Empowering remote work and digital innovation

The IT experts

With over 200 customers, HELPLINE is the European user experience leader. At the heart of this French business are nine contact centers and 2,000 skilled technicians who help customers fix IT issues on the spot — via phone, email or chat. More complex issues can involve desktop sharing or a site visit.

All of that was managed using the Genesys PureConnect solution, deployed on-premises and neatly integrated with the company’s dashboard reporting tools, IT service management and Active Directory systems.

“We grew from 1,000 to 2,000 agents in four years and are proud to have a 97% client retention rate, one of the best in the industry,” said Lionel Florence, Director Users Digital Journeys at HELPLINE. “Genesys has been by our side throughout.”

Prepared for anything

Business continuity planning (BCP) is vital to a leading IT services company like HELPLINE, which provides critical support for major public organizations, financial institutions and retailers. Toward the end of 2019, the company put the Genesys Cloud platform to the test at one of its sites in Paris.

“As well as improving BCP, we were keen to see how Genesys could support the next stage of our digital strategy,” said Lionel. “For example, moving to Customer Experience as a Service — anticipating, automating and bringing fresh innovation like callbacks and AI-enabled bots. The trial confirmed we could do lots more for about the same level of spend.”

An easy migration

A few months later, the trial moved to a full rollout when the COVID-19 pandemic put France into lockdown. “We signed up for Genesys Cloud on Friday and went live the following Tuesday with remote working,” said Lionel. “We took care of the implementation ourselves and, within a couple of hours, our customer support technicians were familiar with the system.”

In the first day of the lockdown, HELPLINE received three times more calls compared to its previous biggest-ever spike. Over the next two weeks, volumes rose by up to 30% before eventually easing. Despite these remarkable challenges, HELPLINE saw an increase in customer satisfaction ratings. And less complexity, servers, network components and backups resulted in cost savings.

Agile automation and AI innovation

Having transformed with BCP agility and resilience, HELPLINE focused on using Genesys Cloud as a digital accelerator. The first step was to automate its service delivery by adding smart voicebots and chatbots, built using the Genesys Dialog Engine Bot Flows authoring platform. Improvements in understanding and interpreting customer inputs quickly helped drive up usage and satisfaction scores.

“Now, 100% of interactions are initially handled by a bot,” added Lionel. “Rather than replace humans, they improve the flow of simple user actions, releasing our technicians for more complex inquiries. Similarly, using bots to help triage and route inquiries to the right technician eliminates complicated IVR menus, boosting customer experience.”

In the event of a major IT outage, HELPLINE can handle up to 80% of its calls through automation. This significantly reduces average handling and waiting times, while ensuring regular customer communications until the incident is resolved. Future plans include eliminating manual quality assurance and work scheduling tasks with the introduction of Genesys Workforce Engagement Management.

“We handle around 50,000 requests daily, answering calls in under 20 seconds with a first contact resolution rate of more than 80%,” concluded Lionel. “Through AI and automation, we are reducing our global cost of service for the customer. Ultimately, this makes us more attractive than our competitors.”