Empowering digital superheroes

Aiming for consistent empathy and care

Founded in the UK, Sage now serves customers in 23 countries with solutions for managing accounting, HR, payroll, payments, construction, assets, real estate and enterprise systems. In France, the company’s third largest market by revenue, 600 agents across seven sites handle over 640,000 voice, chat and email conversations. Critical for enabling efficiency and resilience in millions of small and mid-sized businesses, as well as professional accountants, these interactions include frequent sales and support requests.

But monitoring whether customers were being consistently handled with empathy and care was tough. Each channel used a different software platform, including a legacy on-premises system. They were hard to maintain, not scalable and incompatible with a cloud-based SaaS business model. Options for data and systems integration were also limited, making it impossible to get a 360-degree view of the customer journey. Other issues included inability to track KPIs and predict demand, and a lack of call and chat recording tools.

“We could only listen in to live calls, which was time-consuming and delivered unreliable results,” said Fabien Borras, Director Customer Operations, Tools, Data and Service at Sage France. “So, we aimed for a bold digital-first model to create an empowered workforce and frictionless customer journeys. That meant moving teams, tools and technology into a single global cloud contact center.”

Transformational possibilities emerge

To drive its desired contact center transformation, Sage France chose the Genesys Cloud platform.

Turning agents into superheroes

Effective research, training and communications activities were crucial to its success. Over 50% of agents responded to an online survey, ensuring valid results with respect to the digital transformation challenges it faced.

“Based on these findings, we designed a Digital Superheroes campaign,” said Gaëlle Bissey, Quality Manager, Customer Operations at Sage France. “It was conceived by our agents, team leaders, coaches, product experts and the quality team, as well as colleagues from our internal communications and social media departments.”

As an important company initiative to inspire more cross-departmental work, “Knocking down barriers so everyone can thrive” served as the theme for the first campaign. Each subsequent part was embodied by a superhero character fitting a specific behavior.

“Agents were encouraged to train with Digital Allies,” added Gaëlle. “We used examples of common mistakes identified through quality management tools in Genesys to build a quiz, testing agents’ knowledge and recognizing the best performers.”

Delivered in six-week sprints, the change management campaign became a broad initiative implemented across all Sage France departments and its customer service, relations and sales touchpoints.

“We were able to pool knowledge and learning, not just around the technology migration, but the people and change management needed to create an amazing digital-first culture,” said Gaëlle. “Now, we have a center of excellence based around super-agents who build online training materials like videos, presentations, demonstrations and so on. As a result, employees feel more personally engaged, empowered and fulfilled in their work.”

Solid improvements across the board

Having a customer experience (CX) approach that’s more customer- and employee-centric positions Sage France to drive further trust and loyalty.

“Digital adoption is up 19% and more customers visit our digital forum and knowledge base than ever before, with usage up 170%,” said Fabien.

And Sage France delivers more efficient service. First-contact resolution increased 25% — compared to a target of 16% — with 85% of customers now self-serving through IVR or digital channels. As a result, CSAT score improvements averaged 11% — almost tripling the target. NPS also doubled since implementation, reaching as high as 60 to 70.

Employees have also noticed the change. Over 75% of agents said they found the new quality assurance process helpful, rising to 90% among those using the full suite of tools. Agent schedule adherence is holding steady at 96%, while time spent on after-call work has halved. Not surprisingly, eNPS rose by 22 points, and Sage France has also been recognized by the prestigious Glassdoor 10 Best Places to Work in France list.

The move to Genesys Cloud provided financial benefits as well. Along with a 42% reduction in call volumes, the company retired two legacy systems for more than $1.2 million in annual IT infrastructure and support savings.

Coordinating every step of every experience

By investing in a CX transformation, Sage France is now able to orchestrate each customer experience and deliver seamless customer journeys across all channels, with greater empathy and care. This is supported by enormous gains in digital adoption and its CSAT and NPS ratings.

“The three traits consistently ranking highest in our customer sentiment analysis are listening, kindness and professionalism,” said Gaëlle. “Our agents greatly enjoy the new self-evaluation tools and can monitor their own performance and development against targets, which they couldn’t do before.”

And, thanks to improvements in systems integration and quality assurance, Sage France has better visibility of service and follow-up actions as its customers switch channels.

“Previously, we struggled culturally and technically to support customers in a digital-first fashion,” concluded Fabien. “Through excellent cross-border and cross-functional collaboration — and superhero-modeled teamwork — we standardized technology, adapted our processes and devised new ways of working, straight from scratch.”