The customer is a proudly Australian no branch banking provider. Initially founded in 1994 to offer access to home loan products, today, the bank provides a range of low-cost banking products, including home loans, savings accounts, credit cards, term deposits, and transaction accounts, to 400,000 customers.
As a direct bank, while it has offices in most major capital cities across Australia, it does not operate a single retail branch, ensuring that the contact centre and digital channel experience are crucial to delivering customers the required service. Staffed by 350 locals based in the Melbourne head office, the contact centre receives 2,500 calls per day.
Traditionally, an ageing demographic consumes the bank's products, so providing an excellent contact centre customer experience is crucial.
Since its acquisition by another bank in 2021, the bank has undergone a rebrand and repositioning strategy to attract a younger demographic – the digital natives. This shift includes offering a more comprehensive range of ways to interact with the bank, something its legacy platform could not do.
Walking the tightrope – modernising mission-critical operations
The bank's purpose is to help everyday Australians make the most out of their money, and its 100% digital footprint is part of the reason it can keep costs low for its customers. However, the customer was reluctant to make wholesale changes and move to a new platform, and the legacy contact centre had been its retail "face" for some time. The technology underlying the contact centre was only updated on an ad hoc basis and had become unwieldy and was in danger of outliving its lifespan.
The second challenge faced by the contact centre relates to the higher resourcing costs as the bank prides itself in being located in Australia, staffed by locals. Running a local team has meant that staff and real estate costs are higher than a typical offshoring solution.
The pandemic brought other stresses. With the inability of staff to access city-based offices, the contact centre faced a double challenge – how to enable staff to support its customers during enforced remote working conditions while minimising any risk of contact centre downtime delivering modernisation works.
Byte implements the Genesys Cloud Contact Centre.
The bank's CFO recognised the bank needed to move to a contemporary solution available anywhere that provides staff with easy, flexible working arrangements. The bold decision was taken to move the company from its legacy contact centre to a modern cloud-based solution integrated with the Microsoft Telephony and Teams environment. Byte was engaged in making it happen.
Byte's in-house team sits inside the customer's team and recommended upgrading to Genesys Cloud Contact Centre and prepared the bank and its legacy telephony platform for the upgrade. The integration work included connecting the Genesys platform with the banking platform (T-24) and workflow system (Pega).
Because of the requirement to keep the contact centre running during the project, the team worked behind the scenes to manage the upgrade with rollback options over a Friday evening. The team implemented the "plumbing" first – telephony upgrade with the business support system. The following morning, when the contact centre staff logged on at 8:30am, it was all ready to go.
The long-term vision and roadmap for the contact centre upgrade are to leverage more of the Genesys Cloud Contact Centre capabilities, including the options for customers to interact with the bank via any channel – phone, email, webchat messenger services and social media.
Outcomes and Benefits
Since the first phase of its modernisation, the contact centre staff have seen immediate benefits. It is now simple to operate and interact remotely. All agents interact directly via an interface with customers through a web browser, with no special software required. This gives the bank flexibility and allows contact centre staff to access the systems needed from any location.
As flexible, hybrid working models become the new normal into the future, it will allow the bank to reconsider its expensive city-based locations as staff are now empowered to work from home.
Post-deployment with agents working from home, customers have continued to enjoy elevated service levels from the bank's contact centre.
The upgrade rollout means de-risking the business too. Previously the legacy system was at risk of outliving its lifespan. The upgrade eliminated those potential failure points.
The next phase of the project will exploit the hidden value of the platform and focus on improving people processes and rolling out new Genesys Cloud features.
The Secret Behind Byte's Special Sauce
Byte has partnered with the customer for seven years, starting as their managed service provider to operate and manage their infrastructure environment. Byte's expert team on the ground has enabled the bank to move away from on-premises infrastructure and exploit the benefits of cloud-first technologies.
The trust Byte has built within the bank's team means that advice and feedback are sought even outside the team's direct projects. Byte is fully committed to delivering value above and beyond the norm, and we work with the customer in partnership as a trusted advisor.
"Our contact centre staff have been amazed at how seamless the transition was, and I doubt our customers noticed any difference at all. This is a testament to the openness and transparency we have with Byte and is the key to delivering success for the bank's contact centre modernisation." Bank Transformation Specialist
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