Cloud contact center transforms customer service

A global eCommerce leader

Edenred is a leading digital platform for services and payments that connects over 50 million users and 2 million partner merchants in 45 countries via approximately 900,000 corporate clients. In 2021, Edenred managed approximately $32 billion in business volume — primarily carried out via mobile applications, online platforms and cards.

Its Brazilian branch operates three lines of business: Employee Benefits, with its Ticket brand; Fleet & Mobility, with its Ticket Log and Repom brands; and Payment Solutions, and New Markets with Edenred Pay. It’s an ecosystem of 130,000 client companies, 8.3 million employees and 500,000 stores.

The company has administrative headquarters in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul with a workforce of 2,300 employees. It operates a contact center with 750 agents in Campo Bom, with contingency resources in Porto Alegre solely devoted to customer services for the Fleet & Mobility and Payment Solutions businesses.

The challenges of an aging system

For more than a decade, the Edenred Brazil Fleet & Mobility and Payment Solutions businesses used on-premises systems from two Brazilian companies — one for voice and another for chat — without the possibility of integration. When the voice provider discontinued its production and support, Edenred began its search for a new solution.

Jéssica Mallach, Continual Improvement Coordinator at Ticket Log, led the task of implementing the new contact center.

“It was not feasible for an agent to attend to the two different channels, and it was impossible to consolidate information to efficiently manage customer services with that infrastructure,” said Mallach.

To improve functionality and make it easier for agents to use, Edenred decided to replace this outdated infrastructure with a cloud-based omnichannel solution.

“The transformation of our contact center into an omnichannel environment was made possible by Genesys in the cloud,” said Marcelo Mezzomo, CTO of the Fleet & Mobility business. “It provided the technology and data that allowed for full integration with our platforms and created a superior customer service experience.”

The advantages of a Contact Center as a Service model

After evaluating a few other contact center solutions, Edenred determined the Genesys Cloud platform best fits its needs. Weighing in favor of Genesys was the fact that it was a global market leader, and several other Edenred locations globally were having success with the platform.

“We chose Genesys Cloud for its omnichannel resources and the possibility of easy and rapid expansion in a high-availability environment,” said Mallach.

The implementation began in June 2020, after six months of project design and planning. The Brazilian integrator Alctel supported the migration of 14 IVRs in just five weeks — and with all the agents working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Alctel was amazing. It developed dashboards and made available the research of on-line post-contact satisfaction; it was totally flexible concerning deadlines and helped to resolve all the issues we faced when deploying the new solution. It was an excellent partnership, which still continues to add a lot to Edenred operations,” says Mallach.

“Genesys entirely changed our contact center environment, operationally and economically,” said Günter Fischborn, IVR Telecom Specialist at Edenred Brazil. “We traded a decade-old, non-integrated, on-premises system for an omnichannel cloud solution provided as a service.”

Moving to a Contact Center as a Service platform has reduced maintenance costs. For example, the five racks used in a data center were replaced by just five servers — equivalent to one-eighth of a rack — decreasing costs by approximately $10,000 per month in data center space.

An integrated solution with excellent results

Now voice, chat and email channels are totally integrated. The WhatsApp integration will be completed in 2023 and likely will account for 30% of all contact center services. In addition, the EVA chatbot powered by IBM Watson is integrated into the cloud platform and the company’s CRM system.

“The Genesys platform has proved to be an excellent option,” said Douglas Pina, Mobility Executive Director at Edenred Brazil. “We have managed to optimize the customer service resources and above all we have improved the productivity rates and satisfaction of our clients.”

In line with internal compliance and security processes, as well as the Brazilian General Law of Data Protection, the Genesys Cloud solution also offers complete monitoring of its services. Now, it’s possible to record agents’ performance in real time and rely on accurate, accessible reports.

“The data provided by Genesys allows for better decision making when it comes to staffing,” said Daiana Xisto, Service Coordinator at Ticket Log. “We can reallocate agents to the service queues with more demand, while improving agent evaluation and quality management.”

By integrating its CRM system, internal service systems and Microsoft Power BI into the Genesys platform, Edenred has increased automation in its contact center — resulting in a 30-second savings in average handle time. And the Genesys native integration with Salesforce allowed for the average number of calls per agent to go from 18 to 23 per day — a 28% increase in productivity.

Edenred has also increased efficiency. From 2020 to 2021, its number of service claims dropped 12.64%. “The greater efficiency and quality of customer service certainly played a part in the 48.7% increase in sales revenues Edenred Brazil posted in 2021 when compared to the previous year,” said Mallach.

With better customer experience, satisfaction improved to 97.95% in 2021. Agents and managers also praise the ease of use, audio quality and intuitive layout.

“With Genesys, we have report flexibility, indicators in real time and panels of activities that allow us to make adjustments very rapidly,” said Anilton Squena, Maintenance Operations Coordinator at Ticket Log. “As a practical tool, it helps the daily work routine and ensures the agent’s focus on providing a good service to the client, without wasting time and energy with difficult-to-use tools.”