It’s often said that diligence is the mother of good fortune. For eFinancial, it was a vital prerequisite for taking its contact centre from on-premises to cloud.

The leading direct-to-consumer life insurance provider is always looking to innovate and help customers get the right policy easier, faster and more affordably. In this series of blogs, we follow the eFinancial journey to get the inside track at the company’s customer experience transition — from the Genesys® PureConnectTM on-premises application to the PureCloud® product.

Covering All the Bases

It was textbook cloud strategy. eFinancial was growing rapidly and had two contact centres — Bellevue, WA and Chicago, IL. These contact centres handled 50,000 to 100,000 outbound calls a day. Customers would shop for and purchase life insurance via the phone and the internet. In the background, Genesys Speech Analytics tracked conversations to help identify opportunities where agents could further enhance their sales skills and deliver a better customer experience.

To accelerate growth, eFinancial wanted to scale up the business and enable select agents the option to work securely from home, while also lowering infrastructure costs. And they wanted to stretch resources through greater automation.

As a long-time on-premises PureConnect customer, the easiest and quickest option would have been to stick with Genesys and sign up for the PureCloud app. The company’s VP of IT, Paul Bourdeaux and his team, weren’t just looking for an easy route. By taking a holistic approach, they took the time to scout the market, see what was out there, and do their own due diligence. You can’t blame them. After all, they weren’t playing for table stakes. The loss of dialer data alone carried a six-figure cost.

Picking the Right Solution

eFinancial cast the net far and wide, looking at nearly every company. Three partners made the shortlist: Ring Central, Five9 and Genesys. In the final evaluation, the PureCloud app shined through based on superior performance in a number of key criteria:

  • User experience
  • Software updates
  • Dial performance
  • Omnichannel roadmap
  • Routing capabilities

eFinancial also felt that the PureCloud app had an edge in other areas. Having workforce management embedded into the tool meant there was less manual effort with everyday tasks, like organising training and resource scheduling. Call recording enabled simpler quality assurance. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) microservices — a technology used extensively by the company — offered open APIs for easy integration to back-office systems. This meant agents had bespoke screen pops for different insurance partners.

In Part 2 of this blog series, we’ll look at how eFinancial implemented the PureCloud app to ensure a successful cloud transformation. For more information about eFinancial visit https://www.efinancial.com/, and to learn more about the PureCloud customer experience app, check out the PureCloud platform