A local energy provider priding itself on being 100% Australian, 100% local with a customer service team of 650. Since launching in 2004, this provider has shaken up its traditional competitors and built a reputation for providing award-winning customer service.
While customers love its distinctive focus on personalised and empathetic service, the business started to face a steady increase in customer debt due to a commitment to giving customers every opportunity to make payments before supply termination. It was decided that a different approach to tackle the challenge was required.
They knew it needed to meet specific contact & correspondence requirements to achieve regulatory compliance obligations. However, they sought a solution that allowed their agents to contact struggling customers quickly, address the number of debtor accounts, and reduce the debt overhead.
Following through on excellent ideas to serve customers
The customer assist team itself brought the challenge to the business. Based on current projections during the COVID-19 lockdown, they knew that customers would face increasing financial hardship. After forecasting that the customer debt problem would increase, they knew they needed to contact more customers in the same amount of time.
However, the biggest challenge was recovering lost time where contact centre agents left voicemail messages when they could not make contact on the first call. This approach was slow, painstaking, and created frustration within the contact centre team, leading to poor morale.
The customer sought Byte's contact centre support team to implement a system that automated this voicemail process. The business goal was to increase the time customer contact agents spent talking to customers who answered calls.
This involved designing a system that would let its agents undertake progressive outbound dialling campaigns leaving pre-recorded voicemails for customers who didn't answer. Byte's innovative design overcame a previously long-held position that 'it can't be done' and also avoided additional license costs.
Combining Genesys automated calls with improved customer contact processes
Byte's team drew on its contact centre expertise to design and configure a system utilising Genesys Contact Centre that automates outbound dialling.
On the telephony side, the team designed and configured the existing Genesys Contact Centre system to implement dialler treatments based on customer contact rules. The team also developed non-standard Genesys dialler treatments to govern what the solution delivers when they receive a response. and includes rules on what the system does when there is no answer, or a busy tone is detected.
In this way, the system can contact more customer records per day and only direct the call to a consultant if a human answers.
The team also customised the platform to detect a customer's voicemail to then deliver an automated voicemail.
From a process point of view, Byte's in-house and the customer's technology teams worked side by side to redesign the underlying business processes. This work included populating the dialler with the correct customer records and ensuring all calls are tracked and updated in the Gentrack billing system to meet regulatory requirements. With no native integration pathway, Byte developed a middleware solution and processes to update those customer records in the billing system automatically.
Increasing customer collections by 15%
The solution was so efficient, the business immediately had to expand dialling lists and adjust staffing levels to keep pace with the dialler. Within the first week, the customer assist team knew it had hit a winner when the collections rate increased from 4% in the previous month to 19%.
Not only was there a marked improvement in debt collection, but the team also reported more engaged consultants and less time to get through calls. They made more customers calls and anticipate increased contact rates to come.
But wait, there's more….
Due to the impressive results of the project, the customer assist team are now looking to build more progressive dialling options for ad hoc customer campaigns. The business, is also looking to roll the solution out to the Direct Connect team for sales campaigns.
For Byte, this signals a great result for one of our longest and most loyal clients – and demonstrates a successful mix of project consultancy from the contact centre and managed services teams.
From our perspective, our consultants are already closely embedded in with the customer's team, and we are part of their telephony group. This project provided staff with the opportunity to gain valuable expertise and learn from our contact centre experts. The result had led to a positive cross-pollination of ideas.
Quote
"Our consultants love the dialler – and the outcomes have been so successful now the business wants to roll this out across its other areas. We have great people with great ideas, but we couldn't have made it happen without Byte's expertise and team." Customer quote
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