Agile cloud solution empowers agents to provide same-day customer outcomes

To modernize its contact center from a legacy on-premises system and improve the customer experience, the NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) embarked on a cloud transformation. By implementing the Genesys™ solution, the agency saw a 30% reduction in handling times, a 48% drop in time spent on outbound campaigns and a 20% decrease in escalations.

30% reduction

in call handling times

48% reduction

in time spent on outbound campaigns

20% drop

in escalations

100%

of sessions recorded

Increased

team collaboration

Unlimited

scalability

The omnichannel customer experience provisioned by Genesys over an integrated single platform has transformed our operations. The Genesys team was able to meet all financial and timeline targets throughout the deployment cycle of the solution with no hits to service — and all of it was achieved during the Australian bushfire crisis.

— Wendy Keith, Director, Housing Contact Center, NSW Department of Communities and Justice

Pursuing a digital approach to connect with clients

The New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) provides services aimed at improving the lives of disadvantaged individuals, families, people with disabilities and communities. Under the DCJ, the Housing Contact Center facilitates requests for public housing, helps people broker the private rental market, offers access to interest-free bond loans, and assists homeless and at-risk individuals with information and referrals to non-governmental organizations for temporary accommodation.

To ensure prompt services for the country’s most vulnerable citizens, DCJ Housing has a goal to reduce customer service response times in 2020 and give clients a same-day outcome on their applications. This goal is even more ambitious as it applies to 1,000,000 voice and email interactions per year, including 230,000 calls annually in the homelessness space alone.

Realizing this vision required DCJ Housing to modernize its on-premises legacy systems and streamline the flow of information and services across siloed channels. The agency tapped into the capabilities of the Genesys solution to allow the agency to be more agile and provide same-day outcomes.

Driving cloud contact center innovation

The legacy contact center infrastructure at DCJ Housing made it increasingly difficult to meet client expectations and leverage digital innovation. The system lacked real-time monitoring functions to prioritize requests as well as efficient dialing processes, resulting in ineffective workforce management, application processing backlogs and poor customer experience. In addition to resource-intensive software licensing and upgrade requirements, a lack of integration between workforce management and outbound voice also kept agents from capturing valuable contextual information to drive better value for clients.

The Genesys solution has increased collaboration amongst DCJ Housing Contact Center (HCC) employees using a suite of features like screen sharing and chat when transferring or escalating calls. Integrating outbound voice, email and workforce management systems in a single platform make it easier to streamline workflows and improve customer engagement, delivering positive outcomes.

Because the system is easy to manage with minimal IT resource requirements, DCJ Housing can serve clients faster through automated task routing and prioritization features. This results in fewer call transfers and shorter wait times, improving agent productivity so they can achieve same-day client communications.

Continuous support from the highly responsive teams at Genesys and partner NTT throughout the sales and implementation process was integral in assisting DCJ Housing to seamlessly roll out new customer engagement channels to keep pace with client demands.

On March 18, 2020, we piloted 11 agents working from home. It was a success and we immediately began ramping up. On April 2, 2020, our remaining few agents transitioned to work from home and our entire workforce is now remote — 400 agents in 2.5 weeks! This would not have been possible without Genesys.

— Peter Collins, Senior Operations Manager, Housing Contact Center, NSW Department of Communities and Justice

Establishing seamless business continuity

Business continuity concerns have also been addressed with the rapid deployment of new functionalities and upgrades without disruption to existing workflows.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Genesys enabled DCJ Housing to seamlessly transition toward a remote working environment with no disruption to business continuity. In early March 2020, it conducted a pilot to allow 11 agents to work remotely. Following the success of the pilot, the entire workforce of 400 agents was working remotely within just 2.5 weeks.

Giving agents the tools to enhance customer experience

DCJ Housing can now deliver superior customer experiences. Real-time monitoring of agent performance and visibility into every interaction have been critical to enhancing team collaboration, work performance and forecasting the best possible agent schedules.

The highly intuitive interface tracks call volumes and monitors client behavior patterns, empowering agents with a unified view of the customer journey for seamless interactions. Agents now have a single customer service view that covers interaction history with the agency, and contextual data to deliver faster, more personalized services every time.

Genesys is playing a crucial part in helping us achieve our 2020 customer experience goal of delivering a same-day outcome for all our clients. In fact, we couldn’t have even dreamt about setting such an ambitious goal had we not moved to this new solution.

— Wendy Keith, Director, Housing Contact Center, NSW Department of Communities and Justice

DCJ Housing has been able to meet its business objectives after switching to Genesys. The cloud-enabled platform has cost-efficiently minimized manual processes, increased client response times and optimized system allocation based on request prioritization. The resulting drop in cost per agent makes it more financially viable for DCJ Housing to explore capabilities like robotic process automation deployments to further boost efficiencies.

The contact center transformation is yielding remarkable results for the HCC, allowing it to build a fully integrated customer engagement platform. The benefits of integration capabilities, unlimited scalability and operational visibility put DCJ Housing firmly on track to achieve its goal of same-day client communications and customer experience excellence.

At a glance

Industry: Government

Location: Australia

Company size: 400 agents

Challenges

  • A legacy system made it difficult to meet clients’ needs
  • Backlogged application processing
  • Predominantly manual processes

Product

Genesys

Additional resources

Case study PDF

Partner

NTT