When leading direct-to-consumer life insurance provider eFinancial wanted to get an edge over the competition, it was time for a customer experience transformation. In Part 2 of this series, we follow the eFinancial journey from the Genesys® PureConnectTM application to the PureCloud® product.

We’ll specifically look at how eFinancial safely moved to the cloud using a controlled, hands-on approach. This multisite deployment required meticulous planning and systems integration — all while keeping the changeover invisible to over 400,000 customers.

Beyond Lift and Shift

Paul Bourdeaux, VP for IT at eFinancial, and his team opted for a phased approach on moving to the PureCloud application. But they weren’t interested in simply putting current contact center systems in the cloud. It was more about building and improving on what they already had with the PureConnect application and an array of other on-premises solutions. For example, eFinancial wanted to redesign and consolidate lead acquisition, campaigns and queue management capabilities with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

A Safe Starting Point

To lower its risk and accelerate learning — and to save on infrastructure — eFinancial introduced the PureCloud application at a brand-new site in Arizona. Serving 40 independent agents, this small greenfield deployment let them experiment and get comfortable with PureCloud queue routing capabilities, dialer features and open APIs.

Genesys Professional Services helped with design validation, but eFinancial had everything else covered. Its architects and engineers spun up the PureCloud application in four weeks using online resources, templates and documentation. The team also executed the AWS integration piece flawlessly. When needed, eFinancial adopted an Agile testing process, quickly coming up with new code and configuration fixes.

Speed and Cost Advantages

Through instantly available, feature-rich telephony, the PureCloud Voice product enabled eFinancial to open its Arizona office faster and at a lower cost compared to provisioning carrier services. The upfront investment to optimize lead acquisition and queue logic is paying off already.

Not long after going live, the IT team had to set up four outbound campaigns on short notice, a task that previously would have taken up to three weeks. They were given 10 days — but they actually did it in five days.

And using the Genesys wizard, Paul Bourdeaux created a demo for the PureCloud Chat capability one evening from home. It took about an hour and allowed him to showcase the solution to his board the next day.

Solid Migration Template

eFinancial is currently replicating the Arizona PureCloud template to migrate its main sites in Bellevue, WA and Chicago, IL. There’s still some work needed around integrating speech analytics, for example, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

Standalone voice, text and email communications will be consolidated on the PureCloud application and managed through a single omnichannel desktop. Paul and the team will integrate their workforce management tool, something that was only a pipedream previously. The team will also build customized screen pops using AWS microservices, another innovation that would have been lengthy and expensive before moving to the PureCloud application.

Part 3 of this blog series will look at the post-implementation experiences that eFinancial had with the PureCloud application, including business outcomes from the customer experience transformation. To learn more, get a PureCloud tour online today.