Many call centers are at a crossroads — wondering if it’s time to move to a cloud-based platform and, if so, which one is right. To help guide you through the decision-making process, the Genesys “Customer Reference” calls web series gives you firsthand migration stories from real-world customers. Plus, you can ask questions to help you on your own contact center journey to the cloud.

For the first webinar in the series, now available on-demand, we spoke with Daniel Pullo, Manager, Customer Retention at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA). Following are some of the highlights on the company’s move to cloud.

Can you provide a little background on FCA — the business, number of agents, contact centers, etc.?

Daniel Pullo: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, also referred to as FCA, is the world’s eighth largest automaker. The group was established in October 2014 when we merged Fiat and Chrysler. Our portfolio includes Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, Mopar and Ram Trucks. In North America, our customer care function reports up through the Mopar brand, which is our after-sales service and parts brand. Our customer care operations are based in Center Line, Michigan.

Our customers and dealers call, chat, email, tweet and Facebook message us with presale questions. Post-sale inquiries are about recalls, appointment scheduling, vehicle concerns and warranty coverage. These contacts are routed through 40 different lines of business into one of our contact centers. We currently have about, I’d say, 1,000 FTE across all four of our core contact centers.

Can you describe the contact center solution(s) you were using before Genesys? What challenges did you experience?

Pullo: Sure, good question. I was responsible for the operation of four supplier contact centers. And we operated on three disparate on-prem telephony solutions. So, our suppliers delivered the staff, but we delivered the calls to their telephony platforms, which was challenging for us for a few reasons. First, in this set up, it really limited our flexibility to move calls between sites. Especially if we had periods of high call volume or if we had a weather event or an occurrence at one of our centers. It made it very challenging to flip the switch and move volume from one center to another very easily.

Second, if we needed to make changes or react quickly, especially during those periods of high volume that I talked about, we were dependent on the number of IT resources and the speed of IT resources at our supplier locations. We were at the mercy of their IT function to make those changes. We’d also have to make some of those changes twice. So, from a cost standpoint, if I wanted to make changes in disparate systems, I’d have to engage two IT groups at two suppliers, which duplicated costs.

From the reporting standpoint, both real time and historical, we had different sets of queue views and different sets of reporting. Handle times and average wait time were measured in different ways. So, we did see some variance in calculations and actuals, and we had to spend more time on our end to adjust and aggregate reports for our use.

And then, from a forecasting standpoint, not only were there different telephony platforms, but they also had different forecasting scheduling platforms. That was, again, a duplication of effort, having to do things twice. And we needed more resources in our end and on the supplier side to manage that, because it was in essentially three different places.

Why did you ultimately choose Genesys for your contact center?

Pullo: We wanted to consolidate all of our solutions into a single solution. There was also a desire for us to be able to manage it in-house – to give us that level of ownership, visibility and agility – a solution with workforce management within the tool and enhanced IVR and ACD capabilities. We wanted a solution that gave us improved real-time visibility and that allowed us to consolidate inputs within the tool itself. And that’s what Genesys® PureEngageTM Cloud has allowed us to do.

What has changed since implementing Genesys? What are you able to do that wasn’t possible before?

Pullo: Okay, I’ll cut this into three areas. From a real-time adherence standpoint, we’re able to better measure, understand and improve our contact center metrics across all of our centers. We’re able to adjust or review performance on specific lines of business — down to the agent level — in real time. And then, based on that, we can make allocation adjustments or adjust what the callback queue should look like or what the call priority should look like.

From a workforce management standpoint, having all of our planning and forecasting activities on a single platform has been huge for us. So before, if we were struggling, we would have to ask our supplier to make changes to their skilling and hope that they do it properly. Now, if needed, we can make those changes on their behalf or they can make those changes and we can validate. So, we have more transparency from a forecasting and planning standpoint.

From a designer and designer analytics standpoint, we’ve gained a better understanding of customer journeys by having a tool that allows us to go in and really understand where customers are going or what they’re asking for. Where we could potentially self-serve, what the customer behaviors are like, and what their actions and activities are like — having the tools to give us those insights so we can easily work with our IT to make the changes needed to make the customer experience as effortless as possible.

*Some answers above have been edited or shortened for clarity.

Hear the Whole Cloud Story

To learn more about how and why Fiat Chrysler Automobiles moved its contact center to the cloud, watch the full on-demand webinar. We want these webinars to be as interactive as possible, so please email us if you have more questions. We’ll answer any questions we receive in an upcoming blog post.