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American Heart Association
Driving innovation and cost savings with a custom cloud solution
24-hour pivot to full home working
10% or fewer calls abandoned
97% email resolution
4.8 out of 5 customer satisfaction rating
Saving $500,000 annually in office space expenses
Freed up headcount for other tasks
The six cardiologists who founded the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1924 would be amazed. Today, the AHA has over 100 U.S. offices and is the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting cardiovascular disease and stroke. At the AHA National Engagement Center in Dallas, about 125 customer care agents handle incoming calls, outbound campaigns, webchat, email and social media communications. They also process more than 100,000 memorial and tribute donations each year for the entire organization.
During 2019–2020, AHA recorded around 662,000 contacts, 53% of which were calls. Although these operations ran on the Genesys PureConnect™ Cloud application, there was opportunity for improvement.
“We’re not a typical out-of-the-box enterprise and have more need for certain features than others,” said Chip Sugrue, Vice President Customer Strategies at the American Heart Association. “We wanted a customized cloud solution that could be closely meshed around our specific needs, while accelerating innovation adding newer software, technology and AI development.”
Assisted by customer experience experts Avtex, AHA began to build a commercial case and bespoke design for moving to the Genesys Cloud platform. “It’s so much easier when a partner listens, understands your business, and can clearly articulate the technology you need and what you will gain,” said Sugrue. “Our Avtex account representative was a key business partner and made sure we got the best value from our investment.”
But the pandemic meant AHA had to put those plans on hold. “We closed our offices on a Monday and quickly pivoted to full home working the following day with our existing Genesys solution,” said Sugrue.
The lockdown was a particularly tough time for AHA. The organization had to deal with learning about the impact of COVID-19 on the cardiovascular system, and then educate a reluctant general public to continue going to the hospital if they had signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease and stroke. The pandemic also had a negative effect on securing financial donations. The donations-processing team moved to working from home with two staff volunteers making regular office trips to print receipts and send personalized cards to families of those being honored with memorial and tribute donations.
Undeterred, AHA pursued the opportunity to innovate and transitioned to Genesys Cloud two months later. The stakes were raised with Giving Tuesday Now, a much-needed email fundraising campaign scheduled to launch within 12 hours after the cutover.
“It was the smoothest transition I’ve ever been involved in,” said Sugrue. “The first time ever our training staff conducted virtual training, and most agents were up to speed within a couple of hours.”
Since then, call volume has increased and abandon rates have remained consistently below the 10% target. Customer satisfaction continues to achieve scores of 4.8 out of 5. And out of 2,000 monthly emails received, AHA autoresponder templates produce a 97% first-response resolution, which saves the company time and improves customer satisfaction.
With the upcoming release of its Emergency Cardiac Care 2020 guidelines, AHA integrated its IVR system with Amazon Lex speech recognition. Callers simply enter their ZIP codes, and the system searches and plays back the locations of their nearest cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training classes. In the first five months, the automated service answered more than 7,000 calls.
“We used to be able to handle around 30 of those type of calls per advisor, per day,” added Sugrue. “Now, we don’t have to worry about capacity. We’re serving customers faster with the information they need. And we’ve freed up three headcount to help with other tasks.”
AHA does a major Emergency Cardiac Care Guidelines product update every five years. Having prepared with the Genesys Cloud platform to see call volume triple, the National Engagement Center is now prepared to handle the release of the entire sutie of Emergency Cardiar Care products at one time.
Ruby, a home-grown Amazon Lex voicebot will also assist by answering FAQs. A bold departure from 2015, this big bang approach will put emergency cardiac care products in the hands of customers sooner, while reducing time to revenue for AHA.
COVID-19 has changed the world for all non-profits with greatly intensified competition for funding. AHA agents are trained to listen carefully to circumstances and transfer calls to charitable estate-planning partners. Last year, 110 such calls generated $10 million in donations. More than ever, securing donors comes down to having the right agent in the right place at the right time.
“With Genesys Workforce Engagement Management, we pretty much know how our day is looking regarding shifts, queues and staffing levels,” said Sugrue. “Last year, one very generous donor called offering $1 million so long as we met that day. And, if we hadn’t been able to make that happen, the gift would probably have gone to another good cause.”
