Agile cloud solution empowers agents to provide same-day customer outcomes

Pursuing a digital approach to connect with clients

The New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) provides services aimed at improving the lives of disadvantaged individuals, families, people with disabilities and communities. Under the DCJ, the Housing Contact Center facilitates requests for public housing, helps people broker the private rental market, offers access to interest-free bond loans, and assists homeless and at-risk individuals with information and referrals to non-governmental organizations for temporary accommodation.

To ensure prompt services for the country’s most vulnerable citizens, DCJ Housing has a goal to reduce customer service response times in 2020 and give clients a same-day outcome on their applications. This goal is even more ambitious as it applies to 1,000,000 voice and email interactions per year, including 230,000 calls annually in the homelessness space alone.

Realizing this vision required DCJ Housing to modernize its on-premises legacy systems and streamline the flow of information and services across siloed channels. The agency tapped into the capabilities of the Genesys solution to allow the agency to be more agile and provide same-day outcomes.

Driving cloud contact center innovation

The legacy contact center infrastructure at DCJ Housing made it increasingly difficult to meet client expectations and leverage digital innovation. The system lacked real-time monitoring functions to prioritize requests as well as efficient dialing processes, resulting in ineffective workforce management, application processing backlogs and poor customer experience. In addition to resource-intensive software licensing and upgrade requirements, a lack of integration between workforce management and outbound voice also kept agents from capturing valuable contextual information to drive better value for clients.

The Genesys solution has increased collaboration amongst DCJ Housing Contact Center (HCC) employees using a suite of features like screen sharing and chat when transferring or escalating calls. Integrating outbound voice, email and workforce management systems in a single platform make it easier to streamline workflows and improve customer engagement, delivering positive outcomes.

Because the system is easy to manage with minimal IT resource requirements, DCJ Housing can serve clients faster through automated task routing and prioritization features. This results in fewer call transfers and shorter wait times, improving agent productivity so they can achieve same-day client communications.

Continuous support from the highly responsive teams at Genesys and partner NTT throughout the sales and implementation process was integral in assisting DCJ Housing to seamlessly roll out new customer engagement channels to keep pace with client demands.

Establishing seamless business continuity

Business continuity concerns have also been addressed with the rapid deployment of new functionalities and upgrades without disruption to existing workflows.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Genesys enabled DCJ Housing to seamlessly transition toward a remote working environment with no disruption to business continuity. In early March 2020, it conducted a pilot to allow 11 agents to work remotely. Following the success of the pilot, the entire workforce of 400 agents was working remotely within just 2.5 weeks.

Giving agents the tools to enhance customer experience

DCJ Housing can now deliver superior customer experiences. Real-time monitoring of agent performance and visibility into every interaction have been critical to enhancing team collaboration, work performance and forecasting the best possible agent schedules.

The highly intuitive interface tracks call volumes and monitors client behavior patterns, empowering agents with a unified view of the customer journey for seamless interactions. Agents now have a single customer service view that covers interaction history with the agency, and contextual data to deliver faster, more personalized services every time.

DCJ Housing has been able to meet its business objectives after switching to Genesys. The cloud-enabled platform has cost-efficiently minimized manual processes, increased client response times and optimized system allocation based on request prioritization. The resulting drop in cost per agent makes it more financially viable for DCJ Housing to explore capabilities like robotic process automation deployments to further boost efficiencies.

The contact center transformation is yielding remarkable results for the HCC, allowing it to build a fully integrated customer engagement platform. The benefits of integration capabilities, unlimited scalability and operational visibility put DCJ Housing firmly on track to achieve its goal of same-day client communications and customer experience excellence.