Evolving the employer and employee experience

Heavily customized client services

Alight Solutions is a leading provider of integrated cloud-based digital human capital and business solutions. Leveraging proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, it delivers superior outcomes for employers and their employees across health and retirement benefits, payroll, workforce and professional services.

“We have over 6,000 in-house and external agents spread across 25 countries,” said Robin Vallango, Vice President, Customer Care Technology at Alight. “They handle around 2 million calls a month, plus chats. We customize service uniquely by client but had built up lots of complexity over the years with some 10,000-plus voice and chat routes, over 5,000 skill pools and 6,200 ACD queues.”

Formerly a Genesys Engage™ on-premises customer, Alight wanted to simplify its tangled contact center landscape with multiple hardware, application and technology layers. This included over 10 legacy systems for routing, IVR, telephony, call and screen recording, chat, co-browse, real-time monitoring and campaigns. Alight also lacked a single agent window and holistic customer view — and its IT complexity was compounded by seasonal demand spikes.

Starting a CX evolution journey

From an initial list of five contact center providers, Alight settled on the Genesys Cloud platform, powered by and integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Genesys is consistently recognized by Gartner as one of the industry leaders and had been a good partner with our on-premises solution,” added Vallango. “Genesys Cloud met our enterprise-level requirements. And their open API set and AppFoundry partners have since become highly beneficial to us.”

The company’s journey to evolve its customer experience (CX) in the cloud started with an overhaul of its on-premises environment, as opposed to a classic lift and shift. Genesys Professional Services assisted on a migration that started with voice services, reporting, analytics, workforce and quality management tools. Next, Oracle chat and co-browse were replaced by Genesys chat with co-browsing features added via an AppFoundry^® Marketplace partner. Lastly, IVR services are being switched over to Genesys Cloud.

Enhancing control with journey orchestration

Alight migrated all of its 900 global client organizations to the cloud. Ranging in size from 100 to 2 million participants, they each enjoy services highly personalized to their exact needs.

“We really didn’t want individual routing strategies by client,” said Vallango. “We wanted one routing strategy, with smart configuration behind the scenes. Genesys Professional Services did an amazing job in terms of understanding those individual nuances and helping us devise solutions. The call quality with Genesys Cloud is also much better than it was when we were on-premises.”

Customers get a better live experience, while new hires can be onboarded faster and even use their personal devices if required.

“Our agents work more efficiently now, easily swapping between calls and chat conversations,” said Vallango. “They love the new tools, while a large percentage work from home with a single login and reporting and quality monitoring all in one place.”

Maximizing efficiency and effectiveness

Genesys Workforce Engagement Management helps Alight forecast its staffing needs, schedule shifts and leave requests, and track performance metrics.

“We previously used the tool with our on-premises setup,” said Mahendra Sharma, Director of Omnichannel Product Engineering at Alight. “However, we had two different products and had to do lots of integration so they could talk with each other. With Genesys Cloud, we found workforce engagement management to be much more seamless and easier to use.”

Alight agents also use the Genesys Tempo™ mobile app to manage their schedules. They can see when they are scheduled to work, request days off and receive notifications about schedule changes.

“It’s a very handy application, and we are taking full advantage of that,” said Sharma. “The Tempo app is critical for our workforce management ecosystem.”

In addition, the Alight team introduced gamification several months ago to help engage and motivate its agents.

“Our teams enjoy seeing where their metrics fall in real time throughout the day, week and month,” said Michelle Lake, Client Leader, Customer Care at Alight. “It’s not only about seeing their own scores but how they weigh against peers in their group. For managers, it helps drive opportunity with their teams while also allowing them to have fun with agents at the same time.”

Greater uptime, lower costs

Overall spending by its IT and contact center partners has decreased by 40%. Those savings include the retirement of 10-plus legacy systems, a reduced server footprint and time saved in managing vendor relationships. Likewise, its partners no longer must house equipment in the company’s data centers and pay for multiprotocol label switching connections.

Before, if systems went down, clients couldn’t perform critical tasks like checking their health benefits. Now, that’s much less likely.

“With an omnichannel platform like Genesys, we’ve gone from multiple disaster recovery strategies, business continuity plans and platforms to just one with Genesys Cloud hosted on AWS for high availability,” said Sharma. “It’s been very stable, and our total number of incidents have reduced significantly.”

Accelerating innovation

The innovation pipeline shows no signs of slowing. Alight is currently developing IVR voicebots.

“With Genesys, you’re free to select your own AI partner,” said Sharma. “However, we decided to leverage Genesys AI for our bots through Dialog Engine Bot Flows and the integrated knowledge workbench.”

“Now we’ve got the foundational capabilities in place,” concluded Vallango. “We’re already seeing the benefits in terms of technology infrastructure and savings, and improved agent and customer experience. And we can do some really cool things around predictive routing, natural language, speech analytics and introducing other channels.”