Case Study: APM Saves $1 Million With Genesys Cloud

Established in 1994 as a small operation in Perth, Western Australia, APM has grown to become an international human services provider with locations across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, North America and Asia.

The company’s services focus on enhancing an individual’s employability; independence; health and wellbeing; and social and economic participation in their community.

Its 14,000 staff support more than two million people – of all ages and across 11 countries – to help improve their quality of life.

Challenges

During its 30 years of strong growth, and as a result of multiple acquisitions, APM had reached the stage where it was relying on four legacy contact centre platforms to support its communication with clients.

Having four platforms in place meant the company had to deal with multiple support partners. As there was only limited knowledge within the business of any of the platforms, contact centre teams had to rely on the platform vendors when they needed support. This often proved challenging as the company didn’t have the size to access premium levels of service.

APM also had challenges when it came to workforce management as the platforms lacked this capability. “This, coupled with a lack of consistent data and reporting, meant our contact centre had to be overresourced, which had obvious financial implications,” said Michael McBride, General Manager, Customer Service Center, APM.

Despite their best intentions, the customer service team found it had become a blocker to improvement projects on growth and expansion in customer experience (CX) because they didn’t want to introduce even more platforms.

For example, the business wanted to add live web chat as a channel, but the customer service group couldn’t agree to it because it would mean introducing yet another system into the contact centre that the team would have to learn and manage.

The company also faced challenges when it came to scaling backend systems as some of the platforms were already oversubscribed. This, in turn, required the IT team to create workarounds to keep things operating.

“Even making small changes, such as adding 10 new users, would require a two-week process,” said McBride. “Simply changing an outbound display number could take 72 hours or more as we needed the assistance of a support partner.”

Solution

In late 2021, APM sought a new contact centre platform that better matched the company’s operational needs. Technology partner Customer Driven was engaged to undertake an analysis of requirements and recommend alternative solutions.

After a rigorous assessment process, APM opted to deploy the Genesys Cloud AI-powered experience orchestration platform.

In January 2022, Customer Driven began a six-month rollout that addressed each of the company’s 14 work groups in turn. The first group went live on the new platform that May.

“The outcome was a huge success with no customer impact, no staff impact and no business performance impact,” said McBride.

“Our decision to go with Customer Driven and Genesys Cloud had been validated. The implementation project was the best we have ever run with any vendor. It was smooth, collaborative, on time and successful.”

Once the deployment had been completed, the company had a total of 230 users on the new platform in seven locations, as well as work-from-home staff across Australia and New Zealand. This number increased to 280 staff in 2023.

Results and Achievements

The new platform has significantly improved workforce management at APM, with a dedicated workforce planner and Genesys Cloud support manager ensuring optimal use of its capabilities.

Enhanced forecasting and scheduling have led to better utilization of part-time staff, while skills-based and time-of-day routing have improved efficiency throughout the day.

The platform has also increased APM’s success in tendering for new clients, including government contracts, by enabling compliance with data sovereignty regulations.

Additionally, comprehensive reporting and seamless integration with Microsoft Power BI have revolutionized APM’s business management approach.

Notable productivity gains in email management have reduced staffing needs, saving $1 million annually. The platform’s flexibility also allows staff to move seamlessly across different business groups, enhancing APM’s ability to respond to shifting customer demands.

“With emails now being managed in a single platform and on the same platform as calls, agent time spent per email has reduced from 30 minutes to just 6 to 10 minutes, as the need to login into different systems has been eliminated,” said McBride.

“Genesys Cloud provides us with a customer experience toolkit whereby we can pick and choose the channels and functionality that best suit each client,” said McBride. “This allows us to present much more appealing proposals.”

The Future

Future plans include making use of Genesys Cloud for email routing on a global scale. There are also plans to take advantage of the platform’s speech analytics capabilities to rate every interaction, thus receiving feedback on all interactions without requiring additional effort from clients.

McBride is confident APM now has a powerful, flexible and scalable contact centre platform that will support its growth for many years to come.

“Genesys Cloud has been a real game changer for the way we operate, and I anticipate we will continue to enjoy further significant business benefits in the future.”

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Genesys – View the Original Article

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About Genesys

Every year, Genesys orchestrates billions of remarkable customer experiences for organisations in more than 100 countries. Through the power of our cloud, digital and AI technologies, organisations can realise Experience as a Service, our vision for empathetic customer experiences at scale. With Genesys, organisations have the power to deliver proactive, predictive, and hyper personalised experiences to deepen their customer connection across every marketing, sales, and service moment on any channel, while also improving employee productivity and engagement.

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Author: Genesys
Reviewed by: Hannah Swankie