Shifting into top gear

Online vehicle buying leader

The UK’s biggest digital automotive marketplace, Auto Trader brings together the largest and most engaged consumer audience with the largest pool of private vehicle sellers and car dealerships. Together, cross-platform visits total about 80 million per year while 75% of all minutes spent on automotive sites are spent on Auto Trader.

“As a business, we’ve been undergoing a major cloud transformation,” said Mike Braid, Head of Enterprise IT for Auto Trader. “Our end goal was to move the entire buying journey online — from arranging adverts, part-exchange options and finance quotes to vehicle delivery to the door and contract-end balloon payments.”

Escaping legacy IT silos

Delivering that vision meant breaking free of disparate customer service operations running on legacy technology. Spanning two UK contact centers, one a recent acquisition, this fragmented IT environment included standalone products such as Avaya Aura, Horizon, NICE call recording, workforce management and various other solutions.

As a result, customers received a disjointed experience, while 300 agents struggled to keep up with over 60,000 monthly inbound and outbound calls. Likewise, supervisors could not get a full 360-degree customer view and lacked effective real-time data and reporting tools.

Careful cloud considerations

After carefully evaluating offers from NICE, 8×8, Amazon Connect, and RingCentral, Auto Trader opted for the Genesys Cloud AI-powered experience orchestration platform.

“Genesys had everything we needed in one proven solution with the ability to quickly flex and enable/disable additional feature sets and partner integrations with ease,” said Adrian Bradshaw, Senior Enterprise Engineer at Auto Trader. “We also liked the fact that Genesys had an online community where people could post ideas which would be considered and noted for future product development.”

Over the next six months — the final three of which saw the UK thrown into lockdown-enforced remote working due to the pandemic — the company’s IT team handled the entire contact center migration.

“We soon got to grips with the platform, building call flows, replacing handsets for softphones and system testing,” added Bradshaw. “We adopted a ‘train the trainer’ approach, which minimized disruption running 20-minute remote coaching sessions with users before going live a couple of days later.”

Enhanced customer, agent and IT experience

Auto Trader has successfully elevated its customer care and service levels on numerous fronts. Requests for advertising packages, password resets and other seller inquiries are processed more efficiently by the consumer team. And on the retail side, agents engage better with vehicle dealers and manufacturers, increasing advert counts, promoting new products and deepening relationships.

One of the biggest changes was moving from transaction processing to business logic — an initiative assisted by integrating Genesys Cloud with the company’s data lake for improved decision-making.

“Our business analysts have better data and reports than ever,” said Braid. “We’re now able to see the impact of price changes and sales campaigns on our bottom line, which we couldn’t before.”

Boundless possibilities and budget savings

Not content with replacing clunky on-premises systems and going to the cloud, the IT team went several steps further, enhancing customer service with pre-integrated solutions found in the Genesys AppFoundry^® Marketplace.

“We previously used an automated pause-and-resume desktop agent for secure payments,” said Tim Speakman, Technical Support Engineer at Auto Trader. “PCI Pal has been a huge win, eliminating lots of fixing and network segregation, and reducing our compliance scope. We’ve also integrated Zendesk for IT ticketing and PureInsights for repackaging of Genesys Cloud data and transcriptions, again significantly reducing effort.”

The company retired several solutions. Previously, it spent around $370,000 every three years on new hardware, with a similar amount on support and running costs.

“With Genesys weekly feature releases, we spend less time on software and security patching, compared to our old Avaya on-premises system. All together that has saved us around $85,000 a year,” concluded Braid.