Gaining an edge with a cloud-first strategy

Adopting a native cloud approach

Arvato CRM Solutions is a trusted partner to the private and public sectors, with expertise in delivering award-winning customer relationship management, business process outsourcing and public sector and citizen services. The business focuses on providing customer service, which is driven by technology and powered by its people. With more than 50 years of experience, it designs and delivers innovative, individual solutions for some of the most respected global consumer brands and UK public sector organizations.

UK customer service operations ran successfully on the Genesys PureConnect™ Cloud application for six years. But over time, Arvato wanted to adopt a more agile strategy that enabled quicker onboarding for new clients and a flexible location strategy allowing hybrid or home working for agents. This required cloud solutions, and their contract renewal with Genesys provided the ideal opportunity to evaluate the market.

“We wanted to consider the merits of a native cloud solution built from the ground up with an elastic web fabric — and, importantly, what advantages this offered for client onboarding and offboarding, faster service provisioning and flexible home working,” said Steve Miller, Head of IT, Design and Automation at Arvato CRM Solutions.

Reaching full workforce mobility

After evaluating other solutions, Arvato selected the Genesys Cloud platform. “In the end, it came down to trust,” said Gordon Dalgleish, Head of IT Solutions at Arvato CRM Solutions. “We knew Genesys and were impressed with the product. They introduced us to a brilliant partner, Kerv, who supported us throughout the migration.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic and first lockdown hit the UK, call volumes quickly and significantly increased, particularly with Arvato’s public sector and retail customers. Despite this, Arvato made the seamless switch to remote working during this time.

“It was simple to reroute traffic and we didn’t have to worry about complexities like quality of service and load balancing,” said Dalgleish. “We made savings by eliminating call diverts, then added chat and email to lower costs further. Now we have 1,100 agents who can multitask and work securely from any location — at home, on our sites or at a client’s office.”

Achieving service improvements

Back-office migration concerns were quickly dispatched, too. Genesys Cloud was integrated with the company’s previous workforce management system, simplifying tasks like resource forecasting and scheduling.

“We have over 100 reports that we rely on to ensure our invoices are accurate and transparent,” added Dalgleish. “Kerv came up with a handy workaround for shifting everything over to Genesys Cloud, so there was zero disruption to client billing and revenue.”

Crucially, Arvato can transition or implement new services and react quickly to business opportunities. For example, it onboarded 175 agents for a new client within a short four-week period. Equipped with prebuilt laptops, these agents were trained remotely using Microsoft Teams. Best of all, Arvato is no longer tied by the geography of its sites. “Our recruitment pool is now location agnostic,” said Miller.

Other benefits from moving to Genesys Cloud include reduced support effort and lower cost of ownership. “Having a purpose-written cloud native solution designed for use over the internet helped improve system performance,” added Miller.

Innovating at a faster pace

Arvato regularly develops new solutions such as Automation as a Service, which uses IBM AI-powered bots, Blue Prism and Microsoft Power Automate for robotic process automation. And the Genesys AppFoundry^® Marketplace has significantly improved the ability to quickly inter-connect with other platforms.

“When invited to bid for new contracts, we’re now able to prototype and develop services quickly as required,” concluded Miller. “Plus, we’re able to scale up and down faster. That’s an incredibly powerful advantage to have, and it’s helping to provide compelling solutions — supporting us to win more business.”