Empowering business continuity in a crisis

Localsearch is a digital marketing company that services and supports small business owners in 38 markets, primarily along Australia’s eastern seaboard. The company has more than 28,000 customers who prefer to interact with customer service through inbound calls. This preference, combined with the limitations of a legacy contact centre system, were the primary drivers for upgrading its 80-seat contact centre to the Genesys Cloud^™ platform. Then, as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Localsearch urgently brought 60 sales consultants onto the platform.

Business continuity was a key driver. The Localsearch team needed to know a power outage or similar disruption wouldn’t take its operations offline. The team selected Genesys Cloud because of its capability to support contact centre staff working from anywhere, including their homes — without any deterioration in customer service.

Within days of rolling out Genesys Cloud, the platform’s remote working capabilities were tested. In response to the growing COVID-19 issue, the Queensland Government was forced to order a state-wide lockdown. That meant Localsearch had to rapidly deploy remote working for its contact centre staff. Although it had never done this before, Localsearch rolled out remote working seamlessly — and without the need for outside support.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime scramble, let’s hope. But we didn’t have to get on the phone to Genesys at all,” said Gary Mandelkow, Chief Technology Officer for Localsearch. “Everything worked as it was designed to.”

Effortless implementation

Ease of use is still front of mind for Mandelkow, even though Localsearch had to use the software in new ways almost immediately after deployment.

“When we went live with Genesys Cloud, we didn’t need to have three or four attempts,” added Mandelkow. “We went live at 5:00 PM on 26 March, and that was it. There were no rollbacks or any major issues — none of the chaos you’re used to when you migrate to a new contact centre. Now, in terms of telephony there’s zero infrastructure that my IT team have to deal with. We have no hardware at our head office or even in a data centre. The solution is entirely based on the cloud.”

The company was able to easily add 60 sales consultants to the platform, increasing the user base by more than 50% overnight.

“Again, one of the most incredible parts of the experience was how little support we needed,” said Mandelkow. “Everything in Genesys Cloud is elastic. We don’t have to ask for more licences and pricing is all predetermined. Because of that, we can balloon up and shrink back down as we wish.”

Enhanced customer experience

Localsearch reports that, even during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the company improved its customer experience.

Reporting issues with the previous software make it difficult to compare it to the current platform. But contact centre staff report warm call transfers have improved the overall customer experience. Calls are no longer dropped during routing. They’re correctly routed according to user status, which also boosts customer satisfaction by decreasing call handling times and removing unnecessary frustrations.

With the new contact centre software, the improvements will keep coming because management now has a 360-degree view of interactions. Localsearch will use those insights to ensure its team has everything it needs to quickly resolve client queries.

And because Genesys Cloud integrates with Salesforce, both the contact centre and sales teams’ calls and notes are loaded into Salesforce automatically. All work groups now have a full view of client interactions — allowing the digital marketing service to provide better support during the pandemic. This integration meant the team could pass context across the organisation, ensuring data was freed from silos. They had quick access to relevant information that was even more essential in the midst of a pandemic.

Greater efficiency despite volume increases

As the Localsearch contact centre adjusted to working under lockdown restrictions, it also managed a significant surge in call volumes. The surge was a result of its customers navigating COVID-19 restrictions and changes in business conditions.

Throughout March and into May, call rates doubled and then almost tripled. The volume was absorbed effortlessly, said Mandelkow. “Everything scaled as it was designed to — and that’s a great story.”

Localsearch can now facilitate conference calls from home or office workstations, rather than meeting rooms, which led to the right people being included. This streamlined communication at a critical time, generating better customer experience outcomes and stronger relationships between departments.

Near real-time reporting

Because of the recent implementation of Genesys Cloud, Mandelkow’s team also received valuable data in almost real time. Contact centre managers could download call recordings quickly and produce reports at individual, team and group levels. Prior to moving to Genesys Cloud, Localsearch had no real-time or even accurate reporting from its contact centre.

Now it can configure dashboards in minutes with parameters and filters. The company can also export data into a business intelligence database and build its own reports and wallboards. That’s because Genesys has embraced open APIs and packaged integrations to give its customers as many options as possible to use their data and enhance their businesses.

“Before Genesys Cloud, we had limited visibility of our agents,” said Mandelkow. “The metrics were limited and inaccurate. Also, there were only basic metrics available at the end of the week. It was awful. Now, we can see all the numbers change in real time as we answer the calls.”

Next, Localsearch wants to enable data dips into Salesforce, allowing the data from the platform to influence how calls are handled and routed, and also to feed outbound dialling campaigns.