Less complexity. More productivity.

Established in 1994 as a small operation in Perth, Western Australia, APM has grown to become an international human services provider with locations across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. The company’s services focus on enhancing an individual’s employability; independence; health and wellbeing; and social and economic participation in their community. Its 14,000 staff support more than two million people — of all ages and across 11 countries — to help improve their quality of life.

During its 30 years of strong growth, and as a result of multiple acquisitions, APM had reached the stage where it was relying on four legacy contact centre platforms to support its communication with clients.

“Our staff were relying on two Mitel solutions, and one each from 3CX and Vodafone,” said Michael McBride, General Manager, Customer Service Centre at APM. “This was causing us an increasing array of challenges.”

Having four platforms in place meant the company had to deal with multiple support partners. As there was only limited knowledge within the business of any of the platforms, contact centre teams had to rely on the platform vendors when they needed support. This often proved challenging as the company didn’t have the size to access premium levels of service.

APM also had challenges when it came to workforce management as the platforms lacked this capability. “This, coupled with a lack of consistent data and reporting, meant our contact centre had to be overresourced, which had obvious financial implications,” said McBride.

Despite their best intentions, the customer service team found it had become a blocker to improvement projects on growth and expansion in customer experience (CX) because they didn’t want to introduce even more platforms. For example, the business wanted to add live web chat as a channel, but the customer service group couldn’t agree to it because it would mean introducing yet another system into the contact centre that the team would have to learn and manage.

The company also faced challenges when it came to scaling backend systems as some of the platforms were already oversubscribed. This, in turn, required the IT team to create workarounds to keep things operating.

“Even making small changes, such as adding 10 new users, would require a two-week process,” said McBride. “Simply changing an outbound display number could take 72 hours or more as we needed the assistance of a support partner.”

A better way forward

In late 2021, APM sought a new contact centre platform that better matched the company’s operational needs. Technology partner Customer Driven was engaged to undertake an analysis of requirements and recommend alternative solutions. After a rigorous assessment process, APM opted to deploy the Genesys Cloud AI-Powered Experience Orchestration platform.

In January 2022, Customer Driven began a six-month rollout that addressed each of the company’s 14 work groups in turn. The first group went live on the new platform that May.

“The outcome was a huge success with no customer impact, no staff impact and no business performance impact,” said McBride. “Our decision to go with Customer Driven and Genesys Cloud had been validated. The implementation project was the best we have ever run with any vendor. It was smooth, collaborative, on time and successful.”

Once the deployment had been completed, the company had a total of 230 users on the new platform in seven locations, as well as work-from-home staff across Australia and New Zealand. This number increased to 280 staff in 2023.

More efficient workforce management

Of the many benefits that have been realised since the new platform went live, one of the most significant has been an improvement in workforce management. There is now a dedicated workforce planner in place and a Genesys Cloud support manager to ensure the new platform’s management capabilities are fully utilised. With Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management (WEM), APM has seen a marked improvement in forecasting and scheduling, which has allowed for better use of part-time team members. In addition, the use of skills-based and time-of-day routing has helped to level out demand peaks with more efficient utilisation of team members throughout the day.

“This year is the first financial year where the APM contact centre hasn’t had to increase FTE,” said McBride. “The business is continuing to grow, and we have taken more phone calls than last year and are managing more interactions across more channels, but with the same number of people.”

Improved tendering capabilities

The new cloud platform has also helped APM to become more successful in tendering for new work. Previously, the company was unable to tender for some potential new clients because it couldn’t offer them capabilities such as a web-based chat.

“Genesys Cloud provides us with a customer experience toolkit whereby we can pick and choose the channels and functionality that best suit each client,” said McBride. “This allows us to present much more appealing proposals.”

Also, because Genesys Cloud is a fully IRAP-assessed platform, APM can now comply with all data sovereignty and privacy regulations. This opens a wider pool of potential new clients, including the federal government, as the company is now using the same platform as many government agencies.

Moreover, the comprehensive reporting capabilities of Genesys Cloud, along with its seamless integration with Microsoft Power BI, have revolutionised the business management approach of APM. “The breadth of reporting that is now available in Genesys Cloud, and its integration with Microsoft Power BI, has changed the way we manage our business. It’s not just a platform; it’s a way of working.”

Significant productivity gains

Not only has the addition of more channels been attractive to clients, but having all channels within one platform has led to increased efficiency. Now, team members no longer spend time switching between various applications.

The email routing capabilities within Genesys Cloud across one APM business, Assure, have resulted in impressive productivity gains. Where the company used to have two people managing email for this particular business, they now need only 0.6 full-time employees.

“With emails now being managed in a single platform and on the same platform as calls, agent time spent per email has reduced from 30 minutes to just 6 to 10 minutes, as the need to login into different systems has been eliminated,” said McBride.

Overall, the new platform has also eliminated the need for additional headcount. Headcount had been increasing by 25% year-on-year; but since the migration, it has been flat. This has saved almost 20 additional staff and annual costs of $1 million.

Also, with all staff now working on one platform, APM has the flexibility to move people across different business groups seamlessly throughout the day, enabling them to better respond to shifting customer demands.

“For example, if an SMS campaign is scheduled to launch in one business, we can move staff from other teams to cover the increase in demand, and then move them back again an hour later, quickly and painlessly,” said McBride.

Embracing the future

Future plans include making use of Genesys Cloud for email routing on a global scale. There are also plans to take advantage of the platform’s speech analytics capabilities to rate every interaction, thus receiving feedback on all interactions without requiring additional effort from clients.

McBride is confident APM now has a powerful, flexible and scalable contact centre platform that will support its growth for many years to come.

“Genesys Cloud has been a real game changer for the way we operate, and I anticipate we will continue to enjoy further significant business benefits in the future.”