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How Toyota Financial Services is Using Automation to Streamline Operations

The financial services firm is rolling out “digital workers” to carry out repetitive tasks. In doing so, the company is working to free up employees’ time to handle more complex duties.
Suman Bhattacharyya
Contributing Writer

Financial firms are turning to automation to increase productivity. To that end, they’re using bots to review and analyze data and equipping customer service staff with digital assistants to help serve customers better.

Toyota Financial Services, the Plano, Texas-based finance and insurance brand for Toyota and Lexus in North America, has been rolling out automation tools through software firm UiPath for the past three years. The company provides retail and wholesale financing, retail leasing, and other financial services to authorized Toyota dealers, affiliates, and shared customers. 

TNCR recently spoke with Brandi Barbour, domain information officer for automation at Toyota Financial Services, to gain her insights on the evolution of the firm’s automation strategy. 

I understand that Toyota Financial Services first rolled out UiPath’s automation solution in 2019. Was the initial focus reducing the number of employees?

We initially wanted to reduce the number of full-time employees through automation, but as we dug into it, we’ve seen hours saved, allowing people to do more intelligent work as opposed to manual process work throughout the business.

How does the automation of tasks work?

With robotic process automation (RPA), you map out the business processes [first]. Our RPA teams document the process from end to end, and then they go back and create a bot to simulate that work.

So, for example, if we would have to repossess a vehicle because a customer hadn’t met the terms, instead of having to manually type in a communication or a letter, [the toolset] merges all [the information] together and then sends out a message to the customer.

How many hours do you estimate you’ve saved since you rolled out the program back in 2019?

We’ve saved 150,000 hours since 2019.

What is your key goal with automation?

We want to have a digital worker. Think of it as a digital assistant. The digital worker is taking over the bulk of my work so I can move on to other tasks.

How do you envision employees interacting with digital workers?

We want every customer care agent to have a button on their dashboard that says, “go do this, process this, update this address,” and [the virtual worker] automatically does it for them. 

If [customer care agents] have that capability on their desks, it could result in customer experience improvements. It could also improve the agent’s experience because they don’t have to do these [rote tasks] repeatedly all the time.

What’s an example of a task you would like automation to handle in the future?

Using natural language processing to detect the tone of an email chain. So let’s say a natural-language processing tool comes in, looks at an email chain, and tells us when a customer is angry.

Note: UiPath acquired artificial intelligence startup Re:infer in August, which will add a natural-language processing capability that can analyze data from customer conversations. The company said it intends to make this capability available to clients next year.

Are there any challenges selling the benefits of automation internally? 

We are trying to get more auditors and risk and compliance teams comfortable with automation. 

What do you consider a major risk when rolling out automation initiatives?

The biggest issue has nothing to do with automation itself. If the data behind [automation] is not good, then you’re in trouble. That’s because the [automation assistant] isn’t going to do what you think it will do if your data is not right.

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