A global investment bank wanted to streamline their internal communication efforts by automating a currently manual solution. Discover how The Information Lab created an automated solution which was able to contact thousands of users and process their responses while significantly reducing manual effort and user-error.

The Challenge

Large corporations often require cooperation from multiple lines of business. An account management team representing over 5000 unique clients were obligated to provide contact information for each of their clients so that newly introduced legal guidelines were communicated to them. In the past, this was done with a pen and paper and required extensive manual effort to ensure that contact information was collated and fed into an application that sent legal correspondence on a large scale to each client. One of our consultants spotted an opportunity to introduce an Alteryx workflow which leveraged python to outreach to hundreds of users at once, ask them to fill out a template, and then process the information within the responses creating a database of contact information.

The client had mentioned that a solution which was able to do this has many use cases across the firm, therefore the workflow would be turned into an application which allowed users from across the business to benefit from this technology.

Our Solution

The Information Lab worked closely with the contact outreach team to define the necessary steps in the workflow. This solution was broken into 3 key steps:

1. The first step was to create a template email along with a list of accounts for each independent account manager. This table was created in Alteryx and would request users to fill out necessary contact information for each of their accounts, with clear instructions of how to fill out the table.
2. The second step was to create a workflow which used Python to parse this table into structured data, using HTML and Regex to collate information and store it in a database. An additional piece of functionality was added to identify accounts which had been incorrectly mapped to an account manager.
3. The final step was to create a workflow which then grouped these accounts and map them to necessary legal templates, the output being a dataset which would be fed into a final application to find the correct legal documents to send to each client.

The Impact

The key impacts of this project were the amount of time saved per outreach, and a significant improvement in accuracy which was done by reducing manual touch points and the dependency on flat files. A total of 1500 working hours were saved across a 3 month period, with the tool being used on multiple other projects which saved a further 500 hours across a 2 month period. The accuracy rate increased from 66.7% in a prior outreach to 92.1%, with the remaining contacts being manually contacted by the firm. Despite the legal requirements of this outreach no fines were imposed on the firm thanks to this new solution.