Imagine being able to mobilize your business for rapid expansion, so you could onboard agents, target new markets, and build custom functionality quickly and effectively. It’s easy when you take your customer experience to the cloud.

Australia’s fastest-growing retail travel business, Ignite Travel Group, presents corporate clients, retail customers and tourism partners with hand-picked, value-filled holiday packages. The full-fledged online business continues to expand, both organically and through its partnership with Flight Centre Travel Group, to create new distribution networks, supplier channels and revenue streams.

As a long-time Genesys on-premises customer, Ignite Travel Group wanted to continue the success it had experienced, but it was attracted to the benefits of a cloud-based solution. The company already enjoyed a successful contact center, based on the Gold Coast, with 110 sales and customer service specialists. And to deliver the next stage of growth, it wanted to develop the business further — targeting new markets with a more nimble, lower-cost business model.

Although its on-premises contact center solution had delivered what Ignite Travel Group needed at the time, the company’s requirements had changed: It needed more space and wanted to expand internationally without adding hardware or having agents tied to one location.

Cloud-Based Flexibility

Now, with the Genesys® PureCloud® application, Ignite Travel can scale at pace — without major investment. The product supports inbound and outbound communications, and the group plans to add SMS text soon. In addition, the business gained a disaster recovery site, which it lacked with the on-premises solution, just as the Commonwealth Games hit town.

The international sporting event posed some potential challenges. For example, with the local transport system facing gridlock, the company had real concerns about staff not being able to reach the office. So the pressure was on to get the solution up and running quickly.

The Genesys cloud solution met the challenge successfully, because it enables sales and customer service consultants to work anytime, anywhere — all they need is an internet connection. In the end, Ignite Travel Group didn’t need its contingency plan for the Commonwealth Games, but the company likes knowing it’s in place if needed in the future.

Improved Efficiency, Reduced Expense

With its cloud-based application, Ignite Travel Group has also transformed employee productivity, ensuring that its customers enjoy efficient service and the best advice on hot deals and travel products. Training lead times have dropped dramatically — from two days to two hours: an 87% improvement.

Automating workforce management has made routine tasks, such as forecasting and work scheduling, more accurate and less time consuming. This means that team leaders always have a real-time view of workloads and can organize resources to meet SLAs and KPIs. This also frees up the IT team to focus on transformational work, instead of managing servers and contact center infrastructure.

The open APIs and software development kit that come with the PureCloud application make it easy to bridge feature and functionality gaps. For example, the team has built its own dashboards and scorecards, along with a useful desktop button, to invoke emergency messaging and information services. And it’s created a bespoke interface to trial chat.

Accelerating Your Business

With New Zealand, the US and Canada in its sights, Ignite Travel Group can now open local contact centers very quickly, without the expense and delays associated with on-premises solutions. And because it can offer the latest technology and opportunity for remote workers, it’s well placed to hire the best talent.

The Genesys cloud-based contact center platform has served as a growth accelerator for Ignite Travel Group — giving it more freedom to go after new markets — with substantially less downtime, maintenance, hardware, training and licensing costs. The intuitive interface is easy to deploy and use. And it empowers users with key business insights to improve forecasting and scheduling — and to get the best use of IT resources.

Check out the full story to learn how Ignite Travel Group improved customer experience with the PureCloud application. And then take the PureCloud guided tour to see how Genesys cloud-based products can accelerate your business.