Boosting client service by streamlining the contact centre

Love, care and exceptional service

Anglicare Sydney is a Christian non-profit providing care to older people and services to the vulnerable across a large area of New South Wales, Australia.

Anglicare has been serving those in need for more than 160 years, employing 4,000 staff and serving alongside 2,000 volunteers, to share the love of Jesus, enrich lives and strengthen communities.

“We strive to make a real and positive difference in the life of each person we serve and exceed their expectations with love, care and exceptional service,” said Roy Hazelwood, Contact Centre Manager at Anglicare Sydney.

On-premises challenges

To support the provision of a diverse range of services to clients across the Diocese of Sydney, Anglicare Sydney had relied on two on-premises contact centre platforms. But it faced numerous challenges, including the lack of a consistent view of customer experience, an end-of-life Cisco system with remote work issues, regular Avaya outages and limited reporting.

A flexible new platform

With these challenges, the team at Anglicare Sydney recognized the need for a new contact centre platform that could significantly improve both staff and client experiences. The organization also wanted to find a vendor that could demonstrate a cultural alignment and strong understanding of its objectives.

“From the very beginning of this process, we were acutely aware that we would only be successful if we were able to meet both our employee and customer experience objectives,” said Hazelwood. “While the product and implementation were important, for Anglicare Sydney ongoing support was the deciding factor. We wanted a technology partner that would be with us for the long term.”

After assessing a range of options on the market, it decided in 2020 to replace one of its legacy platforms with the Genesys Cloud platform.

“We initially implemented Genesys Cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic for 20 agents from our customer contact centre, our IT service desk, and our customer experience and support services division,” said Hazelwood. “We quickly realized many benefits from the platform and, in 2022, we migrated 70 users from our Anglicare Sydney division onto Genesys.”

Both deployments were managed by its technology partner QPC Australia.

“Its knowledge of Genesys and experience in the contact centre space meant QPC Australia understood our requirements and were able to get us up and running as quickly as possible,” added Hazelwood.

Omnichannel experiences enhance care delivery

One major benefit has been enabling web chat and SMS to supplement existing voice and email options. This included rapid training of internal service volunteers during pandemic outbreaks.

“Due to the user-friendliness of Genesys Cloud, we were able to train our people within two hours and have them up and running almost immediately,” said Hazelwood.

Turnkey integrations like Call Journey for sentiment analysis also provide instant customer and employee health checks to guide coaching and service refinements.

Meanwhile, community members accessing food and financial assistance can now conveniently input their postcode to get routed directly to the closest Anglicare support centre.

“This means they no longer need to repeat their need multiple times to different agents and departments, which can often be a stressful experience,” said Hazelwood.

Employee empowerment leads to improved satisfaction

Alongside elevated external support capabilities, Anglicare Sydney has focused intensely on nurturing its internal culture.

“We have worked hard to listen to customers and employees,” said Hazelwood. “The contact centre staff’s leadership skills and allowing input into decision making have made a huge difference.”

That employee empowerment is paying dividends. A transparent reporting approach encourages dialogue around performance and feeds into staff recognition.

Powering integration and performance

As well as enabling significant improvements for both agents and clients, the new Genesys platform has allowed the organization to add value with other pre-integrated tools.

“We are now leveraging complementary technologies from AppFoundry partners that enable us to improve our customer and employee experiences in tandem,” said Hazelwood. “Post-call surveys provide an instant and reportable health check on client satisfaction and also assist in identifying problem calls that may require coaching or further assistance.”

Strong business benefits

With all agents now supported by the Genesys platform, Anglicare Sydney is enjoying some significant business benefits.

“We can now provide our agents with a single pane of glass, which enables their total focus to be on serving clients,” said Hazelwood. “They can make use of a variety of communications channels including voice, email, SMS and live chat. This is much better than what our legacy platforms were able to deliver.”

The intuitive operation of Genesys Cloud also means one manager can cover quality, resource management, technology, system maintenance, architecture, reporting, analysis and testing.

It’s also now possible for the Anglicare Sydney team to make changes to the system quickly without the need for third-party assistance. This means the organization can be much more agile and able to respond quickly to client needs.

With the efficiencies gained from streamlining its contact centre, Anglicare Sydney is saving around AUD $120,000 in annual operational costs, with wait times decreasing by 96% to just 11 seconds.

A bright future

The organization continues to look at the use and benefits of the feature-rich all-in-one platform, Genesys Cloud.

“Genesys has provided us with a powerful and scalable contact centre platform that will meet our requirements for many years to come,” concluded Hazelwood.