Going forward, AHA plans to have agents continue home working and relocate operations functions to its National Center. “We are planning for an estimated savings of $500,000 per year in expenses associated with leased space and servers, which we couldn’t have done with our old technology,” said Sugrue.
Innovation never stops at AHA. On the docket for 2020–2021 are improved post-call email surveys, hold-your-place-in-line callbacks and screensharing. AHA will also introduce InteractionSync, a useful Avtex solution that links Genesys Cloud with Microsoft Dynamics — further reducing agent call handle time and increasing customer satisfaction.
To support the fight against heart disease and stroke, please donate to the American Heart Association at www.heart.org.
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Carglass
Improving the customer experience and boosting profits
New call queues created within a few hours, compared to 2-3 weeks
3.6% fewer abandoned calls
8.5-second reduction in average handle time
1.5% improvement in time-to-revenue
Fully loaded experience center roadmap
Headquartered in Cologne with more than 345 sites and 240 mobile units across the country, Carglass® Germany specializes in vehicle glass repair and replacement. A central contact center is at the heart of the business, supporting more than 50 languages and handling 1.2 million calls, 50,000 emails, 4,000 chat messages and 3,000 outbound contacts a year.
Rather than continuing to invest heavily in limited, on-premises products, Carglass® decided to move to the Genesys CloudTM solution.
“We wanted to transform from a cost center to an experience center as a key driver for profitable growth,” said Brice-Willys Tebiro, Innovation and Improvement Manager at Carglass®. “That meant clearing away a jungle of legacy apps and systems. That way, our advisors wouldn’t have to keep screen-jumping, closing down pop-up windows or asking customers to repeat information. We also needed better clarity around reporting and customer journeys.”
Now 160 advisors work with maximum efficiency, taking calls and booking appointments, or handling requests from large insurance companies and fleet agency contracts. In addition, Carglass® has seen a sizeable reduction in what it refers to as “red calls,” repeat contacts from customers seeking general information or checking on orders.
“Now, with Genesys Cloud, we usually know why the customer is calling and connect them faster to the agent with the best skills,” added Tebiro. “That varies between appointment scheduling for straightforward chip repairs to more complex requests to look up specific vehicle models and arrange correct fitting and windscreen replacement.”
Smarter IVR, routing and skills-matching has enabled Carglass® to raise service levels. This has resulted in 3.6% fewer abandoned calls and an 8.5-second reduction in average handle time. Between these and other gains, the move to the Genesys Cloud solution has contributed to a 1.5% improvement in conversion rates — the efficiency from first contact to receipt of payment. For a high-volume business like Carglass®, that represents a significant financial gain.
The IT-friendly nature of the Genesys Cloud platform has allowed Carglass® to be there for essential workers, delivery drivers and those who can’t work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even in an unprecedented pandemic situation like now, windscreens and other vehicle glass parts get damaged,” said Tebiro. “So, customer service had to be solid and technology has to enable flexibility. Within two to three hours, we created new call queues and IVR messages in Genesys Cloud, compared to two to three weeks with our old solution. And our Net Promoter Score has remained consistently strong throughout.”
Because the Genesys Cloud solution is built with open APIs, it fits well within the Carglass® experience center vision, which is assisted by pre-built integrations and applications. It also allows for a thriving developer community to offer tips and advice.
Carglass® intends to add chat next, followed by email, SMS, social media and outbound dialing — all managed from a single omnichannel desktop. And now, artificial intelligence is firmly in range, allowing customers to self-serve using virtual assistants for frequently asked questions and basic tasks like fixing appointments.
“The changeover went very well, and we now have the right foundations to push on and build our experience center,” concluded Tebiro. “I’ve also been impressed with how responsiveness the Genesys teams are and how they helped the project run smoothly.”
EMEA
eFinancial
Redesigning the life insurance experience
Increased sales revenue during lockdown
100% of agents working from home
25% increase in dials and contacts
80% reduction in web response time, from 10 minutes to 2 minutes
Eliminated four yearly software updates
One of America’s largest direct brokerages, eFinancial, helps customers get the right life insurance easier, faster and more affordably. Service is delivered from three contact centers in Bellevue, Washington; Chicago; and a new site in Tempe, Arizona. Together, they handle around 50,000 contacts a week via inbound, outbound, email and text.
