Doubling down on innovation

Graphics and digital print gurus

Graphic Solutions Group (GSG), an expert provider of equipment, consumables and services for the graphics and commercial sign industry, employs 60 inside sales reps working remotely, hybrid and in office across 10 branches. Its supervisors and agents fill multiple roles, taking orders and handling up to 1,200 calls daily, plus chat messages from the company’s website — with eCommerce accounting for nearly a third of its sales.

Previously stranded on legacy Cisco on-premises technology, GSG lacked real-time analytics and effective reporting. The business was nevertheless growing rapidly. However, during periods of high demand, service suffered due to long wait times and abandoned calls, leaving both agents and customers feeling frustrated.

“Along with our IT director, we studied the cloud market, gradually building up business requirements,” said George Temple, Director of Customer Experience at GSG. “Unfortunately, the Mitel and Talkdesk solution we chose couldn’t deliver on their system integration promises. So, we had to start over in our search for a new contact center solution.”

Protecting sales revenue

At the recommendation of an independent consultant, GSG took a comprehensive look at three leading contact center as a service providers, eventually selecting the Genesys Cloud platform.

“After the Genesys demo, where they mocked up our direct inward dialing and CRM system, we were done with shopping,” added Temple. “We comfortably beat our 90-day go-live target with a fully remote implementation and onboarding program.”

Powered by highly resilient Amazon Web Services (AWS) global data centers and a microservices architecture, the Genesys platform soon made a difference.

“One day our on-premises servers completely crashed,” said Lauren Forte, Director of Inside Sales at GSG. “However, the Genesys platform stayed up, enabling us to handle over a thousand calls, retaining over 95% of revenue and later recovering handwritten orders to our ERP system.”

Multitasking made easy

GSG lost no time in extending the platform to over 100 non-contact center and Cisco unified communications users. The switch to the cloud was executed seamlessly. “Our agents said moving to Genesys was the smoothest technology implementation they’d ever seen, and after 30 minutes of training they were ready to go,” said Forte.

Several months later, GSG implemented Genesys Web Messaging and also introduced a payment self-service portal on the website. GSG added a chatbot built using the integrated Genesys Dialog Bot Flow in less than three months. The chatbot answers the initial web message and delivers notifications, office hours and other relevant information to customers. Next, GSG is planning to use Intent Miner to find new areas of opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) automation.

“Web messaging has been a hit, both internally and externally,” said Temple. “We have found that a lot of our customers are using web messaging as a navigational support tool for our website. It allows customers to get the help they need without abandoning our site. Instead of calling or emailing, they get help right away by sending a message. And we’ve also found that agents can multitask much easier with web messaging than with voice.”

Avoiding costly recruitment and training expenses

Due to supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, GSG experienced massive caIl volumes that their team had trouble keeping up with. Hold times skyrocketed and employees were feeling stressed as frustration grew amongst the team. In an effort to improve employee morale, call metrics and reduce queues, the inside sales department received approval to recruit an additional five people.

Since a new sales rep would receive 90 days of training and take six months or longer to fully onboard, the team reevaluated the situation. “We had been talking with Genesys and decided to upgrade to the Genesys Cloud 3 license and utilize Workforce Engagement Management as a way to solve some of our challenges,” said Temple.

Once GSG started using the workforce management functionality for employee scheduling, staffing became much more efficient. “We thought we needed five additional agents to help with the increased volumes,” said Forte. “But it turns out that we had a scheduling issue, not a headcount issue. That saved us $250,000 in labor costs annually.”

Building a culture of continuous improvement

Supervisors and agents used to have conversations that weren’t tied to data or clearly defined metrics. That’s no longer the case. AI-powered forecasting and scheduling enables GSG to predict and staff for demand spikes more accurately.

And GSG has seen a significant increase in both sales and conversion rates since streamlining its staffing and scheduling processes with Genesys Workforce Engagement Management.

“Our agents are able to focus on higher pay-off activities, such as visiting customers, receiving training and running outbound campaigns — one of which generated $2 million in sales,” said Forte. “Collectively, those gains contributed to 32% revenue growth over 24 months, while sustaining sales margins and customer experience.”

Adding gamification to the mix

Always excited to experiment, GSG leveraged Genesys Workforce Engagement Management gamification tools to remove other historic business barriers. “While others talked about a roadmap, Genesys walked the walk and offered a license with room to grow,” said Temple. “And through their user groups, we have a voice — they listen when it comes to R&D.”

GSG has gamified four KPIs, including schedule adherence, which is especially useful for covering lunch breaks and wasn’t possible to measure before. Agents and remote workers take part in monthly challenges to win prizes and can track their performance stats via a personal dashboard.

“Gamification was super easy to turn on,” concluded Forte. “It’s leveled the playing field by showing you don’t have to be a long-serving rep or manage big accounts to be recognized.”