of a major contract with the French banking group BPCE. As part of this groundbreaking partnership, Brink’s has been entrusted with the complete outsourcing of the management of the BPCE network’s 10,000 ATMs, including supervision, facilities management, maintenance, troubleshooting, procurement and technical support.

In fact, never before has a bank delegated such a broad scope covering the entire lifecycle of its vending machines to a single service provider. To fulfill this mission, Brink’s has set up a dedicated center of excellence in Toulouse, a veritable control tower from which all operations are managed.

This diversification fulfils a dual ambition for Brink’s: 

• Firstly, to consolidate its leadership in its traditional core business, cash-in-transit.
• Secondly, to conquer new high-potential markets across the entire cash value chain.

But this strategy also brings with it new operational challenges, particularly in terms of customer relationship management. With the multiplication of its activities, Brink’s must be able to manage increasingly varied and specific requests, ranging from cash-in-transit operations to ATM maintenance.

This increased complexity requires a global vision of the customer journey, and the ability to follow each request from end to end, coordinating multiple stakeholders and skills. 

To meet this challenge, Brink’s had to thoroughly rethink its contact center infrastructure.

A seamless customer journey thanks to Diabolocom – ServiceNow integration

To support its diversification strategy and guarantee an optimal customer experience, Brink’s has undertaken to overhaul its customer relationship management system. Until then, the group relied on disparate and poorly interconnected tools: a CRM for customer management, a call center solution for telephone interactions and an ITSM (IT service management) platform for tracking requests and interventions.

This fragmentation of tools had several negative consequences: reduced visibility of the customer journey, time-consuming manual processes and a lack of responsiveness in handling requests. For Brink’s, it was becoming urgent to converge these different bricks within a unified and coherent ecosystem.

It was against this backdrop that Brink’s decided to integrate the Diabolocom contact center solution into its ServiceNow ITSM platform, using a connector specially developed by the Diabolocom teams.“The entire supervision system for BPCE’s 10,000 vending machines is based on ServiceNow, and this integration was crucial to the project,” emphasizes François-Xavier Schepereel.

“Diabolocom has developed a connector for Brink’s which, on the one hand, integrates call management functions directly into the ServiceNow interface and, on the other hand, automatically pulls up the record of the system associated with the call.”

Thanks to this telephony-computer interface (CTI), Brink’s advisors have a 360° view of each customer, with direct access to all information relating to their contract, equipment and interaction history. Each time a call is made, the advisor is automatically notified and can access the corresponding customer file with a single click, without having to juggle between several tools.

Beyond this productivity gain for advisors, the Diabolocom-ServiceNow integration enables end-to-end management of customer requests and interventions. 

When a customer calls to report a problem with a PLC, the contact center automatically creates a ticket in ServiceNow, which is then handled and routed to the right people according to predefined rules. All processing stages are logged in the tool, enabling real-time monitoring of progress and facilitating information sharing between the various players.“We made sure that the complexity of the organization involved in the technical management of a fleet of 10,000 PLCs was masked for the support agents,” explains François-Xavier Schepereel.

“Integrating the Diabolocom banner into ServiceNow enables them to manage everything in this single tool, which centralizes all PLC-related operations and interventions.”

This integration also enables Brink’s to take full advantage of its wealth of customer data. By interfacing Diabolocom with its business intelligence tools, Brink’s is able to analyze call volumes, reasons for contact, resolution times and satisfaction levels. This invaluable data can be used to feed real-time dashboards into the call center, and also to identify ways of optimizing processes and the customer experience.

By unifying the management of customer interactions and the monitoring of operations, the Diabolocom-ServiceNow integration acts as a real performance lever for Brink’s. It helps to simplify the customer journey, empower teams and embed a culture of continuous improvement. 

Continuous optimization for operational excellence and customer satisfaction

The implementation of the Diabolocom solution integrated with ServiceNow marked a decisive step in the transformation of customer relations at Brink’s. But to fully exploit the potential of this new infrastructure, it was essential to support the teams in adopting the new tools and working methods.

Brink’s was thus able to count on the expertise of the Diabolocom and ServiceNow teams to define the target processes, parameterize the tools and train the users. As François-Xavier Schepereel testifies, this change management approach has paid off handsomely:

“It’s clear today that the solution delivers on its promises, whether in terms of ease of use for support technicians and their supervisors, or autonomy for the latter and administrators.”

In concrete terms, the new organization is based around three dedicated centers, which handle technical support for the branches, support for the maintainers who work on the machines, and everything to do with supplying the machines with cash. In all, the organization mobilizes 80 advisers and handles some 200,000 incoming calls a year.

To make things as simple as possible for customers, each of BPCE’s 29 branches has been assigned a unique call number, regardless of the reason for the request. Thanks to the integration of the BPCE repository into ServiceNow and the coupling with Diabolocom, advisors can immediately identify the calling branch, the machine concerned and the nature of the request. The caller is then taken in hand by an interactive voice server, which guides him/her to precisely qualify his/her need and direct him/her to the right contact.

Once the call has been processed, the customer is invited to rate his or her satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 5. A key indicator which, like all the data collected during interactions, is fed directly into Brink’s business intelligence tools to provide real-time dashboards.

“We use all the possibilities offered by Diabolocom – from the voice server to post-call satisfaction surveys and real-time indicators – to automate what can be automated and provide supervisors with a complete view of activity,” emphasizes François-Xavier Schepereel.

This real-time vision is essential to enable Brink’s teams to constantly adjust their system, as illustrated by this concrete example shared by François-Xavier Schepereel:

“We were able to verify Diabolocom’s ability to support us in a crisis situation: a single phone call was enough to obtain from Diabolocom all the help we needed to validate the adjustments made. Half an hour later, the call curve, which was rising dangerously, was curbed thanks to the changes made to the IVR, and we were able to regain control of the situation.”

In addition to managing incoming calls, the solution is also used for outgoing call campaigns, notably for proactive support of bank branches. When a technician detects an anomaly on an ATM, he or she can contact the branch concerned directly, guide the caller to a solution or, if necessary, initiate an on-site intervention.

The results were immediate. Just a few months after the start of the project, the benefits were tangible, both in terms of operational efficiency and quality of service: improved responsiveness, reduced processing times, improved customer satisfaction… All results that have reinforced Brink’s strategy.