Monday, 06/05/2023

Rethinking Communication: Digitalization Brings Ease to Exchange with WTU

A smooth cash supply is hardly imaginable in Germany without cash-in-transit companies (WTU). Essential for this: regular exchange between customers and cash service providers. This exchange, however, still takes a lot of time today and requires significant manual effort on both sides. Automation and system-supported communication provide relief here.

Challenges in Daily Work

At our annual cash dialogue trade event in May in Leipzig, participants were clearly concerned with one question: How can communication with cash service providers (WDL) be made more efficient? The processes and coordination are mostly characterized by time-consuming manual processes—on both the customer side and the service provider side. Daily operations involve passing on information about failures or schedule changes, resolving discrepancies, and planning for holidays.

This involves numerous manual efforts that cost time and resources. As a result, this way of working also makes it difficult to maintain a comprehensive overview of daily business, and the status of cash processing remains opaque at various stages. A pure communication platform would only provide relief at first glance. Real added value is offered by monitoring options and automation. We at ALVARA want to integrate all these aspects and implement them through the further development of the ICC platform.

Automation Provides Relief

The interaction with customers at cash service providers has already been standardized and automated for some time with the use of the ICC (App). However, direct exchange with the industry has shown that there is still further potential in the digitization of WTU notifications. ALVARA will incorporate these insights into new functionalities of the ICC platform and continuously advance system-supported communication.

Automatic recognition of relevant topics is essential. This means that problems and upcoming tasks should be identifiable and manageable by the system. Communication itself can thus be automated. Additionally, further interfaces should ensure that proactive data exchange on specific issues is simplified. Announcements of shifts or changes in holiday planning can be communicated easily and digitally.

Information Processed and Forwarded Efficiently

It is the everyday things that are already recognized in monitoring today, but often only at the end of the day. However, proactive communication is crucial for successful customer retention of the WTU. Whether it's canceled tours, missing single coin orders, or a backlog in counting: WTUs can report information transparently and automatically and lead an active resolution of issues. Additionally, this approach allows automated workflows, so follow-up processes at the customer—which are often very time-consuming—can be further reduced.

At the cash dialogue, initial functionalities were already discussed and developed that we would like to integrate into the solution in the future. A focus is, for example, the reporting of "planned" or short-term tour failures and the associated replacement trips by cash service providers. This allows branches to be proactively informed and any replacement orders to be triggered automatically.

Conclusion

In the future, cash service provider companies and customers can look forward to more efficient and transparent automatically generated communication. Standardized processes relieve actors on both sides and give them more time for their core business. But that's not all: Synergy with other ALVARA solutions should also bring added value in the future. It is conceivable that the planned Manager Cockpit will help ensure that interaction is not only traceable but measures can also be better assessed. Promising prospects, we find.

Do you want to benefit from automation in WTU notifications?