Contact Center Transformation: Post-Implementation Results During the COVID-19 Crisis

This is the third and final blog in our series documenting the eFinancial contact center transformation. In previous articles, we looked at the leading direct-to-consumer life insurance provider’s move from the on-premises Genesys® PureConnect™ solution to the Genesys Cloud™ platform as well its implementation steps. In this article, we look at how the COVID-19 pandemic forced the provider to accelerate its migration plans — pushing a three-month rollout into three weeks so that its 400 agents could work safely at home when lockdowns began on March 23. Incurring zero business disruption, the company quickly set about extracting even greater value from the Genesys Cloud platform.

Rapid Response

Before COVID-19, eFinancial planned to begin the Genesys Cloud deployment in its Bellevue, WA and Chicago offices in April 2020. However, early in March — with lockdowns in sight — eFinancial decided to act quickly to ensure business continuity. The company worked around the clock and engaged with the Genesys Professional Services team to complete a six-month project in four weeks. The evening before stay-at-home directives came into force, both sites were up and running in the cloud — with a third contact center in Tempe, AZ, already on the Genesys Cloud platform.

Business as Usual — But Better

Sales fell in the last week of March while equipment was being delivered to agents’ homes. But sales quickly returned to pre-COVID-19 numbers the following week. Dials and contacts rose by 25% through April and May, as agents with no commutes willingly worked longer hours. Another contributing factor to its success was the popularity of life insurance during a pandemic, which had people thinking more about their mortality than they might ordinarily.

Unfortunately, due to the rush to get everyone working from home, eFinancial didn’t have the opportunity to fully implement its change management strategy. Happily, agents took to the Genesys Cloud platform with little or no assistance. Agents found the interface intuitive and were thrilled at being able to work during the lockdown. And, because empowering agents to work outside the office has been so successful, eFinancial intends to continue to offer them this option to some extent in the future. Over the long-term, extra flexibility to accommodate individual needs could prove motivational for employees and reduce churn.

Financial Gain Upon Gain

While still in the early days with the Genesys Cloud platform, eFinancial is seeing a healthy ROI thus far. Because of the move to the Genesys Cloud platform, eFinancial was able to not only remain open and solvent, but also profitable and is posting record sales.

The provider also was able to avoid the need to replace aging hardware in its Bellevue and Chicago contact centers. And IT teams no longer spend two weeks every quarter on hardware and software upgrades. Time and money saved are reinvested in training on native cloud support — channeling IT resources toward the future.

After implementing the Genesys Cloud solution, eFinancial turned to the Genesys AppFoundry to help fulfill its data requirements. To remedy some of the data blindness issues it struggled with, eFinancial leveraged the PureInsights Configurable Dashboard. This real-time dashboard aggregates eFinancial data from the Genesys Cloud platform, providing better insights for its operational reporting. In addition, the company is utilizing the PureInsights Hosted DB, which has greatly accelerated its time to value with historic data from Genesys Cloud for intake into the artificial intelligence (AI) process.

Refining Customer Service and Driving Sales

One reason eFinancial looked to the Genesys Cloud solution was its workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities. While the company has yet to use these features, it anticipates WEM will take the heavy lifting out of resource scheduling, increasing accuracy with less effort. Centrally housed compliance data, such as consent recordings and do not contact lists, are readily (and securely) accessible.

The provider can also better leverage data, AI-built algorithms and machine learning to guide routing and customer journeys. To further improve the customer experience, eFinancial plans to embed SMS at the start of the contact journey. Bullseye routing, another new option, will identify a second level of skills if all first-choice agents are busy so that customers don’t have to wait in line. And now, customers completing web forms are contacted within 10 minutes.

Other promising initiatives include A/B testing of dialing strategies for high-intent leads. Machine learning ranks prospects by the strength of buying signals, then moves the top scorers from a predictive campaign to a preview dialing campaign to improve better sales conversions.

Learn more about how the Genesys Cloud platform can prepare your contact center for the future.