Case Study
Always there for local communities
Client
Ceredigion County Council
Sector
Local Government
Solution
Genesys Cloud
Overview
Over-the-weekend move
Based in the town of Aberaeron, Ceredigion County Council serves around 72,000 citizens, 25% of whom are over 65 years of age. Like most local authorities, it faced the perpetual challenge of doing more with less: improving public services against ever-reducing budgets. A task made even tougher when the pandemic forced contact centre staff to work from home.
Moving our supervisors and 20-plus advisors to remote working was pretty painless.
Challenge
Enable home working with minimal service disruption, while maximising cloud and omni-channel innovation.
“Thankfully, we were already onboard with Kerv Experience and Genesys Cloud,” says customer services manager, Anna Gawthorpe. “That meant moving our supervisors and 20-plus advisors to remote working was pretty painless. They took their laptops home Friday and were up-and-running on Monday morning.”
Solution
The foundations for the smooth move were laid two years earlier when the Council was managing multiple numbers and hunt groups, and battling siloed communication, without the benefit of central reporting.
Choosing to replace its on-prem telephony system with an agile Genesys Cloud contact centre, Kerv Experience specialists worked alongside the Council’s IT team to ensure everything was set up to get the best from the new platform.
During lockdown we’ve been able to offer the same service as before with little or no disruption to the public.
Result
The Genesys Cloud solution ensured there was no productivity loss. Home-based agents continued to handle 9,000+ calls a month, supporting local communities with a reassuring voice at the end of the phone during times of great uncertainty.
The situation was worsened by the launch of the NHS Track and Trace app, which generated extra calls from customers seeking guidance. The system handled them with ease. “It was important we were there when our customers needed us most, assisting with issues ranging from COVID-19 advice and refuse collection to free school meals and housing benefit enquiries,” says corporate manager, Joy Lake.
Greater care and understanding
Although at the start customers tended to make allowances, their tolerance levels changed during lockdown. Aided by improved reporting and call handling, the Council was able to closely match agents to specific situations, making flexible use of 17 different skill sets.
“Showing empathy and understanding is a natural part of the job, although it was needed more than ever during the crisis,” continues Lake. “This was reflected in our KPIs with, for example, average handling time increasing by a couple of minutes.”
Working smarter, not harder
With the old set-up, agents used to work in the dark, not knowing whether the customer had called before or who they had spoken to. “Kerv Experience helped integrate Genesys with our CRM system,” says Gawthorpe. “Now, it automatically calls up customer histories and case notes. So, they don’t have to repeat everything. And we’re able to resolve issues faster, while saving time on post-call work like logging details and follow-up actions.”
The Council is already planning its next Genesys-assisted innovation. “We can see a number of use cases for introducing web chat,” concludes Lake. “For example, a customer might want a date for their next bin collection, a blue badge form, or to book something into a recycling centre. Simple changes that, once again, will make a big difference.”
Now, we’re always in control and can see at a glance how we’re performing on call handling, queue times, service levels, and much more.
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Case Study
Lemon Business Solutions transforms remote service delivery and agility
Client
Lemon Business Solutions
Industry
Business Process Outsourcing
Product
Genesys Cloud
Overview
With on-prem voice, email and SMS comms, Lemon Business Solutions was hampered by hard-to-scale and time-consuming siloed systems.
Aspirational outsourcing company, Lemon Business Solutions brings zest to its customer experience. With 24/7 omni-channel services it’s the first point of contact for customers of many large engineering firms, as well as industries like telecoms, IT and facilities management. Agents are its most valuable asset, handling nearly two million calls annually.
With their existing system, everyday tasks like reporting, required lots of effort. Keen to improve business continuity the company looked for an alternative. Everything went out the window when the pandemic struck.
We can rapidly jump on service issues, whether our agents are in the office or at home by closely monitoring call queues or comparing KPIs across multiple channels and pinpointing coaching and training needs.
Challenge
Having existing on-prem voice, email and SMS comms, albeit in siloed systems, Lemon’s options for a new solution included using the company’s legacy PBX supplier. “What it said on the tin and how it performed in practice were like chalk and cheese,” adds Anderson.
“With a clunky user interface, the solution required lots of programming to work properly. We’d be left with more complexity; but making things easier was why we were moving to the cloud.”
Following a recommendation, Lemon decided to try Genesys Cloud.
“We were introduced to Genesys partner company, Kerv Experience, who brought skills beyond comparison. The migration was super smooth, and we got the best out of Genesys Cloud through Kerv Experience sharing knowledge and guidance.”
Solution
Keeping remote performance levels high
Managing a dispersed, mobile workforce brings new challenges. However, combining call and screen recording, Genesys Cloud comes with inbuilt reporting, analytics and workforce management. That enables the company to centralise quality assurance and keep remote performance levels high. Supported by Kerv Experience, Grafana advanced dashboard monitoring was also introduced.
