The rapid shift to remote working due to COVID-19 meant contact center operations needed to deploy solutions to let them seamlessly manage a remote workforce without losing efficiencies or negatively impacting customer experience (CX).
Cloud-based solutions have particularly benefitted contact centers, letting agents continue to be productive and effective as they work from anywhere. However, it can be challenging for contact center managers to identify and integrate the right tool for their business needs, especially when they’re under time pressures. It’s important to find a cloud-based contact center solution that helps to enhance agent capabilities and experience, while simultaneously improving the customer journey.
NICE recently worked with GWA Group Limited (GWA) and the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) of Western Australia to implement NICE’s CXone Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) solution across both organizations as part of their wider, ongoing digital transformation (DX) and technology modernization programs.
Providing the flexibility and scalability needed to empower GWA employees to work from anywhere
GWA Group Limited (GWA)—one of Australia’s leading suppliers of fittings and fixtures for bathrooms and kitchens—recently implemented NICE’s CXone solution to support its transition to a single, standardized platform globally to improve their customer experience.
GWA contact centers were previously operating on a legacy telephony system, which could not be adapted to flexible and remote working requirements. After transitioning from on-premises solutions 12 months ago and accelerated by the impacts of COVID-19 on operations, GWA needed a cloud-based solution that would:
- integrate seamlessly with other solutions including Microsoft Dynamics as part of its organizational transformation
- provide increased flexibility and scalability for contact center operations
- support a remote workforce.
After assessing the CCaaS vendors in the market with cloud service capabilities, GWA selected CXone because it was built and optimized for the cloud platform.
Since implementing CXone across its operations in Australia, GWA has experienced several benefits, including the ability to:
- measure and assess a full 360-degree review on every customer interaction
- leverage functionalities like sentiment analysis to provide real-time feedback and guidance to agents
- strip out complexity across processes
- introduce greater flexibility and agility to adapt to industry change.
GWA is currently scaling the NICE CXone platform across its operational regions, including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, to bring every region into one global, standardized platform.
Alex Larson, general manager – technology and transformation, GWA, said, “With our NICE CXone implementation, every process across our operations is changing and it’s quite an exciting time for GWA. CXone is helping us move the business to a place where we can react based on the here-and-now, with real-time feedback and guidance on customer interactions, rather than looking back in three months and being unable to change. Most companies would only ever dream of what we’re achieving this year.”
Read more about GWA Group Limited success story here.
Delivering modern solutions to help RAC WA work from anywhere in the real world
RAC WA also recently engaged NICE to implement its CXone cloud platform solution across the organization as part of its digital transformation (DX) and technology modernization program.
RAC WA needed to update its outdated and complex contact center solution to improve the experience for frontline users. RAC WA was looking for a solution that could:
- integrate with other technologies in the DX program
- improve the member and agent experience
RAC WA reviewed the market leaders in CCaaS and information from third-party organizations, including Gartner. RAC WA then ran proofs-of-concept with NICE and the users that would ultimately work on the new platform, before implementing the CXone solution.
Since deploying the CXone CCaaS solution, RAC WA has experienced several benefits, including:
- 800 agents onboarded to the platform across multiple contact centers
- 3,107,859 million interactions managed on the platform from October 2020 to February 2021
- 55 on-premises servers decommissioned
- 700 phone headsets were removed across the organizations after transitioning to softphones.
Croyden McLennan, product owner - contact center, group IT operations, RAC WA, said, “We have multiple ways of working at RAC WA; a lot of different areas of the business work in different ways, so we have to be able to customize parts of the system to cater for it. All that customization is done and rolled out in the platform, so people and agents are configured in the way that they need to work.”
As a result of implementing CXone, RAC WA has also:
- reduced the management time and effort required for its contact center
- consolidated its teams
- dramatically reduced the training requirements for its agents
- leveraged functionality including sentiment analysis to provide an improved member experience and a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for integration with 18 RAC WA systems to date
While deploying the solution during the pandemic added a layer of complexity to the implementation, it highlighted the need for contact center solutions that truly let agents work from anywhere.
Croyden Mclennan said, “The cloud platform provides the business units with scalability as well. It enables work-from-home options for frontline staff; plus, in periods of unexpected high call volumes, such as extreme weather events, agents can log in from home to provide immediate support to members in need. This means we can instantly scale up and we don't need to wait for people to drive into the office.”
Read more about RAC member satisfaction with CXone.
Contact center transformations deliver benefits in a changing world
Contact centers are constantly changing, much like the rest of the world. In particular, the shift towards more hybrid working environments has emphasized the need for contact centers to adopt more flexible working strategies and processes to better support customers.
Exceptional CX is essential for competitive advantage and, without the right solutions underpinning contact center operations, it can be challenging for businesses to rapidly adjust to changing customer needs and expectations. Businesses that invest in cloud-based digital contact center technologies that offer scalability and agility can achieve greater business flexibility. They can also better understand how customers can access support services and how they are supported in those channels.
For more information on how NICE can help you find the right cloud platform solution to optimize your work from anywhere contact center and empower your workforce to deliver a better customer experience, watch this 20-minute demo and contact the team today.
