Matching high-speed broadband services with digital-first customer care

Challenge

Historically, UK service providers and cable operators have tended to focus on urban or suburban areas with high population densities. From a commercial standpoint, network build-out costs were a major investment that could take years to recoup. So, communities in rural and hard-to-reach areas didn’t enjoy easy access to high-speed broadband.

Fibrus is changing that.

Maximising the use of assets such as telephone poles and underground ducts, it delivers full fibre optic cable to the door, for quality and reliability that cannot be achieved any other way. Keeping operations on track is the job of 130 customer service, sales, billing and technical support specialists. However, productivity and service suffered due to weekly outages and poor reporting.

“Stability was a major problem, and we’d struggle to cope during busy periods, or when service issues peaked during storms and high winds,” said Stephen Riley, Head of Customer Service at Fibrus. “We could just about work out how many calls we were getting and had no way of deflecting customers through self-service or digital channels. Even basic stuff like creating a new IVR recorded message or integrating other systems was incredibly hard.”

The solution

To kick-start its customer and employee experience transformation, Fibrus reached out to Genesys as part of a competitive tender.

“We’d heard good things about their cloud platform in terms of its leadership, reliability and integration in this space, but needed to find a local partner,” said Riley. “Genesys had no hesitation in recommending and introducing us to Kerv Experience, who quickly got on board with our tight timescale. They looked at Fibrus as a customer, rather than trying to up-sell stuff we didn’t need on day one — unlike other providers who weren’t as practical or flexible.”

Fully tested before going live, Kerv Experience specialists expedited a smooth eight-week migration, while avoiding overlapping charges from the existing Fibrus contact centre provider.

The new Genesys Cloud platform enables Fibrus users to efficiently manage inbound and outbound calls; email; and Genesys Web Messaging, WhatsApp and Facebook conversations — all from a single desktop. Customers now complete identity checks through IVR, so they don’t waste time doing that with an agent. A Genesys out-of-the-box connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM has also helped personalise service and reduce effort.

Digital innovation doesn’t end there. A Genesys chatbot supports website FAQs, while also identifying customer intent and triaging Genesys Web Messenger conversations. Other new capabilities include call and screen recording, plus offering customers the option of a callback. Also, with Amazon Polly text-to-speech analytics, Fibrus can track keywords and customer sentiment, intercepting potential escalations and taking preventative action.

Elevating employee experience has been another crucial part of the transformation. Long gone are the days of manually preparing and managing forecasts and work schedules on spreadsheets. Powered by AI, Genesys Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) helps automate and streamline back-office operations — especially when it comes to predicting demand spikes and making sure Fibrus teams are correctly resourced. Now, supervisors can create accurate forecasts in minutes, leaving more time to focus on agent performance, skill development and coaching.

Similarly, by introducing gamification tools, WEM facilitates regular monthly competitions with leaderboards and prizes. Awards recognise achievements such as taking the most calls, collecting the most votes for supporting colleagues or simply being an unsung hero.

“Our employees are more engaged, especially home workers who can sometimes feel isolated,” added Riley. “That’s when attrition rates start rising. WEM and gamification really helps address that problem.”

Likewise, Fibrus teams make more decisions based on real-time data and reporting. That includes over 100 wrap-up codes to categorise calls that help drive improvement projects right across the business. Improved data and performance visibility has also enabled the launch of a commission program, enabling employees to maximise earnings.

These newfound capabilities are already translating into solid business benefits. Fibrus has seen a 29% reduction in contact rates, releasing agent capacity and contributing towards a £630,000 ($745,000) headcount cost savings. Importantly, customer satisfaction hasn’t declined — quite the opposite. Net Promoter Score (NPS) has climbed 27% with Trustpilot ratings up 7%.

Empathy and ensuring vulnerable customers in remote areas stay connected is at the heart of personalised customer care. “Our agents love the documents section on Genesys,” concluded Riley. “It’s easy to email customers step-by-step guidance on how to fix their broadband issues and then call them back to answer any questions and make sure everything is okay. We’ve had great feedback and customers appreciate it.”

The future’s looking even brighter. Tapping into the expertise of Kerv Experience, Fibrus plans to continue improving digital journeys and its use of AI. Potential new projects include making bots more conversational and the addition of Genesys Agent Assist for recommending next best actions to agents during live interactions.

Other possibilities include integrating Genesys with the company’s network monitoring systems. The goal would be to enable bots to correlate outages by the customer’s surname and postcode and inform them the problem is already in hand — thereby reducing effort and incoming contacts further still.

“Kerv have been fantastic to work with,” said Liam Mulholland, Service Delivery Director at Fibrus. “I think as a vendor their performance with us has been exemplary, and there’s an awful lot more that we can do together in the future.”