Transforming customer and employee experience

Probe Group is one of Australia’s largest business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, with more than 18,000 agents delivering services onshore in Australia, nearshore in New Zealand and offshore in the Philippines. Guided by the belief that great employee experience translates into great customer experience, Probe wanted to prioritise its workforce management by adopting the best-in-class resources, technology and processes that empower personalised customer services.

Realising this goal meant Probe had to transform its end-to-end business processes from employee onboarding to service delivery. The company needed an agile way to integrate its many siloed applications, which were hindering employee productivity and experiences. It sought to build work-from-home capabilities to meet evolving employee expectations, as well as business continuity requirements that its legacy on-premises contact centre couldn’t support.

In addition, the company aimed to improve the speed of its onboarding and service provisioning by closing the gaps in its traditional technology procurement and integration approach. Probe also wanted to improve its efficiency and performance. In particular, lowering AHT was a focus for its contact centre — and it felt that enhanced routing could help it achieve this.

“Metrics like AHT are reflected in our contracts with customers on a risk and reward basis, so improving and managing performance is extremely critical to us,” said Andrew Hume, CEO of Probe.

Cloud integration enables fast service deployment

Seeing the benefits early, Probe became one of the first in the APAC region to transition to the cloud. A cloud-based omnichannel platform was deployed in 2017 to bring greater agility across channels and enhance its customer services. Following a rigorous evaluation process, the company decided the all-in-one Genesys Cloud solution had the best-in-class offerings to suit its unique requirements.

Taking advantage of quick and easy deployment functionalities, Probe stood up Genesys Cloud in under 48 hours and started moving over its 22 separate customers over the months. Genesys Cloud has enabled Probe to have flexibility in its carriers and eliminated its six- to eight-week technology procurement cycle. It’s now easier to scale IT capacity up or down quickly based on usage.

Innovating with AI-powered routing

Like many organisations, Probe segments its customers into groups and then pushes these contacts to a cohort of agents with matching skill sets. Genesys Predictive Routing takes this approach a step further by identifying the best agent within that cohort for each customer every time — delivering real personalisation at scale.

“Genesys Predictive Routing was probably one of the easiest implementations of AI that I’ve ever seen,” said Rohan Khanna, CTO at Probe. “A lot of thought has gone into simplicity and ease of turning this on for customers. And when we actually tried it, we certainly saw the results very, very quickly with a clear comparison.”

Probe trialed the solution across its two biggest queues and saw dramatic improvements compared to other queues; 94% of the time when predictive routing was turned on. “We’re not just talking about efficiency for our agents,” added Khanna. “We’re talking about lower wait times. A better NPS score. A much better experience for the customers. We’re now up to 19 queues. Genesys Predictive Routing has been really easy to push to clients. And they’ve been absolutely blown away because it’s effortless for their customers.”

Results included reductions of 16% and 13% respectively in response times and AHT, plus a 5% drop in call transfers. Based on the efficiency gains, Probe estimates it will have a reduced workforce requirement of nine to 13 full-time agents.

“We wanted to match agents who sold better to certain types of customers — and Genesys Predictive Routing allows us to do that with the click of a button, while improving a number of KPIs,” said Hume. “These are material numbers, particularly in a commercial construct where the length of call equals workload and workload is linked to how we get remunerated.”

In addition to recognising top performers, Genesys Predictive Routing highlights agents in need of additional training. New agents also benefit from smoother onboarding through a graduated introduction to the full complement of queues and skills. Not surprisingly, the company is already looking to expand artificial intelligence (AI)-powered routing across more queues.

Ensuring business continuity and seamless integration

An early transition to cloud automation has made all the difference for Probe in continuing to remain efficient in the “new normal” resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. With the deployment of the Genesys Cloud solution, Probe is one step ahead in providing a secure and compliant work-from-home solution for its agents. Routine processes such as onboarding and employee engagement have been largely unaffected, while improvements in areas like agent productivity, collaboration and service quality have contributed to better business outcomes.

Using a cloud-based platform also makes it easier for Probe to integrate third-party applications. By moving to the Genesys Cloud solution, Probe has removed the need to subscribe to other add-on services. And since many of its clients use a variety of third-party software, native integration into an ecosystem has contributed to better operational efficiency.

“Our IT stacks are getting smaller, thanks to Genesys pre-built integrations and neat features like transcription, sentiment analysis, predictive routing and more,” added Khanna. “And that means lower maintenance and fewer points of failure.”

For Probe, the agile all-in-one Genesys Cloud solution offers the fundamental capabilities required to improve customer services and boost employee productivity. “Enabling work-from-home was another big winner for us,” concluded Khanna. “We see Genesys as an all-encompassing contact centre leader. Whether that’s in workforce management, coaching, quality assurance, or other stuff that’s coming in AI, we are now strongly placed to advance our capabilities.”