Innovation for a more resilient future

Creating stronger businesses and communities

QBE is an iconic global insurance company that’s been in operation for more than a century. Headquartered in Sydney with a local presence in 27 countries, QBE operates a large contact center operations division spanning four continents. And its 36 business divisions are run by over 4,000 people working throughout Australia, Asia, Europe and the US.

QBE offers commercial, personal and risk management solutions. It’s driven by a purpose of enabling more resilient futures; helping create stronger businesses and communities; and giving its customers confidence to explore, innovate and take measured risks — secure in the knowledge they’re covered by a strong, resilient insurer.

“QBE is committed to resilience,” said Scott Paterson, Global Unified Comms and Collaborating Manager at QBE. “We want to help to create stronger businesses and communities in the markets that we operate in.”

QBE continually strives for greater consistency across everything it does, whether it’s the experience it provides to customers and partners, the performance of the business or the values that connect its people.

Customer experience transformation

When it comes to customer experience, QBE is focused on three core areas: make it easy to interact; understand each customer as an individual so they can be directed to the right person or place immediately; and earn the customer’s trust by showing them they’re valued.

“At QBE, we want to make it simple for our customers and partners,” said Ned Papadopoulos, Head of Customer and People Experience at QBE. “No matter what age you are, no matter what demographic you are, we want to make it easy to interact with us. I’m really excited that Genesys Cloud can allow that to happen.”

This mission was becoming increasingly challenging to deliver using its legacy systems, split across on-premises contact center platforms: Genesys PureConnect on-premises in Australia and Europe, and a different solution for North America. It meant double the workload maintaining multiple platforms and it couldn’t efficiently scale to enable a cohesive enterprise-wide customer engagement platform strategy.

“When I started in my role in early 2021 and met with my contact center stakeholders, it was clear that the current platform wasn’t easy for our users and it wasn’t easy for our customers to do business with us,” said Paterson. “So, we met and we arranged to do something about that. We decided we wanted to transform our contact center platform from an on-premises legacy product to a new cloud-based platform.”

Selecting a new solution

Once deciding to embark on this transformation journey, QBE undertook a thorough RFP process to ensure a future-fit platform could scale with the business, with a broad global support footprint.

“We had a long list of features and functionality that our business required, and we were able to score all of the market players against this list,” said Paterson. “It was key to us to ensure that we picked a partner who could collaborate with us, who wouldn’t just sell us products. We really wanted to seek out a long-term partnership that was going to meet our needs.”

Genesys came out ahead for its features and functionality. Then the transformation journey to the cloud commenced.

Phase one was spent successfully migrating to Genesys Cloud. The early part of the journey involved building, testing and training for the early cohort of agents and supervisors. Eleven months were then spent building, implementing and training for the full migration of over 4,000 agents and supervisors, and in late 2022 the phase one deployment was successfully delivered.

QBE wanted to ensure they could replicate anything on Genesys Cloud that its user community were used to doing on the legacy platform.

“Change management for QBE is a key focus through any delivery,” said Paterson. “We ensure we support our users through change, and we’ve done this throughout the Genesys delivery. We created training videos, vision clips and support guides. We had drop-in sessions and in-person training sessions. We ensured that all of our users were comfortable with Genesys Cloud and were comprehensively trained before we went live.”

“Imagine transitioning 4,000 people to a new system without any drop in customer service,” added Papadopoulos. “That’s a massive achievement.”

It was crucial that this migration happened over just a four-week period. Smaller teams migrated first, then other teams transitioned with complete confidence. It was also crucial for sales, service and claims teams to be deployed together, so as not to degrade the customer experience.

“Genesys was with us the whole way through,” said Papadopoulos. “We couldn’t have done it without them. They’re here, they’re testing and learning with us, especially when the first deployment went live. They were constantly asking, did that work? Did it not work? What can we adjust? How do we get ready for the bigger teams that speak directly to customers?”

QBE is now taking more than 9 million inbound and outbound calls on Genesys Cloud annually, in addition to having recreated over 9,000 reports and dashboards.

A successful deployment is only the beginning

QBE is now fully committed to optimizing Genesys Cloud for maximum advantage. It’s leveraging the range of features and functionality that are available out of the box, and the CX innovation available through the AppFoundry^® Marketplace partner ecosystem.

Genesys Cloud has allowed QBE to innovate while enabling it to maintain consistent service levels throughout the migration and not lose any customers. Contact center operations are now easier with the intuitive web-based platform. In the past, people had to come to the workforce planning team to access information; now, anyone can log in and access the information on demand.

Department heads are now initiating their own self-service, listening to calls and configuring their own reports. They now have clear visibility over service performance, can easily access direct customer feedback and utilize these insights to drive improvements and efficiencies across their teams.

Workforce schedulers love the ease of Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): it’s simple to plot multiple meetings in a few clicks, it’s easier to manage basic scheduling and reduced wait times are also improving.

Another success for QBE has been tapping into the huge ecosystem of the Genesys AppFoundry for continuous innovation. One such initiative has been Daisee for quality management, helping automate quality assurance calls — something the legacy system was only able to manage for 0.1% of calls. Previously, employee teams had to manually listen to 1,000 calls each month; this is now completely automated with 100% of calls listened to and clear insights fed back to the business.

“We’re really excited about AppFoundry,” said Papadopoulos. “It allows us to self-serve, understand what’s out there and what’s the next service level for our customers that we can innovate. That’s really exciting for both our customers and our partners, and from our regulatory responsibilities that we can actually make sure that we’re maintaining that. It’s amazing that our customers can feel that comfort that we’re ensuring a hundred percent of calls are reviewed, and that we are doing the right thing by our customers, and for our partners.”

QBE understood that to deliver a seamless experience for customers it also needed to deliver the right experience for its people. Launching Genesys Cloud has been a large part of supporting its people on the QBE modernization roadmap. As the platform has improved its people experience, QBE now has passionate and highly engaged teams using a state-of-the-art system that supports them in their day-to-day work.

Employees have also responded particularly well to the Genesys Cloud implementation, the way the implementation was managed, and the training, support and communication received. They can now see not only their own performance, but the performance of those around them as well, making them more vested in the results and giving them transparency to see what’s going on, live at all times.

A bright future ahead

QBE is working on its continuous CX evolution roadmap with Genesys Cloud. In adapting and implementing a more resilient cloud methodology, the insurer looks to leverage more support from Genesys as it builds a more stable environment for its teams and clients nationwide.

Genesys Cloud has opened up a whole new world for QBE in terms of integrations to other systems, and they’re seeing teams of people worldwide undertaking innovative self-service development work to run automated processes integrated into Genesys Cloud.

“This has been a great journey,” concluded Papadopoulos. “We were on a platform that was about to expire so we needed that relationship with the Genesys team. They were right there from the beginning for us when we were making that transition to the new platform, and sharing with us what it could offer.”