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Super SA is a state government organisation providing superannuation for public sector employees in South Australia. Over 210,000 members and their financial advisers regularly contact the organisation for enquiries related to superannuation accounts, transition to retirement, and changes in investment options, among others. Super SA is committed to providing the highest level of service to members, which includes keeping them updated about all aspects of membership.
The Challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic has truly affected ways of working across Australia—including at Super SA. The pandemic has accelerated the various operational issues the organisation was already facing, especially with a highly inflexible, time-consuming system that presented challenges such as:
- No work from home option. During COVID, inbound call traffic at Super SA increased by over 40% as the government announced early superannuation access to those in financial need. Their Adelaide CBD-based frontline agents were unable to work from home or remotely due to system limitations, making them feel vulnerable.
- High dependency on solution vendor. Super SA heavily relied on their own IT support team and contact centre vendor to enact on all changes they needed in the system—even small operational day-to-day changes such as adding users, time-of-day changes, and adding a new on-hold or greeting message took several days to complete.
- Lack of email queuing and routing. The previous system did not have email prioritisation, queuing, or categorisation—everything was done manually using Outlook. Two full-time employees had to triage incoming emails into different folders then assign them to agents, which meant it took on average 10 days to respond to emails. This resulted in more calls following up on unanswered email enquiries.
- Limited reporting functionalities. With the old system, there were no dashboards and reports had to be run and exported into Microsoft Excel. This was tedious, time-consuming, and provided limited real-time visibility into contact centre operations and limited their ability to make changes and satisfy member demand.
- Lack of automated rostering or scheduling capabilities. Agent scheduling and rostering had to be done via Microsoft Excel—another time-consuming process that hindered accurate workforce management forecasting and planning.
The Solution
To address the changing circumstances they were facing, Super SA deployed Telstra Contact Centre Genesys Cloud in September 2020. With COVID onsite presence restrictions, the Telstra team and delivery partner CVT completed the whole solution deployment online.
Telstra Contact Centre Genesys Cloud is an easy-to-configure, cost-effective solution that only requires internet access to get started. Users can connect phone, email, chat and social through a single interface to deliver consistent customer experiences across all channels. Genesys Cloud’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities can help predict and understand customer issues before they escalate—or even before they happen.
This solution seamlessly integrates with CRM tools to add context to customer journeys, while the intuitive interface makes it easy for agents to resolve issues quickly. With tools that let them talk, video call, chat, and search together, employees can be empowered to collaborate.
“The move for us to a cloud-based solution has just made life in the contact centre so much easier. The opportunities for efficiencies and work improvements, the autonomy and empowerment it gives to staff, and the ease of dealing with the solution and making changes and responding to business needs have been fantastic.”
Toni Mundy, Head of Member Services, Super SA.
Thriving through change
November 2020 saw a full lockdown in South Australia, and having Genesys Cloud in place allowed Super SA to continue—and even improve—serving their members.
- Remote working capability. This greatly improved staff flexibility, enabling them to do their best work from the safety of their own homes. The cloud-based contact centre gave agents access to the tools needed to support member queries and concerns from almost anywhere, as though they were in the office.
- Member callback. Call abandonment rate was reduced by an average of two to three percent, thanks to the callback functionality and optimising the time the callback is offered.
- Effective email enquiry management. Agents now respond to emails within a day on average, because there’s no need to triage incoming emails. Emails are now received, prioritised, and categorised automatically into designated queues based on predefined rules, then sent to the relevant team based on agent skill and availability.
- Customised on-hold and greeting messages. This allowed Super SA to set the right expectations with members, contributing to overall customer satisfaction. Simple informational messages can now be recorded and easily communicated to members calling the office, without the need to engage the vendor for set-up.
- Greater administrative control. Super SA can now make system changes at pace to changing operational needs and member demand, enabling agility in their operations. System changes don’t take days to be implemented—thanks to the simple, intuitive administration features that give them more day-to-day control over the contact centre system to set up or make changes themselves.
- Advanced reporting system. All information is now available via dashboards or queue performance tab in near real-time for an overall view of contact centre operations, enabling a more dynamic approach to workforce allocation and optimisation. This enables Super SA to tweak processes for better member service, without the need to manually run operational reports.
- Workforce management solution. As rostering and scheduling are no longer manual processes, they have better visibility on the day’s resourcing needs, ensuring that agents are working on the right things at the right time, in line with member traffic.
- Employee engagement. Agents can track their own performance against colleagues in the spirit of fun, healthy competition with gamification features like Leaderboard. They can also use the mobile app to see their schedules and system alerts to help them be on track and assist them in improving performance.
