Probe Group, Australia’s largest locally owned outsourcing business, made headlines recently when it entered an agreement to merge with rival outsourcing outfit Stellar. The new entity will have 12,500 employees across six countries. Estimates suggest that the combined revenue of the organisation will exceed 600 million Australian dollars. Probe Group Chief Executive, Andrew Hume, has articulated his vision to create a scaled, tech-powered, Australian owned Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider — with an emphasis on customer experience outsourcing services.

COVID-19 has influenced three key strategies for BPO providers like Probe Group. First, it’s critical to embrace work-from-home and remote agents as a long-term business model. Second, move toward investing in an onshore model. And third — and most importantly — embrace the shift toward digital engagement, a trend that has greatly increased in the first six months of 2020.

Executing these strategic pillars demands a focus on technology to deliver the productivity and cost benefits customers want. And the biggest opportunity to innovate across the three pillars lies in enhancing the employee experience. That’s key to enhancing the overall delivery of Experience as a ServiceSM.

Probe Group has always emphasised employee experience as a key focus area. “Great customer experience is driven out of great employee experience. We try to integrate end-to-end employee journeys, right from onboarding to learning, self-assessment and gamification. The future of BPO is in understanding the employee and client value proposition,” noted Rohan Khanna, GM for Technology, Innovation and Projects at Probe Group.

Probe Group has taken a lead in redefining employee experience by looking at it holistically — from employee onboarding all the way through to end-state service delivery. This means that Probe Group agilely integrates its many siloed applications and enables capabilities like work from home, which wasn’t possible with its legacy on-premises infrastructure.

Seamless Cloud Integration for Disparate Applications

Deploying a cloud-based omnichannel platform was key in addressing all the requirements Probe Group had. The company chose the Genesys Cloud™ platform to support its growth strategy. Quick and easy deployment, with the ability to seamlessly integrate with existing IT infrastructures, helped manage the change without disrupting the business.

The migration to cloud has enabled Probe Group to provide a secure and compliant work-from-home solution for its agents. The most important benefit of the cloud-based platform is its ability to achieve native integration with third-party applications. This has significantly improved employee productivity – a critical enabler of its future strategy. Cloud has also enabled non-technical operational resources to manage change — and eliminated the six-to-eight-week procurement cycle.

Probe Group recognised the need to operate without the constraints that the traditional technology procurement cycle created for upgrades and new capabilities. With cloud, the new version of microservices are updated regularly, and it’s embedded into the cloud pricing model. This ensures that companies like Probe Group always get the latest version of the product.

Growth in the BPO industry always accelerates following a global economic crisis. Providers who can deal with market transitions, such as the shift to digital engagement, and move toward outcome-driven business models will emerge as winners.

Cloud is a fundamental technology to help BPOs build agility and differentiation to serve the demanding needs of their customers. “It [cloud] helped us integrate new and different partners — and that has been powerful,” concluded Khanna.

Read the full Probe Group customer story here. And get a tour of the Genesys Cloud platform to see what it can do for your contact centre.