The customer

Created in 2003 by the EDF and Cetelem Group, Domofinance is a financial institution for households. 

Domofinance objectives are to respond to individuals financial needs for their household improvement to comply with electrical standards, safety norms, and energy-saving measures

The issues and the stakes

Loan applications, funding requests, certification requests, and so on, are sent by fax only. Six (6) fax servers receive more than 6000 files per month forcing account executives to waste part of the day to manually sort these faxes and distribute them to the appropriate skills.

Laurence Lallau, Director stated, “We estimated the manual labor at one FTE (full time equivalent) per month, i.e. 20% of the working time of a collaborator; we wished to automate this sorting process in order to remove this very low added value task.”

In addition to time wasted with manual sorting, the volume of received faxes implied a delicate management: paper reams loading frequency (no less than five reams a day), toner problems, paper jams, and so on.  These globally affected the Quality of Service.

Adds Laurence Lallau, “On Monday mornings, it was not rare to have lots of faxes sent on Saturday on standby for printing with empty paper trays.”

Finally, the Quality of Service suffered from regular losses of fax and from difficulties to find the filed documents. With an average of 30 000 sheets received per month, the storage and management constituted true problems making the recovery of a fax arrived fifteen (15) days before a real headache !

Akio Fax Center deployment

For simplicity and speed reasons, Domofinance choose to implement the ASP mode : the application is hosted by France Telecom (Akio’s ASP partner) which provides the required access to the solution.

The faxes are automatically routed to one of the five (5) queues created in the application, each one of these queues corresponds to a type of request (certification request, loan application, funding request, and so on). Routing is based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that scans the fax, analyses its content, and recovers structured character strings used as routing key.

Akio’s president Patrick Giudicelli stated, “The main difficulty consisted in obtaining good results with the OCR, the relevance of the character recognition depending on the quality of the fax."

Each fax is converted to email format, but also available as an attachment to the email.

The account executives have access to the queues according to their skills. Moreover, the application’s cooperative aspect allows a fax to be visible by several agents, avoiding "forgotten" items when one of account executives is absent.

The implemented application only manages faxes reception for now however Domofinance is evaluating the possibility of answering a fax by fax. Indeed, if the majority of the incoming faxes do not require an answer, only a small part of this flow is concerned with this functionality.

The benefits

Eliminating manual sorting thought fax routing automation considerably improved Domofinance account executives’ productivity. Henceforth, they can spend full-time studying their financing files while the faxes corresponding to their skills are directly routed towards the adequate queues.

Laurence Lallau confirms, "Thanks to Akio Fax Center, our account executives are much more effective."

A large part of the faxes are treated in a completely dematerialized way; the problems of paper reams to be loaded, toners to be replaced, and so on, were significantly reduced. In addition, fax archiving and searching have been simplified: the solution’s based research engine makes it possible to find any document with a simple click.

Automation and dematerialization resulted in a noticeable increase of Quality of Service in the sales department. Better yet, with the deployment of Akio Fax Center, a new and more efficient organization was implemented.

Laurence Lallau highlights, “Previously, a sales pool managed simultaneously, faxes, emails, and the telephone with a manual dispatch. After Akio Fax Center implementation, we were able to create three (3) specialized skills pools: each of them receiving only faxes related to their activity. Calls are also routed to the relevant person according to the phone number.”