What really sets the company apart is the way it brings the best of technology and personal touches to the life insurance experience.
A lifelong Genesys on-premises customer, eFinancial decided to go to the cloud. “We needed to scale up the business and wanted a system that would move around with us, giving people the option to work securely from home,” said Paul Bourdeaux, Chief Information Officer of at Vericity (Fidelity Life Association and eFinancial). “We also wanted to make resources stretch through greater automation and a model where hardware and software updates were managed for us.”
As an existing Genesys customer, it would have been easy to take the soft option and sign up for the Genesys Cloud platform. But, eFinancial conducted its own due diligence and explored all options.
“We did a six-month deep evaluation of several providers, arriving at a shortlist of three, which we piloted,” said Bourdeaux. “Genesys Cloud performed best for user experience, software updates, dial performance, omnichannel roadmap and routing capabilities.”
Bourdeaux and his team did the first implementation in about a month using out-of-the-box tools and scripting. Then COVID-19 hit, throwing a three-month migration plan suddenly into a tailspin.
“Genesys Professional Services were part of our SWAT team and present in our standups and scrums,” said Bourdeaux. “On March 22, we still had two call centers running on-prem. By the end of the next day, we were 100% on Genesys Cloud, with 400 staff relieved to be working from home. April turned out to be one of our best-performing months on record.”
During April and May, the number of dials and contacts rose by 25%, fueled by increased customer demand and agent availability. About to go live, Genesys Workforce Engagement Management will take the heavy lifting out of resource scheduling, increasing accuracy for less effort. “Getting an analytical platform that helps schedule and properly staff as demand peaks and falls was another big factor in our decision to go with Genesys,” added Bourdeaux.
Built on Amazon Web Services microservices, the Genesys Cloud platform has open APIs for easy connection with back-office systems. Agents get bespoke screen pops for different insurance partners. The company’s CRM system is fully integrated as well, so there’s no need to continuously toggle from screen to screen or re-key information. Compliance data, such as consent recordings and do-not-contact lists, are also centrally housed within the platform.
Making full use of Genesys AppFoundry partners, the company introduced PureInsights. It’s using PureInsights Configurable Dashboard to simplify real-time reporting and PureInsights Hosted DB to accelerate time to value with historic data from Genesys Cloud for intake into the artificial intelligence (AI) process. “PureInsights gave us access to all the data that would be normally hidden behind the API cloud and allows us to replicate it across our analytics, so we can follow customer conversations and things like time to first call and number of dials per contact,” added Bourdeaux.
Crucially, eFinancial can better leverage data, AI-built algorithms and machine learning to guide routing and customer journeys — with everything tightly tracked through up-to-the-minute metrics like time to first call and dials per contact.
Customers completing web forms are contacted within 10 minutes. “It’s closer to two to three minutes,” said Bourdeaux. “In fact, we had to throttle back because Genesys Cloud was getting agents on calls too quickly and not allowing time for us to run our AI process.”
Now the outbound team quickly spins up campaigns without having to involve IT. Plus, the IT team no longer needs to maintain hardware and software. “We’d carry four major updates a year, running a full suite of regression tests, each taking about two weeks,” said Bourdeaux. “Now, that’s time in the bank for value creation.”
New initiatives include A/B testing of dialing strategies for high-intent leads. Effectively using machine learning lets eFinancial rank prospects by the strength of buying signals and then move top scorers from a predictive to preview dialing campaign. To further improve customer experience, eFinancial wants to embed SMS at the start of the journey. The idea is to send a text that states, “This is {name} from eFinancial, an agent is going to be calling you shortly,” and then start a conversation ahead of the call.
“I am excited for the future,” Bourdeaux said. “There was always the thought about working remote but until we were able to implement it, and prove it on a large scale, we didn’t know what that would look like. We didn’t know if it we’d be able to perform as well as we did working in the call center. We didn’t know what training would look like. And for good or for bad, due to COVID, we were forced to find that out very quickly and it was largely successful. We have learned that we can, in fact, be productive and successful in a 100% remote environment. And that extends to our agents, our transfer reps, our case managers, our IT support. And without a contact center, that really served as the backbone behind our sales platform, we wouldn’t have been able to.”
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