Being there when needed most

Opportunity to drive customer-centric innovation

The largest New Zealand owned bank, Kiwibank, is passionate about delivering customer-centric services. It strives to give Kiwi the freedom to engage on their terms with a consistent experience across all channels.

“The average customer visits a branch once or twice a year and uses online, mobile or phone banking at least five times a week,” said Emma Noble-Beasley, General Manager Contact Centre at Kiwibank. “So, we’ve been moving towards digital banking for some time. COVID-19 accelerated that trend.”

The first digital transformation phase involved replacing legacy contact centre systems, which had needed major investment just to stand still. “Modernising or adding features such as callbacks was challenging for a number of reasons,” added Noble-Beasley.

Instant hit with users

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, all Kiwibank branches were closed as the country was thrown into lockdown. Facing rising traffic spikes, the bank’s contact centre management came under growing pressure to protect its staff and reassure concerned customers. Rather than derail its plans for digital transformation, Kiwibank shifted gears. It worked with Spark NZ, a contact centre partner, to accelerate the change and deploy a trial of Genesys Cloud.

“Our customer experience teams have found information at their fingertips and a clean desktop is much better than the legacy situation,” said Noble-Beasley. “They became very strong advocates for the ongoing rollout. So, with tremendous support from Spark NZ we went live in five weeks.”

Retiring five voice systems, the project saw the migration of 550 Cisco Finesse users along with 50 toll-free numbers and over 90 call flows that had to be built and tested.

Easy to deploy and configure

Kiwibank has leveraged vital Genesys capabilities, such as inbound and outbound voice-based services, which provide skills-based routing, callbacks, voicemail and campaign management. Other key features include consistent pre-recorded disclosures and Google Cloud Text-to-Speech for instant customer in-queue messaging — enabling changes to be made in less than five minutes compared to three hours before.

“The configurable nature of Genesys Cloud means you don’t need to be an IT guru, simplifying design of agent desktops with features like Chrome plugins, screen pops and integrations with Lambda and banking apps,” said Susan Thompson, Client Lead at Spark NZ.

Oration First Contact, another integration, uses natural language speech for customer identification, verification and call steering.

Genesys Workforce Engagement delivers skill and capability routing, forecasting and scheduling, and real-time management, while also providing critical call recording for compliance. And Kiwibank can be more flexible with its teams’ schedules.

“Genesys Workforce Engagement has enabled us to realign shift patterns to match customer demand and allow staff to view rosters and schedules on their own mobile devices,” said Noble-Beasley. “We hear a lot about the challenges of finding and retaining talented people wanting to work remotely. Now, with Genesys Cloud we can offer them that modern flexible workplace.”

Gamification has also helped keep team members engaged while working remotely. “We recently rolled out gamification, which created great excitement especially given that the country was back in lockdown,” said Noble-Beasley. “It gave our people a new way to engage and challenge each other to beat their personal bests.”

Fast business impact

Kiwibank started seeing results quickly. “By introducing callbacks, it saved customers more than 2.9 million minutes in hold time within the first three months,” said Noble-Beasley.

Other financial benefits include a 28% drop in charges for toll-free calls and a 50% savings per user, compared to its previous solution, with the removal of maintenance and support costs along with ongoing upgrades. This is enabling Kiwibank to expand the number of users on its Genesys platform and reap the benefits of moving work around and better utilising specialists.

Outbound campaign management has ensured fairer distribution of work, less misdialing and a 28% productivity improvement as agents are only connected when a customer picks up. One such area is Kiwi Insurance — reducing over eight hours of effort to just 30 minutes. Future plans include exploring artificial intelligence and Genesys chatbots, as well as gamification.

“We now have 100% remote working capability,” concluded Noble-Beasley. “In addition, we’ve equipped our people for success, optimised shifts to create better work-life balance and ensured experts are available when customers need them most.”