Omnichannel CX leads to a 50% improvement in first-call resolution

Facing up to a changing market

Grupo Equatorial has been a mainstay of Brazil’s energy market for two decades. It serves 34 million people across 31% of Brazil, from Oiapoque in the north to Chuí in the south. But its business is changing.

Alongside its regulated electricity distribution operations, where customers have no choice of provider, Grupo Equatorial has been branching out into competitive markets such as rooftop solar power and telecommunications. These markets demand high levels of customer responsiveness and engagement.

At the same time, Brazil’s electricity market regulator, the Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica or ANEEL, is demanding higher levels of service provision across the board. In 2021, for example, ANEEL introduced a wide-ranging package of rules, called “Resolução 1.000,” that included requirements for electricity market operators to offer a range of customer service channels including phone, online and in person.

The resolution also required operators to meet new standards for customer response, for instance by offering callbacks and call recording for quality assessment. “In the last five years, customer service has dramatically evolved — and we have matched in our relationship with our customers,” said Maurício Alvares da Silva Velloso Ferreira, Director of Corporate Clients and Services at Grupo Equatorial.

Entering a digital, omnichannel world

This evolution has forced Grupo Equatorial to reevaluate how it communicates with its customers. Historically, the company had offered in-person and phone-based customer service, but little in the way of digital channels. With consumer preferences and regulation all emphasizing digital contact, it was clear this had to change. And just stitching together a range of point products would not do the trick.

“Our challenge is to provide our customers with the same experience, whether they are in Macapá, Belém or Porto Alegre,” said Velloso. “We cover an enormous geographical area and a huge number of customers. We need to ensure a uniform experience across all our concession areas.”

Besides having a uniform customer experience (CX) platform across the whole country, it was important to have a technology foundation that could overcome natural disasters. The Grupo Equatorial catchment area includes regions such as Rio Grande do Sul, which in 2024 was subject to the worst flooding seen in Brazil for 80 years.

Such catastrophes could force the closure of local offices, but customer services would have to continue regardless.

Selecting a leading platform

The key to which platform Grupo Equatorial should use emerged when the company bought a smaller electricity distributor in the state of Goiás. The distributor was using Genesys in its contact center, and this gave Grupo Equatorial a taste of the technology.

“We understood that Genesys fits the needs of customers from various segments and niches,” said Fernanda de Carvalho Leão, Customer Experience Manager at Equatorial Group. “Large enterprise customers and low-income customers have absolutely different needs but must be equally well served. If the customer prefers self-service, I must make it available. If they want personal service, I must offer it, too, and so on.”

Genesys can cover all these bases with a single platform. Plus, it does not hurt that the technology can be delivered from the cloud, making it impervious to natural catastrophes, and is one of the most widely used customer service platforms on the market, familiar to contact center agents around the world.

A more efficient way of working

Equatorial Group had migrated its contact centers in Imperatriz, Teresina and Porto Alegre to Genesys by February 2024 — and things “immediately started working differently,” said Contact Center Manager Sanderley Lima.

It was not just that Equatorial Group was able to communicate seamlessly with customers using IVR and digital channels such as WhatsApp, which helped raise the level of first-call resolutions from 60% to almost 90%. Nor was it the fact that the platform increased the resilience of Equatorial Group overnight — previously, to re-route calls, “I would need a license and to go through a whole bureaucratic process,” said Lima. “Now we can do a turnaround in seconds.”

These features have transformed how Equatorial Group can deliver quality service, but what the company did not expect was the host of operational efficiency improvements it has seen thanks to the intelligence of the Genesys platform. Previously, for instance, Lima had to listen to a selection of customer calls and collate service metrics by hand to comply with rules set by the Brazilian National Standards Organization.

But now, said Lima: “I already have this on my screen. At the end of the day, I have a complete picture of each agent’s service.”

The Genesys IVR system allows any caller to reach a human agent if they need to, while live sentiment analysis provides a real-time picture of customer satisfaction during the progress of a call. At the same time, Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management helps agents improve their service levels through gamification features and simplifies training — as well as the distribution of tasks to about 600 back-office employees.

Powering intelligent customer service

Thanks to Genesys, “we are using artificial intelligence to help develop customer relationships,” said Velloso. “The result is improvements in operational efficiency, customer experience and consumer satisfaction.”

With less than a year of experience with Genesys, Equatorial Group is already putting the platform at the heart of its customer contact strategy.

“We have an extensive roadmap for deployments in the Equatorial Group,” concluded Velloso.

To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.