Scaling CX operations with one consolidated system

Founded in 1988, Humm Group is Australasia’s original fintech company — providing an array of finance, buy now pay later (BNPL), credit card and business financing solutions designed for today’s shoppers, retailers, and small and medium enterprises. Operating in five countries, Humm services over 2.7 million customers across the Asia-Pacific region.

“We provide finance for life’s little luxuries, for everyday spending like coffee and groceries, and also larger tech purchases — even things like solar panels for the home and fertility services,” said Rebecca Martin, Head of Customer Experience and Sales Support at Humm.

The company’s mission is to scale up in Asia while creating targeted, personalised and informative experiences.

“We want customers to feel we know them, and that we’re easy to deal with,” said Martin.

Siloed contact centres disrupt business flow

In 2019, Humm had three customer contact centres across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines operating on different telephony platforms. None of them communicated with each other, and siloed business units operated an Avaya on-premises solution and other contact centre platforms along with various customer applications. That left its contact centres unable to support each other during busy periods, resulting in longer call wait times for customers.

Easy to implement and train staff

With the help of its partner Datacom, Humm implemented the Genesys Cloud platform in just four weeks. The solution was deployed to 400 agents remotely during COVID-19 lockdowns; however, it was smooth and easy to train staff remotely due to the platform’s intuitive cloud-based capabilities. The move has allowed agents across three time zones to use a single platform to improve collaboration and ensure a seamless handoff at the end of the work day.

“I don’t think I’ve ever in my career experienced a tool that’s had such a cultural change for our team,” said Martin. “It’s super intuitive. I had a group of agents who learned it so quickly they became a quasi-online help desk for their peers.”

Reduced IT costs with CX innovation by design

Before implementing Genesys Cloud, the Humm IT department had managed several phone systems and handled tickets raised manually by agents. System upgrades were expensive and localised technologies made it difficult to roll out new products smoothly.

Now with Genesys Cloud, all technologies and tools are available in one place and communicate with each other. Agents also have greater autonomy over the IVR. New product features are now rolled out seamlessly regardless of location, and costs have decreased.

“Genesys Cloud enabled us to provide the omnichannel experience that we wanted to give our customers,” said Andrew Murrel, Chief Operations Officer at Humm. “It’s a platform for innovation and design, which means I’m not beholden to our IT teams to help us develop. We have the ability to innovate on Genesys Cloud to continue to evolve customer experience.”

To better manage their BNPL service operations, Humm shifted its weekend volumes to the Philippines, while providing its Australian team weekday and after-hours support. This has helped to boost full-time employee staffing over the weekends to provide an improved experience — reducing abandonment by 16% and increasing service levels by 40%, while also reducing overall operating costs by 32% for the year.

And the introduction of callback functionality has enabled Humm to better handle peak volumes and reduce wait times. Giving customers the option to receive a return call has saved 14.9 million minutes in hold time and lowered its monthly telephony costs by 25%.

More proficiency through use of digital channels

At Humm, there’s been a significant channel shift to live chat that’s reduced its call volume. Chat is promoted on the website and IVR to encourage customers to use it. And to better support customers, Humm agents now can transfer chats between departments regardless of the product.

By moving all its customer email inboxes to Genesys, Humm now has a clear view of the average handle time, the volume of emails the company gets and its service levels — an insight they didn’t have when using Outlook. Now, Humm can ensure a consistent customer experience. Canned replies minimise human error in the messaging, but importantly this has helped raise the esteem and skill sets of the agents who may have previously struggled due to limited English writing skills.

Efficient workforce engagement management

Disparate systems and localised technologies meant Humm didn’t have the shared data to make decisions around scale or agent allocation during busy periods as its previous systems prevented efficient scheduling.

Genesys helped Humm schedule, manage and train its agent workforce in one place simply and efficiently with Genesys Workforce Engagement Management. Agents can check their rosters using the mobile app — something they couldn’t do before. Now that agents can check their start times whenever necessary, agent adherence to schedules has improved from 80% to 90% across all its contact centres.

Agent performance is monitored in real time and issues are addressed quickly — increasing employee satisfaction. The platform has also led to efficient use of resources during busy periods and created one standard for customer experience.

“We’ve also seen an increase in team satisfaction and employee engagement across the company,” said Martin.

Empowering global expansion

Using Genesys Cloud and intelligent services, Humm plans to “follow the sun” by scaling up in Asia so more customers can easily access its digital, interest-free finance solutions. Humm will explore more Genesys services and how they can help deliver on their vision of a company that really knows its customers and delivers personalised experiences.