Delivering superior CX at the roadside

Always at their side, anywhere on the road

With more than 30 major clients, Digicall Assist specialises in providing independent emergency roadside assistance across Australia and New Zealand. The company works with leading automotive manufacturers, major insurance groups and fleet management groups to assist their customers. As Digicall Assist provides white-label services, the company represents its clients every day — directly helping in building their brands.

Digicall Assist understands that customer experience (CX) is at the heart of why someone chooses roadside assistance. So, it embarked on an ambitious digital transformation project to level up its customer service capabilities and future-proof its services. Digicall Assist planned to upgrade its aging on-premises contact centre system and introduce a custom-built technology to improve roadside assistance significantly.

“Our mission is to deliver the very highest level of service and care to our clients and their customers. Now Digicall Assist is uniquely placed in the industry to deliver innovative brand differentiation for our clients based on their individual needs,” said Michael Curtin, Chief Executive Officer at Digicall Assist.

Deploying the right help during challenging times

Together with its partner, Synergy Enterprise Solutions, Digicall Assist implemented Genesys Cloud. Digicall Assist wanted a platform that allows it to integrate and develop custom solutions to differentiate within a competitive market. The API-first architecture and wide variety of out-of-the-box capabilities of Genesys Cloud align with those needs.

“The flexible nature of the Genesys Cloud platform allowed us to easily interweave multiple systems to create one-of-a-kind experiences that wouldn’t have been possible with anyone else,” said Rebecca Goss, Contact Centre Operations Manager with Digicall Assist.

Perhaps the biggest win after adopting Genesys Cloud was building a custom API integration with a third-party SMS platform, dubbed InQ-IQ. In the past, Digicall Assist agents relied on customers to share their locations during a breakdown. But when the exact locations weren’t obvious, there were often long phone calls working with the customer to identify their location based on streets, suburbs or significant landmarks. As a result, roadside assistance providers were sometimes dispatched to the wrong places — contributing to delays for customers and extra work for agents.

With InQ-IQ, an SMS is sent to customers as soon as their call connects to the IVR. From this message, customers access a web form to describe their issue. They seamlessly capture and upload a photo of their vehicle, which also captures GPS location data. By the time customers connect with an agent, the agent already has the information via Genesys Cloud and, most importantly, knows where the customers are.

“The benefits of the new InQ-IQ are immediately clear when you hear the customer’s relief that we know where they are and are sending help. This same relief is felt on both ends, as the agents are very appreciative when they see this information pop up on their screen,” said Goss.

The photo feature also helps agents to discern the actual situation and dispatch the correct service for the customers. By handling the complex process of location confirmation, InQ-IQ saves 23 seconds of average handle time (AHT). This has the potential to provide significant time savings across a 24/7 contact centre; it makes a world of difference for customers stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Bringing relief to customers in this manner is one of the feature’s best benefits. The ability to provide swift assistance to distressed customers right from the get-go contributed to improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

“Imagine the possibility of locating customers in very remote locations where they simply do not know where they are. For example, they left Perth heading toward Cable Beach seven hours ago. While this is rare – it does not impact the overall contact centre statistics materially – it completely changes the experience for the customers and is significantly better for the agent,” said Curtin.

Harnessing the power of data to improve experiences

The previous Digicall Assist dispatch system had limited integration with its legacy telephony solution; agents had to access it manually to search for clients’ policies based on their car registration numbers, which could cause delays.

Together with Synergy Enterprise Solutions, the company customised an API integration between Genesys Cloud and its bespoke dispatch system. The integration allows the Genesys platform to identify customer policies correctly, based on customer phone numbers and the client line. Additionally, the solution automatically populates case information to the dispatch system, freeing agents of manual data input.

This improvement results in reduced backend work, increased agent productivity and better CX. With the automation of case reporting, the company saved over 20 hours a month in manual work.

Improving agent performance with an all-in-one approach

Before adopting the Genesys Cloud platform, Digicall Assist experienced clunky reporting processes with the old system, requiring a dedicated email address to receive daily reports. Shift leaders also had to calculate each agent’s shift manually for the next day. Aside from being time-consuming, it also left the metric open to human errors. And it was hard to track agents’ time spent on and off queue because there was no real-time visibility of agent availability.

Genesys Cloud mitigated the company’s reporting and workforce scheduling woes by providing robust workforce engagement capabilities. Easy access to reports allows team leaders to track and monitor agent performance — ensuring agents achieve their goal of 95% on-queue time. This saved around 13 hours each month in manual calculations.

Digicall Assist also takes advantage of the professional development capabilities. Agents can now track their development progress. In the previous system, downloading a call was necessary to provide agents with feedback. Now, supervisors can instantaneously release calls and provide immediate feedback with call monitoring capabilities. And agents can view their performance statistics in real time. These capabilities encourage agents to set goals and engage in healthy competition, positively impacting employee engagement and motivation.

“Call monitoring capabilities have made a real difference in how quickly our new team members can improve, particularly in handling tricky calls. Having near-instant reviews and coaching available as part of their on-the-job training means they feel much more confident going into the next call,” said Goss.

With Genesys Cloud, Digicall Assist can put a greater emphasis on employee happiness. “We view the time saved as an opportunity to reduce stress and spend time on higher-value work,” added Goss. “When our employees are happy, customer experience improves, too.”

Unlocking safety and productivity with a flexible platform

The Genesys Cloud platform is compliant with the ISO 27001 data protection certificate, a crucial requirement for some of the company’s clients and prospects. “Given that our clients are under increasing scrutiny regarding data protection, the certification gives our clients the confidence that their brand reputation, as well as ours, is protected. The Genesys platform was a key part of this certification,” said Curtin.

The old system also required complicated and time-consuming IT maintenance processes. The IT team had to coordinate its monthly or bi-monthly server maintenance with the contact centre management to ensure service continuity. Also, at the onset of system issues, server restoration work from backup would require up to 10 hours, as the old solution lacked an automated failover setup.

Digicall Assist eliminated most manual workarounds that happened previously during downtime, like using disaster recovery phones, and avoided impacted team members from going offline by implementing Genesys Cloud. The platform gives the company a greater degree of certainty and stability in rostering and managing workloads. The solution removed the complex backup and maintenance process, saving the company around eight hours each month.

Now, Digicall Assist sees productivity gains across its business. Experienced agents are handling 22% more calls than they did in the old system. “Roughly, that translates to taking six calls per hour instead of five,” concluded Goss. “Multiplied across all agents over a 24/7 day, that’s a substantial increase in call handling.”