“We can rapidly jump on service issues,” says Anderson, “whether our agents are in the office or at home by closely monitoring call queues or comparing KPIs across multiple channels and pinpointing coaching and training needs.”
Automatic email filtering and distribution reduces the margin for human error.
Result
Delivered from Kerv Experience as a contact centre as a service (CCaaS) model, Genesys Cloud is an all-in-one omni-channel platform. Moreover, it gives Lemon the flexibility to support any business model: 100% office based, 100% home-based, or the current 50/50 hybrid split.
“The changeover to remote working was invisible to our clients. Inside an hour our agents were trained to work from anywhere with a device and a broadband connection.”
The Genesys Cloud CCaaS service has seen Lemon gain efficiency in many areas. For instance, whereas emails previously generated around 6,500 interactions weekly, automatic filtering and distribution means agents deal with 80% less. That reduces the margin for human error and releases them for more valuable tasks.
Similarly, with the introduction of Genesys bullseye routing, calls are directed to preferred agents based on criteria such as skills and knowledge. If they aren’t available the caller is instantly connected to the next best-placed agent. “Key stats, like speed of response and abandonment rates, were fairly good before. They’re far better now,” says Anderson.
Resource and budget conservation
Importantly, the company feels it has sharper competitive edge.
“Technology no longer holds us back. We can provide anything our clients want – voice, email, chat, text, social, bots – and spin up those services faster than ever before. And if we need to roll back something when a campaign ends, for example, we can do that too. That conserves our resources and our clients’ budgets.”
Innovation never stands still
Lemon is already looking to roll out an improved outbound service, along with call-back and bot-powered appointment booking services.
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Case Study
Changing up with cloud-first strategy
Client
Arvato Bertelsmann
Industry
Customer Services & Business Process Outsourcing
Solution
Genesys Cloud
Overview
As the pandemic and first lockdown hit the UK, call volumes quickly and significantly increased, particularly to Arvato public sector and retail customers.
Despite this, Arvato made the seamless switch to remote working. A dedicated team of Kerv Experience engineers supported the journey. For example, by mapping Genesys Cloud and PureConnect data to ensure payroll and client reports were intact, thereby minimising risk.
Having Kerv Experience in our corner is helping us win more business. They always respond, whatever we throw at them.
Challenge
Arvato’s project arose from a need to improve client onboarding and offboarding, accelerate service delivery and enable flexible and remote working.
“We wanted to consider the merits of a native cloud solution built from the ground-up with an elastic web fabric — and, importantly, what advantages this offered for client onboarding and offboarding, faster service provisioning, and flexible homeworking”
Solution
After evaluating leading solutions, Arvato selected the Genesys Cloud application. “In the end it came down to trust,” said Steve Miller. “We had a brilliant partner in Kerv Experience who supported us throughout the migration.”
“Kerv Experience created a hybrid solution so it was easy to re-route traffic and we didn’t have to worry about complexities like quality of service and load balancing,” said Gordon Dalgleish, Head of IT Solutions, Arvato CRM Solutions. “We saved money by eliminating call diverts, then added chat and email to lower costs further still.”
Arvato regularly develops new solutions such as Automation as a Service, which uses IBM AI-powered bots and Blue Prism and Microsoft Power Automate for robotic process automation. Genesys AppFoundry has significantly improved the ability to quickly interconnect with other platforms. Other benefits from moving to Genesys Cloud included reduced support effort and lower cost of ownership.
“Having a purpose written cloud native solution designed for online use helped improve system performance,” concluded Steve Miller.
Result
Genesys Cloud was integrated with the company’s previous workforce management system, simplifying tasks like resource forecasting and scheduling.
“We have over 100 reports that we rely on to ensure our invoices are accurate and transparent,” added Gordon Dalgleish. “Kerv came up with a handy workaround for shifting everything over to Genesys Cloud, so there was no disruption to client billing and revenue.”
Crucially, Arvato can transition or implement new services and react quickly to business opportunities. For example, onboarding 175 agents for a new client within a short four-week period. Equipped with prebuilt laptops, these agents were trained remotely using Microsoft Teams.
Best of all, Arvato is no longer tied by the geography of its sites. “Our recruitment pool is now location agnostic,” said Steve Miller.
Results
Outcomes from the project
1,100
agents can work securely from any location
175
new recruits onboarded in four weeks
Zero
disruption to billing and revenue
Savings
from faster service rollback and cheaper calls
Talent
wider talent pool to choose from
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Event Video
Rethinking CX Post Pandemic – The role of Cloud, Digital and Data in Delivering Brilliant CX
What did we cover at the event?
Kerv (previously known as Foehn), Genesys, Arvato, and Microsoft experts gathered at the Imperial War Museum in London to discuss how companies could reimagine their CX strategies post-pandemic and keep up with consumer demands.
Watch our event video to hear how our client, Arvato, adapted to the dramatic changes through Covid-19 and continues to provide world-class customer experience through the use of Genesys Cloud.
Fancy coming along to the next one? Check out our Events page.
