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The Challenge
Christian Education Ministries (CEM) is a leader in developing, supplying and delivering Christian Education in Australia and owns Australian Christian College (ACC) and Australian Christian Home Schooling (ACHS). ACC aims to transform young people academically, physically, socially and spiritually for lives of significance and service and is located in nine major cities across Australia. ACHS is Australia’s largest provider of home schooling with over 30 years of experience in offering home schooling support and expertise to families.
To meet its growing business demands CEM required an omni-channel contact centre solution to answer customer queries and requests via calls, chat, emails and other social channels. When COVID-19 restrictions began, the organisation needed something that could be set up quickly enabling staff to work remotely and ensure queries from parents and guardians were attended to without any disruption. The solution also needed to integrate with the organisation’s existing ICT and network infrastructure, support remote operations and be cost-effective.
“Being the only multistate, independent distance education provider in Australia comes with the complexity of working and managing operations across campuses. We are also one of the first schools to implement remote and distant education and are, generally, quick in adapting new technologies and best practices in the industry. Our business demands, especially with the recent pandemic situation, required our workforce to work remotely and we needed a suitable solution to make that happen,” said Craig McKeown, IT Manager at CEM.
Key issues:
- Increased business demands and queries from parents and staff.
- Not having a helpdesk function was a risk of delivering a poor customer and staff experience.
- Existing workplace technology did not enable staff to transition to remote work.
Solution
CEM worked collaboratively with Telstra to identify an appropriate solution to meet their business demands. Telstra and their partner CVT Global deployed a global cloud solution ꟷ Telstra Contact Centre Genesys Cloud.
Contact Centre Genesys Cloud is a cloud-based, omni-channel solution that enabled the workforce to handle its customer queries and requests across multiple channels. The solution includes hosted software, IT support and other professional assistance, and required no hardware and software installation which was key to meeting CEM’s requirements for an efficient transition to remote work.
Contact Centre Genesys Cloud requires minimum network bandwidth, helping staff to work remotely while experiencing an engaging collaborative experience.
“Contact Centre Genesys Cloud was the right solution as it enabled our entire IT and Finance team to work from home easily and answer queries from our customers and faculties effectively. With Contact Centre Genesys Cloud, managing the call flow is now simple and we can route the calls, transfer and queue them as needed, offering a better experience for our customers. Parents did not notice any difference in communicating with the school when restrictions were implemented. This helped us maintain parent and staff confidence during a period of big change,” said Craig.
As part of the process we:
- Offered Inbound routing and queueing of communications with auto-attendant feature based on customer inputs through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
- Set up near real-time analytics to monitor queues and agents and prioritise calls.
- Provided a single interface dashboard to answer, document and manage customer interactions across disparate channels.
Outcome
Deployment of Contact Centre Genesys Cloud was completed in one week and the solution integrated easily with the existing ICT systems. The solution enabled staff to work remotely and maintain productivity with the help of a centralised dashboard which improved quality and responsiveness to parent and faculty requests.
Training workshops were conducted for staff and within 72 hours they were able to handle and manage their work through Contact Centre Genesys Cloud.
The solution helps CEM to assign priority to channels with high usage and provides actionable insights with easily accessible reports. This helps CEM provide a consistent and personalised experience for parents while also improving the operational efficiency and productivity.
“One of the highlights of the system was its quick deployment. It took us about a week to get the system up and running which was critical as the recent pandemic situation was fast-looming over the country. This hybrid solution is very good as it gives our workforce the flexibility to work from office or home or remotely from wherever they prefer. This was the right solution at the right time for our organisation,” said Craig.
Key takeaways
CEM remains a leader in delivering Christian Education in Australia and, with the help of the Contact Centre Genesys Cloud solution, now commits itself to lead the rest of its peers in the industry as well. This fully hosted solution enabled staff to work remotely, enhanced the customer experience and required low setup costs with no on-premises equipment and maintenance.
Contact Centre Genesys Cloud is a cost-effective solution for simplified remote contact centre operations that offers following business outcomes.
- Better collaboration and uninterrupted access to customer data and information via centralised dashboard.
- Improved customer experience as services could be delivered faster with better accuracy and efficiency.
- Increased operational performance as the teams can work remotely when and where they need to.
